Open Stack

Greetings, Blazar team!
As you may be aware, I've been working with other folks in the community 
on documenting a vision for OpenStack clouds (formerly known as the 
'Technical Vision') - essentially to interpret the mission statement in 
long-form, in a way that we can use to actually help guide decisions. 
You can read the latest draft here: https://review.openstack.org/592205

We're trying to get feedback from as many people as possible - in many 
ways the value is in the process of coming together to figure out what 
we're trying to achieve as a community with OpenStack and how we can 
work together to build it. The document is there to help us remember 
what we decided so we don't have to do it all again over and over.

The vision is structured with two sections that apply broadly to every 
project in OpenStack - describing the principles that we believe are 
essential to every cloud, and the ones that make OpenStack different 
from some other clouds. The third section is a list of design goals that 
we want OpenStack as a whole to be able to meet - ideally each project 
would be contributing toward one or more of these design goals.

Blazar is one of the most interesting projects when it comes to defining 
a vision for OpenStack clouds, because it has a really well-defined set 
of goals around energy efficiency and capacity planning that we've so 
far failed to capture in the document. In the 'Self-Service' section we 
talk about aligning user charges with operators' opportunity costs, 
which hints at the leasing concept but seems incomplete without a 
discussion about capacity planning. Similarly, we talk in various place 
about reducing costs to users by sharing resources across tenants, but 
not about how to physically pack those resources to minimise the costs 
to operators. I would really value the Blazar team's input on where and 
how best to introduce these concepts into the vision.

As far as what we have already goes, I think the compute host 
reservation part of Blazar definitely qualifies as part of 'Basic 
Physical Data Center Management' since it's about optimally managing 
physical resources in the data center. Arguably the VM reservation part 
could too, as something that effectively augments Nova, but it's more of 
a stretch which makes me wonder if there's something missing.

If you would like me or another TC member to join one of your team IRC 
meetings to discuss further what the vision means for your team, please 
reply to this thread to set it up. You are also welcome to bring up any 
questions in the TC IRC channel, #openstack-tc - there's more of us 
around during Office Hours 
(https://governance.openstack.org/tc/#office-hours), but you can talk to 
us at any time.

Feedback can also happen either in this thread or on the review 
https://review.openstack.org/592205

If the team is generally happy with the vision as it is and doesn't have 
any specific feedback, that's cool but I'd like to request that at least 
the PTL leave a vote on the review. It's important to know whether we 
are actually developing a consensus in the community or just talking to 
ourselves :)

many thanks,
Zane.