The results of the OpenStack Technical Committee have just been announced. I’m very grateful to everyone who voted for me. Thanks!
This is going to be a very different committee than previously. For the first time, PTLs of integrated projects do not have an automatic seat. I think this will be a positive change and see TC members generally take more of an interest in cross-project issues. That said, we need to be careful to explicitly include PTLs in decision making which affect their projects.
One thing I’m curious about is how this new TC makeup will affect discussions about the increase in OpenStack’s technical scope. I went through each of candidate’s nomination emails and pulled out some quotes below. To me, this represents a high level of consensus towards a continued cautious and measured growth in the project’s scope … but make your own mind up! I’m actually quite surprised how many candidates felt it was important to give their views on this.
I have an expansive view of the scope of OpenStack. I do not think that ‘pure IaaS’ as a limiting factor in the definition serves or will serve any of our users. I think that instead of trying to come up with random or theoretical labels and then keeping ourselves inside of the pre-defined label, we should focus on writing software that solves problems for users.
One of the most exciting things for me over the last year has been helping to expand OpenStack by including a number of new projects. I think this growth is important for OpenStack’s success. I would like to continue to help guide this growth and to help figure out how OpenStack can scale as an organization and still be effective.
My goal is to provide an inclusive and supportive environment for projects while making OpenStack better for users and admins all the time. We are so fortunate to have the explosive growth and interest in OpenStack, and I want it to continue. We have built upon incredible ideas and I want us to be empowered to innovate.
We welcomed Heat, Ceilometer, Trove, Savannah, Marconi into the OpenStack family either as integrated or incubating projects. The TC carefully considered each of these applications and my own rule of thumb was “does it have a healthy contributor community and is it a sensible growth of OpenStack’s scope?”. I love to see this sustainable growth in our project and community.
I share the view of many of the other candidates that OpenStack should not limit itself to today’s definition of IaaS. The history of computing is a progression of different levels of abstraction, and what we consider “platform” today may become “infrastructure” tomorrow.
I’m incredibly excited by OpenStack’s growth (in people, code, scope), which I attribute to an incredibly welcoming and constructive community, and the velocity we get out of our preemptive integration system. As a TC member I’d do my best to ensure those conditions remain. I think we’ve only just begun to see what OpenStack will become [..]
As a significant OpenStack user, I’m excited about the direction that OpenStack is heading. I’m glad that we’re accepting new programs that expand the scope of our project to make it more useful for everyone. I believe a major function of the Technical Committee is to curate and shepherd new programs through the incubation process. However, I believe that it should be more involved than it has been. We have been very quick to promote out of integration some exciting new projects that may not have been fully integrated. As a member of the TC, I support our continued growth, and I want to make sure that the ties that hold our collection of projects together are strong, and more than just a marketing umbrella.
First off, the TC has incubated a number of projects in the Havana release, and I’d like to see that continue. I think its important that we build a platform that includes the services that a deployer would
need to build a cloud and that those platform elements work well together. Now, its clear that not everyone will deploy all of the projects we are incubating, but I think its still important that they play well together and have a consistent look and feel.
New projects and growth are important to OpenStack however I don’t think that uncontrolled and disjointed growth in the form of new projects is a good thing, in fact I think it’s detrimental to OpenStack as a whole. I personally would like to see the TC have more involvement in terms of recommending/investigating new projects before they’re proposed or started by others. By the same token, I’d also like to see the TC take a more active role in the projects we currently have and how they all tie
together. I personally believe that having 10 or so individual projects operating in their own silos is not the right direction. My opinion here does NOT equate to “more control”, but instead should equate to being more helpful. With the continued growth of OpenStack I believe it’s critical to have some sort of vision and some resources that have a deep understanding of the entire eco-system.
The issue of scope was a recurring theme during my recent term on the TC. As the OpenStack ecosystem grows beyond Infrastructure as a Service, the committee needs to more clearly define the criteria used to determine the kind of projects and programs that fit within the scope of integrated releases and how they move through the progression of incubation to graduation. In addition to defining the criteria, the Technical Committee should to work develop policies and procedures to provide some guidance to projects which are outside of the scope an integrated release, but valuable to our community.
(I don’t see a directly relevant quote from Robert)
Having no relevant quote from Robert Collins is it something we should worry about ?
2 from HP
2 from Rackspace
2 from dreamhost
2 from redhat
is it something we should worry about? only large companies gets voted in in openstack
I’m surprised that Robert is the only one who didn’t comment directly on this – we all naturally have our particular interests and focus. Not everyone need make their opinion on this a key part of their election platform. I’m sure Robert does have a well formed opinion on it, though.
As for affiliations – I hadn’t actually considered how the affiliations worked out. I’ve full confidence that everyone on this TC will naturally represent the interests of the project over their affiliation. I also think these candidates were elected based on their contributions and leadership rather than their affiliation.
Let’s tally up all the affiliations – 2 from HP, 2 from Rackspace, 2 from Dreamhost, 2 from Red Hat, 2 from the OpenStack Foundation, 1 from IBM, 1 from SolidFire, 1 from Nebula. That’s just AFAIK – people sometimes change affiliation and it takes a while to even realize.
Even if you assume that affiliation is important here, the breakdown doesn’t worry me. It’s actually a pretty decent spread across the main contributing organizations. Do you think there should be more TC members affiliated with smaller companies? Or unaffiliated TC members?
If you mean unaffiliated, I would love to see this too (based on my experience with unaffiliated contributors making a big impact on other open-source projects) but there is a (positive IMHO) reality in OpenStack – any significant leader on this project would have no trouble at all finding full time employment working on OpenStack. What better way to dedicate more of your energy to OpenStack than to work on it full time?