Open Stack

On 8/18/2018 7:25 AM, Chris Dent wrote:
> 5. In OpenStack we have a tradition of the contributors having a
> strong degree of self-determination. If that tradition is to be
> upheld, then it would make sense that the people who designed and
> wrote the code that is being extracted would get to choose what
> happens with it. As much as Mel's and Dan's (only picking on them
> here because they are the dissenting voices that have showed up so
> far) input has been extremely important and helpful in the evolution
> of placement, they are not those people.

To be fair, lots of changes *in* placement *for* nova have been 
influenced by Dan even if Dan wasn't writing the placement side changes, 
because we definitely have a placement sub-team that works on the 
placement side of things and nova people that work on the client side 
nova things. For example, the atomic POST /allocations stuff Dan needed 
for fixing doubled-up allocations during move operations in nova. So my 
point is, a lot of the stuff done has been a team effort.

> 
> So my hope is that (in no particular order) Jay Pipes, Eric Fried,
> Takashi Natsume, Tetsuro Nakamura, Matt Riedemann, Andrey Volkov,
> Alex Xu, Balazs Gibizer, Ed Leafe, and any other contributor to
> placement whom I'm forgetting [1] would express their preference on
> what they'd like to see happen.

I'll try to summarize my position:

1. Placement should eventually be its own project under OpenStack 
governance, not under compute, because it's not just nova; I don't 
really care if it's under compute in some interim while it's technically 
extracted to a new repo. As Zane pointed out, that might be the best 
compromise for now to iterate and make progress on what is the hardest 
*technical* part of this extraction.

2. I don't think we can forever block the extraction on big changes that 
nova needs, especially if we don't already have concrete plans for what 
is needed to get those things done now.

3. The biggest fear is on the people involved in what placement on its 
own might be, because the current placement team is made of, for the 
most part, highly opinionated people that spend a lot of time arguing 
because they have, at times, conflicting design principles which can 
impede getting anything done. Concessions are made after (1) people 
weigh in from the "outside" or (2) exhaustion sets in.

Related to the extraction question, I think if we want to make progress, 
keeping a new placement repo under compute in governance is an 
incremental step so we can add a new core team with nova-core being a 
subset of the initial placement-core team, and then we can add people 
that wouldn't have otherwise been made nova-core because of a sole focus 
on placement (cdent is an obvious candidate here). But I realize keeping 
it under compute means risking #2 could keep it under compute for a long 
time. I don't really know how you fix #3 except people being honest 
about it and actually talking through things to reach consensus, and 
doing what we've said to do in retrospectives many times before - reach 
out for external input earlier and have face-to-face conversations 
(hangouts) earlier *before* conflicts start to damage relationships.

-- 

Thanks,

Matt