Well, last week was the 6-monthly OpenStack summit in Tokyo. It was fantastic to catch up with many folk, but with 5000 attendees, there are many more that I didn’t see than those that I did. Yet I find the sheer volume of face-to-face stuff nearly overwhelming. I wish it was quite a bit longer and less intense.
Over the next cycle I’ve committed to a few things…
- Kicking off TC leadership of scaling for OpenStack. That is, sparking the conversation with the broader community about what scaling means for us, and ensuring each project is paying some attention to it – in the same way that each project already pays attention to e.g. backwards compatibility – they can choose how much, and implementation and so on, but the basic user expectations and framework for thinking about it are shared across OpenStack. The performance working group is certainly related to this but scaling is different to performance.
- Replacing the oslo incubator process with one that creates the package straight away. This will go up as a spec for approval of course. The crux of the issue will be finding a way to preserve the freedom of early refactorings without API commitments, without breaking everything. The current approach in my head is to use versioned submodules within the package during the pre-1.0.0 phase, and liberally copy-paste things when API breaks are needed.
- Helping the app catalog folk a little bit by doing a review of their review guidelines – looking specifically for gaps (e.g. like the currently unsecured http attack vector).
- Start a broad discussion over changing the way we use minimum versions of requirements. Today we raise the minimum version of most requirements quite eagerly. Yet for some like libvirt we instead use feature detection and degrade gracefully when non-latest versions are installed. It seems likely that it would increase compatibility with distributions if we took that approach more widely, but we’d need some care to think through the ramifications.
- Kicking off a discussion about leadership training for TC & PTL members. We vote folk into these rolls, but leading isn’t a innate skill. With our constituency of over two thousand developers, spending some money on good leadership training seems like a sound investment. If the TC agrees that its a good idea, my plan is to seek funding from the Board, and aim to make the training be a pre-summit event. This was suggested to me by Colette Alexander.
- Seek some more eyeballs on the olso.messaging Kafka driver spec from the HP folk that have been working with Kafka.
- Establish connections between Yahoo & HP’s iLO team – they’re seeing the same sort of lockups we did with IPMI on the TripleO test cloud (and the infra-cloud folk are still seeing that) – so I want to see if we can get the bug fixed for everyone.
- Work up a clear spec on refactoring the testrepository and subunit2sql layers so that we have all the data store backends in one common repository, an HTTP REST API for consumers like openstack-health, and still have a good experience for CLI users.
- Lastly, but not least, work up a formal stabilisation cycle proposal to try and give everyone (product working group, users, core developers) what they want which we seem deadlocked on not doing today. The basic thing to me seems to be fear of the consequences of saying no to feature patches – for pretty good reason; many developers have their income directly tied to achieving things upstream, and when upstream says no, the ensuing discussion is fraught (and there is often information asymmetry present). What we probably need to do is find some balance point – and then socialise the plan very broadly – including the Board, so they can encourage member companies to look after their developers properly.
If any of these things are of interest to you, please feel free to reach out to me :).
