Open Stack

Hello everyone,

Thought I would give a recap of the Cross Community CI event that Fatih, Melvin, and Robyn hosted prior to the ONS conference this last weekend. As a small disclaimer there was a lot to ingest over a short period of time so apologies if I misremember and get names or projects or topics wrong.

The event had representatives from OpenStack, Ansible, Linux Foundation, OpenDaylight, OPNFV, ONAP, CNCF, and fd.io (and probably others that I don't remember). The event was largely split into two halves, the first a get to know each project (the community they represent, the tools and methods they use and the challenges they face) and the second working together to reach common understanding on topics such as vocabulary, tooling pracitices, and addressing particular issues that affect many of us. Notes were taken for each day (half) and can be found on mozilla's etherpad [0] [1].

My biggest takeaway from the event was that while we produce different software we face many of the same challenges performing CI/CD for this software and there is a lot of opportunity for us to work together. In many cases we already use many of the same tools. Gerrit for example is quite popular with the LF projects. In other places we have made distinct choices like Jenkins or Zuul or Gitlab CI, but still have to solve similar issues across these tools like security of job runs and signing of release artifacts.

I've personally volunteered along with Trevor Bramwell at the LF to sort out some of the common security issues we face running arbitrary code pulled down from the Internet. Another topic that had a lot of interest was building (or consuming some existing if it already exists) message bus to enable machine to machine communication between CI systems. This would help groups like OPNFV which are integrating the output of OpenStack and others to know when there are new things that needs testing and where to get them.

Basically we previously operated in silos despite significant overlap in tooling and issues we face and since we all work on open source software little prevents us from working together so we should do that more. If this sounds like a good idea and is interesting to you there is a wiki [2] with information on places to collaborate. Currently there are things like a mailing list, freenode IRC channel (other chat tools too if you prefer), and a wiki. Feel free to sign up and get involved. Also I'm happy to give my thoughts on the event if you have further questions.

[0] https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/infra_cicd_day1
[1] https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/infra_cicd_day2
[2] https://gitlab.openci.io/openci/community/wikis/home#collaboration-tools

Thank you to everyone who helped organize and attended making it a success,
Clark