Open Stack

I'd like the group to consider adding one more item to the agenda, or to the next meeting's agenda:

Stable Releases and the newly proposed Stable Release Team

Some background:

Juno just had its final release today and is now EOL.  Juno is 13 months old. If the standard process happens, its repository will be removed from git.OpenStack.org  I have made a plea to leave the repo to allow grenade testing to continue while Kilo is still getting patches.  Parallel to a request to keep Juno alive longer (from Tony Breeds, Rackspace), a discussion has been percolating about creating a stable release team, with PTL and cores, that would own the stable releases and the processes around them.  My count puts the number of active Stable Release devs at 4-5 people, and Huawei has agreed to put a dev on this issue also.  All of this dovetails into a previous discussion we had on this list about sustaining engineering efforts and how we might get that rolling.  I think think it is rolling, with the new project/team.  We  now need to support it.

The developer community used to support stable releases for 18 months, then 15, now 13 months.  The reason for the shortening cycle is the lack of developers willing to work on bakcporting bugfixes and maintaining the gate jobs in working condition.  The gates for various stable releases have often been broken and stayed broken for weeks at a time.  The new stable team is being chartered to address these shortcoming, but if the team fails, release maintenance cycles will remain as is.  If the team manages to get dev resources to keep fixes being backported and the gates working, then the team will determine the stable release schedules/policies and could extend the life of stable releases if they feel they have the manpower to do so.  Or, still may not.

>From the user survey:  30% of production clouds are still on Icehouse.  39% are still on Juno. 

Companies who supply distros, or do not actively move customers to latest releases essentially have to fork OpenStack releases after 13 months to maintain them for their contractual length of time, usually between 3-5 years, and the fixes each of the distros provide are divergent from each other after the 13 months of Cummunity support.

Operators on the ops ML have stated it takes 3-5 months to qualify a new OpenStack release before most, if not all of their upgrade planning even begins.  With lead times this long, it means that most operators are  upgrading more than one release at upgrade time, and once or less per year.

DefCore requires testing against the current or past two releases, which means that Juno will still be acceptable as an OpenStack release for certification under the 2016.01 guidelines.

Why we should know/care about this:

We had a discussion about sustaining engineering efforts, and engineering resources from the Product WG companies just a short bit ago.  We did not come to any conclusions, but it appeared to be an important issue to the WG members.  We have a chance to demonstrate a number of thing if we decide to get involved with the Stable Release Team now:  that we care about longevity of release maintenance beyond where the developer community is willing to support it, that we can bring resources to bear to address the "gap," and that we have valuable experience in the area of Release maintenance.  There might be others. 

So, I'd like to get this on the agenda and ML before it goes stale and there is no maneuverability with regards to this issue.

--Rocky


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Barrett, Carol L [mailto:carol.l.barrett at intel.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2015 5:56 PM
> To: Kenny Johnston
> Cc: OpenStack Product Work Group
> Subject: Re: [Product] [OpenStack][Product WG] 11/23 Team Meeting
> Agenda and Logistics
> 
> I think it's worth discussing this.
> Thanks Kenny.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On Nov 19, 2015, at 10:19 AM, Kenny Johnston
> <kencjohnston at gmail.com<mailto:kencjohnston at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Should we consider having IRC only meeting? That way it
> lightens/eliminates the scribing load and we increase transparency for
> the rest of the community.
> 
> As I'm sure a number of you saw, JJ recently published some tips and
> tricks[1] for hosting good productive chatroom meetings.
> 
> [1] http://jjasghar.github.io/blog/2015/11/18/characteristics-of-a-
> successful-chatroom-meeting/
> 
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 10:37 AM, Barrett, Carol L
> <carol.l.barrett at intel.com<mailto:carol.l.barrett at intel.com>> wrote:
> Hi Folks - We're on for our regular team meeting on 11/23. Thanks Sean
> for volunteering to lead the meeting this week! Details below.
> 
> One more thing - The voice line allows us to have v productive
> meetings, but in order to best support the Community we need to have a
> parallel stream on the IRC channel. Moving forward, I think we should
> have someone who is designated as the IRC scribe (it's hard for the
> presenter to be the scribe too!), as well as ask everyone to add their
> comments to the IRC. Pls respond if you have questions or other
> thoughts on this.
> 
> Logistics
> IRC: #openstack-meeting-alt
> Call in access: (888) 875-9370<tel:%28888%29%20875-9370>, Bridge: 3;
> Passcode: 9518007#
> Etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/PWG_11_23_15
> 
> Agenda
> *       Recruit a volunteer to scribe discussion points into IRC
> *       Mid-Cycle Planning - All
> o       https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/PWG_Mitaka_Midcycle
> *       User Story Updates -
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/openstack-user-stories/
> o       Leong & Kenny: Rolling Upgrades
> o       Jay & Deric: Onboarding Hosts and VMs into OpenStack for
> Management
> o       Steve: Complex Instance Placement
> *       Ops Feedback from Tokyo and Follow-up - Shamail (he will be on
> IRC only)
> *       Opens - All
> 
> Happy Thanksgiving.
> Carol
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Product-wg at lists.openstack.org<mailto:Product-wg at lists.openstack.org>
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/product-wg
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Kenny Johnston
> 
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