Open Stack

Hi everyone,

I'm announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
Committee.
For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm Feilong Wang, currently
working for Catalyst Cloud as head of R&D. Catalyst Cloud is a public
cloud running on OpenStack based in New Zealand, before that I worked
for IBM
System & Technology Lab for OpenStack upstream work. As for OpenStack
upstream,
now I'm a core contributor of OpenStack Magnum and actively involve the
integration between OpenStack and Kubernetes. Besides, I was serving as the
PTL of Zaqar (OpenStack Messaging Service) for years. Before that, I was
mainly working for Glance (OpenStack Image Service) as a core reviewer since
Folsom 2012.

In my opinion, currently the role of the TC is more important than ever.
Some
large companies already downsized their investment for OpenStack or
switching
their focus to containers/k8s, but meanwhile many companies from APAC,
especially China, are heavily investing OpenStack. Although it's a pain
to lose
great contributors, the companies having real requirements for OpenStack
are kept.
It's a good time for us to think about how to define/care OpenStack, for
whom
we're building the software and how to build a collaborative/integrated
community.

As a TC member I want to bring focus in below areas:

#1 Integration and Collaboration

As a distributed cloud platform, it's good to decouple different services to
make each service do one thing well. However, seems most of projects are
solely
focusing on their own offering and not enough projects are paying
attention to
the global impact. I would like to push a more tighter collaboration between
projects and obviously it will make the integration more easier and
efficient.
Operators should expect different projects can work together smoothly
just like
they're different parts within one project. As a maintainer of a public
cloud
running on OpenStack, I know the pain of our ops, when they try to migrate a
service or adding a new service in existing cluster. So I'd like to see more
interlocks between PTL and TC members to understand the gaps and fill
the gaps.

#2 Users & Operators

Listen closely to the voice of users and operators and this pretty much
align
with the mission of OpenStack as below.

"To produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that
will meet
the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being
simple to
implement and massively scalable."

To implement a useful, stable cloud platform, we can't work behind closed
doors, but closely work with the user and operator community. As far as
I know,
except the user survey, we don't have more formal process/approach to
collect
the feedback from our users and operators, though the operators mailing list
and some random forum sessions at OpenStack summit are helpful. And IMHO,
currently we’re mixing feedback collected from different perspectives. For
example, most of the feedback from operators are how to easily deploy/manage
the cloud. But the tenant user/developers' requirements are more related to
functions, UX, etc. I can see we have put a lot of effort to address the
pain
of operators, but obviously, we do also need more work to make the tenant
users/developer’s life easier.

#3 Better UX

This is the tiny part sometimes skipped by us. But I think it's
important for
us to put effort on. For example, we can release a docker image
including all
our openstack clients, so user don't have to deal with python depedencies.
Another example is enforcing restricted API consistency across different
services.


It would be an honor to be member of your technical committee. Thanks
for your
consideration!

--
Feilong Wang


-- 
Cheers & Best regards,
Feilong Wang (王飞龙)
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Senior Cloud Software Engineer
Tel: +64-48032246
Email: flwang at catalyst.net.nz
Catalyst IT Limited
Level 6, Catalyst House, 150 Willis Street, Wellington
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