Open Stack

Hi,

I would love to start a conversation with you all about Nova and Mitaka.

Probably makes sense to arrange a meeting to discuss these points, or
I could join one of your meetings. I can invite other developers along
that might be interested.

It would be great to get this done before liberty-3, so can get to
something that can inform the chosen Design Summit sessions.

Starting the Conversation
-------------------------

If I was asked to pick on key deliverable for the Product Working
Group, I think it would be to create a forum for Product Managers to
collaborate, and discuss each others mission, goals and priorities.
Making it easier to understand where organisations can work together
and avoid duplicate efforts. It would be great if this includes you
all discussing the feedback from all the different user and operator
groups.

I am much less interested in any documents or deliverables, its that
cross company alignment and agreement, that will be extremely valuable
to the developer community.

That will naturally trickle back into the developer community through
the guidance you give to all the people you have working on OpenStack.

There is one big concern that has been raised around how the product
working group and the developer community interacts. If done
incorrectly, it can look like the developer community is ignoring the
user requests presented to it. I want to make sure we start things off
in a way that will not alienate either of the groups.

I guess I am asking that we try and find a way for you all to engage
in the current developer community processes. I know we have had great
input from product managers during design summit sessions in the past,
it would be great to see more of that input again. Many discussions
(and nova-specs) start with a definition of the user problem that
needs addressing. I am sure good input into those discussion would be
welcomed.


Mission and Scope
-----------------

Secondly, I just wanted to share this document we have on Nova's scope:
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/project_scope.html

As a developer community, we do have quite a strong shared mission for
Nova. We are working to make sure that is articulated well, and shared
more widely. The key parts of that are something like this:
* Build a strong ecosystem by having a great API to access on demand
compute resources, that works in the same way across all deployments
* Help keep operators current by providing a good upgrade experience
* Flexibility to grow because we work well for all sizes of cloud deployment

We are reviewing all feature proposals through the lens of this
mission. We don't claim to have succeeded in this mission, we aim to
work towards that mission. I do feel there are key elements of the API
users experience that are missing from that above description, but we
have to start somewhere.

I am really interested in the product working group's feedback on our direction.


Release Goals
-------------

Lastly, I would love feedback on the current set of Nova priorities:
http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/nova-specs/priorities/liberty-priorities.html

It is likely for Mitaka that we keep a similar set of priorities, but
ideally adding at least one of these efforts:
http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/nova-specs/priorities/liberty-priorities.html#priorities-without-a-clear-plan

My ask is, does this list surprise you at all?
Out of all these suggested items, which group would you choose?

This feedback will help with the picking of Nova Design Summit
Sessions. The outcomes of those sessions help decide what can actually
become a priority (a combination of reaching a certain level of
consensus and having people free and willing to work on those things).


Anyways, I hope that sparks some good discussions. Let me know what
you all think.

Thanks,
John

Twitter/IRC: johnthetubaguy