Open Stack

Les Vadasz, a near-founder of Intel used to say "find a tactic and build a
strategy around it". In other words, even without a strategy written down,
you have a strategy expressed through action.

This project doesn't lack for action, and each one represents somebody's
(probably some company's) strategy.

The problem is too many strategies. Finding a way to say no is probably
the best thing that this community could figure out how to do. It is
absolutely striking to me how much capability is being pursued in
OpenStack outside the vision as portrayed in early videos on the project.

The companies who are the early adopters and the most fervent adopters are
most likely the ones pushing for new features. They are your best friends,
yet your worst enemies.

My advice: pick a use case and nail it, 100%, no bugs, easy to use. If
it's only 10% of the world for whom that¹s enough, then sigh and say "next
time".

That's product management IMO.

MikeR





On 12/23/14, 3:05 PM, "Randy Bias" <randyb at cloudscaling.com> wrote:

>Actually, Stefano, you didn¹t even touch on the key motivation, from my
>perspective, that sparked a lot of this.
>
>Here is the keynote I gave from September for those who haven¹t watched
>it yet:
>
>	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOAb6wfBYxU
><https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOAb6wfBYxU>
>
>The point of the entire presentation is to highlight that for 4 years now
>the PTLs and TC have believed that they own ³tactical² matters.  In other
>words, reviewing code, managing the integrated release cycle, and so on.
>The entire PTL team in spring of 2014 at the first joint TC/Board
>meeting, unanimously agreed that they have NO oversight of strategic
>product direction.  Neither does the board.
>
>This leaves a gigantic gap since you can¹t have ³strategy² coming as the
>effect of grass-roots developers committing whatever code they want
>willy-nilly.
>
>IMHO, the remit of this group is to establish a process by which longer
>term vision and product direction can emerge from within the community.
>Product managers at the various constituencies of OpenStack are typically
>on the hook for this within their businesses and I am hopeful that this
>group can figure out a way (hopefully starting with my recommendations in
>the presentation above) to work with the TC, Board, and the greater
>community to come up with a process by which we are thinking about
>OpenStack over greater than a 6 month time horizon.
>
>
>Best,
>
>
>--Randy
>
>VP, Technology, EMC Corporation
>Formerly Founder & CEO, Cloudscaling (now a part of EMC)
>+1 (415) 787-2253 [google]
>TWITTER: twitter.com/randybias
>LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/in/randybias
>ASSISTANT: ren.ly at emc.com
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Dec 23, 2014, at 2:52 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at openstack.org>
>>wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, 2014-12-23 at 12:06 -0600, Kyle Mestery wrote:
>>> My concern is I don't understand why this discussion would not happen
>>> with the broader project, which is on the openstack-dev list, IRC
>>> meetings, and in gerrit. Is there a reason any of those three things
>>> won't work? 
>> 
>> Important question, worth a separate subject.
>> 
>> The Development mailing list averages over 600 messages per week [1],
>> from over 200 different people: managing that traffic is very hard,
>> requires dedication and attention. I have identified three major sets of
>> ATCs: core, regular and casual
>> http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/
>> 
>> Today we have:
>> 
>> - Core (contribute up to 80% of integrated+incubated code): 254
>> - Regular (contribute up to 90% of integrated+incubated code): 589
>> - Casual (contribute the remaining 10%): 1,956
>> 
>> I expect that core ATCs read and participate in openstack-dev, a part of
>> regulars do too but the Casual contributors IMO are not
>> reading/participating much. In my experience very few contributors have
>> the skills *and* motivation to process such traffic effectively. Most
>> contributors simply miss *a lot* of messages on the list because they
>> can't (or don't know how to) manage high traffic email lists. The vast
>> majority of Active Technical Contributors have no time/resources to
>> process traffic on -dev.
>> 
>> This means that managers of casual ATCs, which I expect this group is
>> largely made of, have even less time/capabilities to follow -dev.
>> 
>> A new group cannot really emerge and identify itself as a group inside
>> another huge, trafficked channel. One reason for this mailing list is
>> for this working group to establish itself.
>> 
>> Besides the size of the -dev list, the topics discussed among devs are
>> different than those discussed by the product/project managers in this
>> WG: devs discuss engineering issues, like API stabilizations,
>> versioning, interfaces etc. For this group the main topics are future
>> roadmap, customer's impact and requests ...
>> 
>> Operators have had a separate channel for a long time and have
>> established themselves as a distinct group and learned how to engage
>> with developers. The hope is that this group learns that too soon.
>> 
>>> And if so, what is the purpose of the discussions here? Is it more of
>>> just communicating changes? Call me honestly confused.
>> 
>> Neutron's splitting of services and plugins is the sort of change that
>> will affect equally core, regular and occasional contributors: core ATCs
>> probably know all about it, a part of regulars also know enough but
>> occasional and a part of regular don't know what that means for their
>> bottom line. 
>> 
>> What will happen to products based on Neutron? How will that affect
>> their sales/marketing? What are the governance/legal implications for
>> the new repositories? What does that mean for defcore and openstack
>> trademarks? I don't think that these questions can be raised and debated
>> successfully anywhere else.
>> 
>> /stef
>> 
>> 
>> [1]
>> 
>>http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/repository.html?repository=htt
>>p%3A__lists.openstack.org_pipermail_openstack-dev&ds=mls
>> 
>> 
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