Open Stack

Greetings, Karbor 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.

Karbor is one of the most difficult projects when it comes to describing 
where it fits in the design goals, which may be an indication that we're 
missing something from the vision about the role OpenStack has to play 
in data protection. If that's the case, I'd be very interested in 
hearing what you think that should look like. For now perhaps the 
closest match is with the 'Basic Data Center Management' goal, since 
Karbor is an abstraction for its various plugins, some of which must 
interact with the physical data center to accomplish their work.

Of the other sections, the Interoperability one is probably worth paying 
attention to. Any project which provides access to a lot of different 
vendor plugins always have to balance the desire to expose as much 
functionaility as possible with the need to ensure that applications can 
be ported between OpenStack clouds running different sets of plugins. 
OpenStack places a high value on interoperability, so this is something 
to keep in mind when designing.

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.