Open Stack

I want to start with a big thank you to everyone who made it to the
Community App Catalog fishbowl and working sessions last Thursday in
Tokyo.  Those of us who have been working at making the App Catalog
deliver on it's potential really appreciate your attention and input -
thanks!

Though we had several great discussions in a few different sessions, I
wanted to highlight the things I took away as being the most important
features/considerations we need to take into account for the next
cycle.

Trusted Content - Several people highlighted the importance of
guaranteeing any given content in the App Catalog was not modified at
any point.  Additionally there should be some assurance the asset was
in fact added by the user or organization indicated.  We will work on
providing a method of verifiable signatures for all assets, likely
similar to GPG signatures on Debian packages.

Approved/Supported Content - In addition to providing a mechanism to
guarantee the integrity of assets in the App Catalog, cloud operators
also asked for a way to easily highlight specific content for THEIR
users.  The use case would be a public or private cloud that wants to
provide some supported assets (apps, or app components) in that
environment.  This will allow an operator to indicate clearly which
apps in the catalog they will provide support for, while
distinguishing those assets from others in the catalog.  I was
especially happy to hear several operators were interested in this
approach as I believe this will go a long way towards allowing
different OpenStack clouds to provide "supported" content without
needing to create their own private catalogs.  The obvious broader
benefit here is that all users of OpenStack gain when multiple
operators are sharing their apps with the community.

Improving the add/modify workflow - Out of necessity, the "beta"
version of the App Catalog at launch used YAML files which were
modified via the standard OpenStack gerrity review process.  This made
it easy to quickly get the first iteration of the App Catalog out the
door, but left a lot to be desired when it comes to making it quick
and easy to add content.  In order to move forward on improving this
process, we're working on a proper API that will allow content to much
more easily added.  The web site will include a way for registered
users to add content via web form in addition to using the OpenStack
CLI (or just via the REST interface).

Additional IRC meeting times - There was a great point raised when I
was making a call for better participation in our IRC meetings.  Right
now we meet Thursdays at 1700UTC, which is a really inconvenient time
for folks in Asia & Australia.  I'm going to work on adding a second
meeting time (possibly chaired by someone else) in the next few weeks.

As requested by a few folks, the slides I used are available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/aedocw/community-app-catalog-introduction-tokyo-openstack-summit
(Unfortunately the slides don't capture the best parts of the
presentation - the live demonstration of the Horizon plugin and the
discussion we had after I ran through the background and status.)

If there are other things you'd like to see us focus on during the
next cycle, or have anything to add, please speak up on the mailing
lists or join us on IRC - thank you!

-Christopher