Open Stack

Hello friends,
I've been working full-time on OpenStack for 6 years now, since the very 
early days of the Heat project back in 2012. Along the way I have served 
as PTL of Heat, where I am still a member of the core team, and 
colloborated with developers from many other projects, such as Mistral, 
Zaqar, Telemetry, and Keystone. I also worked on TripleO for a while, 
from which I learned a lot about both deploying OpenStack itself and 
deploying complex applications using OpenStack (since it uses an 
OpenStack undercloud to deploy OpenStack as an application).

Last year I wrote, and the TC approved, a resolution on the importance 
of catering to applications that autonomously make use of OpenStack APIs 
if we are to achieve OpenStack's mission:

https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20170317-cloud-applications-mission.html

(Since then a lot of great progress[1] has been made, with more 
coming[2].) Afterwards, a number of people remarked that up until that 
point, despite being familiar with all of the pieces, they had never 
really connected the dots to realise that there was no secure way for an 
application to authenticate to the OpenStack cloud it is running in 
without extensive manual intervention from the cloud operator.

I'm running for election to the Technical Committee because I think it's 
important that we have a TC that can, collectively, connect the dots in 
as many different ways as possible, to cater to the many different users 
and potential users of OpenStack. There are important discussions ahead 
-- both within the technical community and between the TC and the Board 
-- about where to draw the boundaries of OpenStack; the more user 
viewpoints that are represented, the better the result will be. We don't 
get as much feedback from developers of cloud-aware applications as we 
do from other end users, because in many cases OpenStack doesn't yet 
meet their minimum requirements. That is the gap I am hoping to bridge. 
If we succeed, OpenStack will not only gain a lot more users, but I 
expect more users will become contributors. I know from long experience 
that keeping up with the activity of the TC requires a substantial time 
commitment; I am fortunate to be in a position to contribute and I hope 
to be able to represent many of y'all who are unable to devote that 
amount of time.

I also plan to work with the TC to find more ways to guide projects 
toward maturity once they have joined the OpenStack community -- 
something we largely lost when the old incubation process went away.

Questions and comments are welcome!

thanks,
Zane.


[1] 
https://docs.openstack.org/keystone/queens/user/application_credentials.html
[2] 
https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/keystone-specs/specs/keystone/rocky/capabilities-app-creds.html