Open Stack

Greetings, Swift 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.

The vision puts Swift firmly in-scope as the provider of Infinite, 
Continuous Scaling for data storage. And of course Swift is also part of 
the 'Built-in Reliability and Durability' goal, since it provides 
extremely durable storage and spreads the cost across multiple tenants. 
This is clearly a critical aspect of any cloud, and I'm hopeful this 
exercise will help put to rest a lot of the pointless speculation about 
whether Swift 'really' belongs in OpenStack.

I know y'all have a very data-centric viewpoint on cloud that is 
probably unique in the OpenStack community, so I'm particularly 
interested in any insights you might have to offer on the vision as a 
whole from that perspective.

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.