Open Stack

On 26 Feb 2019, 22:59 +0700, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com>, wrote:
> We should be able to out-innovate any one company, even a big one.
> It makes me sad that after 10 years we haven't built the base to make
> OpenStack attractive as *the* place to do those kinds of things.

+1

> On the other hand, many of those services we do have are only lightly
> maintained. That's not hurting anybody (except perhaps the folks stuck
> maintaining them), but in many cases we might just be delaying the
> inevitable. And some of those services are a feature masquerading as a
> separate service, that operate as a separate team because they couldn't
> find another way to get code into where they needed it (usually on the
> compute node) - those might actually be hurting because they paper over
> problems with how our community works that might better be addressed
> head-on.

I think we need to be very careful with the definition of “lightly maintained”.
IMHO, the number of patches isn't always a good indicator. I can tell about
my project, Mistral. Yes, we haven’t had an impressive number of patches
merged in the last 3 months, but mainly because the key contributors (mainly
from Nokia, Red Hat, NetCraker and OVH) were focused downstream tasks
around it. There were also some internal changes in the companies from which
we have contributors and now we’re trying to deal with that and find a new
contribution model that would keep moving the project forward. But that all
*doesn’t* mean that the project is not needed anywhere. Several huge
corporates and lots of smaller companies use it in production successfully.
They make money on it.
I didn’t want it to sound as a commercial though, I wanted to deliver the
message that “lightly maintained” thing can really be subtle.

> > If you had to make a single declaration about growth in the number
> > of projects would you prefer to see (and why, of course):
> >
> > * More projects as required by demand.
> > * Slower or no growth to focus on what we've got.
> > * Trim the number of projects to "get back to our roots".
> > * Something else.

Just want to clarify this. What’s our main criteria to make this decision upon? What’s the main pain point that triggers thinking about that? Has the (subjectively) big number of projects made it hard to maintain infrastructure (CI, releases etc.), i.e. it led to technical issues and labor costs? Or it’s just image, or discomfort that not all of these projects are well maintained anymore?

> > Do you think the number of projects has any impact (positive or
> > negative) on our overall ability to get things done?
>
> Not really. People will work on the problems they have. If OpenStack
> doesn't have a project to solve their problem then they won't work on
> OpenStack - they're not going to go work on a different OpenStack
> project instead.

+1.


Renat Akhmerov
@Nokia
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