Open Stack

Hey everyone,

OpenStack is a community for creating open source software, but by the
nature of infrastructure management, there is a strong intersection with
hardware, and therefore hardware vendors. Nova, Cinder, Neutron, Ironic,
and many others need to interact with hardware and support vendor
specific drivers for this interaction. There is currently a spectrum
where some of this hardware interaction is done as openly as possible,
while others develop their integration "glue" behind closed doors. Part
of this is the disconnect between the fully open development of
OpenStack, and the traditionally proprietary development of many products.

For those that do want to do their vendor-specific development as openly
as possible - and hopefully attract the involvement of customers,
partners, and others in the community - there hasn't been a great venue
for this so far. Some vendors that have done open development have even
had difficulty finding a place in the community and ended up deciding to
just develop behind closed doors.

I would like to try to change this, so I am proposing the creation of
the Hardware Vendor SIG as a place where we can collaborate on vendor
specific things, and encourage development to happen in the open. This
would be a place for any vendors and interested parties to work together
to fix bugs, implement features, and overall improve the quality of
anything that helps provide that glue to bridge the gap between our open
source services and vendor hardware. This would include servers,
storage, networking, and really anything else that plays a role in being
able to set up an OpenStack cloud.

This is a call out to any others interested in participating. If you are
interested in this effort, and if you have any existing code (whether
hosted on OpenDev, hosted on GitHub, or hosted on your own platform)
that you think would be a good fit for this, please add your contact
information and any relevant details here:

https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/HardwareVendorSIG

Also, please feel free to show your support by voting on the proposal to
create this SIG here:

https://review.opendev.org/#/c/745185/

Thanks!

Sean