A Review of the TC’s Findings from the OpenStack 2019 User Survey

 

May 19, 2020

The OpenStack Technical Committee (TC) added their own questions to the annual OpenStack User Survey in 2019. The TC’s six questions looked to gain insight that can directly be applied to improving the software and its roadmap. 

Jay Bryant, Technical Committee member, emphasized “It is important that OpenStack Operators participate in the user survey as this is a major source of feedback from users to the developers.  The Technical Committee and OpenStack project teams take time each year to review the feedback and ensure that future development plans align with operator feedback.  Such direct feedback is important for a community driven project like OpenStack.” 

The TC’s main takeaways include: 

  • Insight into why there are still so many users operating on older releases (35% of respondents don’t upgrade). Future questions like “why are you not upgrading?” may be added to shed light on whether the lack of upgrades is due to difficulty or there being no need for an upgrade. 
  • There is an emphasis on the importance of continuing to do stable releases, as the majority of responses revealed that users upgraded “using only official point releases”.
  • When asked which projects organizations contribute maintenance resources such as patches for bugs and reviews on master or stable branches, core projects had the majority of participation. Nova, Neutron, and Cinder projects had the next most participants. 
  • It was found that of users that were actively participating, they participated in multiple-ways. Primarily, users expressed participation by reporting bug fixes, however many of the users are also taking advantage of the Forum Sessions and Ops Meetups. The TC noted that, “This would seem to support one of the things that we highlight as being unique about our community. We are users and developers collaborating together.”
  • A lack or time or human resources held to be the most prevalent reason for an absence of contributing maintenance resources. 
  • When asking for users to indicate what other ways they could participate, the TC realized they may not directly see the ways that people are participating with the community. 

The TC has decided to keep these same questions in the next survey to test for consistency. However, they plan to refine questions and provide follow ups to unanswered questions later. Furthermore, the TC did not find the results to be surprising, but rather to reveal that the collaborative nature of OpenStack Users was very prominent.


The full TC’s review of the results can be found here. Don’t forget to complete the User Survey before August 20!

Welcome new members to the OpenStack Technical Committee

 

April 16, 2020

Please join the community in congratulating the five newly elected members of the OpenStack Technical Committee (TC).

  • Graham Hayes (mugsie)
  • Kristi Nikolla (knikolla)
  • Mohammed Naser (mnaser)
  • Belmiro Moreira (belmoreira)
  • Rico Lin (ricolin)

These members join:

  • Kendall Nelson (diablo_rojo)
  • Jay Bryant (jungleboyj)
  • Jean-Phillippe Evrard (evrardjp)
  • Nate Johnston (njohnston)
  • Ghanshyam Mann (gmann)
  • Kevin Carter (cloudnull)

For more information, check out the full results from the election as well as the election process details.

Even if you aren’t a TC member, you can still get involved! Beyond discussing on the mailing-list and participating in ad-hoc IRC meetings, TC members will hold office hours (for one hour) on the #openstack-tc IRC channel at the following times every week:

You can contact TC members at any time, but there will be an effort to be present at those specific hours. So don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any question!

Thank you to all of the candidates! Having a good group of candidates helps engage the community in our democratic process.

A year in review: How OpenStack continues to be one of the top three most active open source projects

 

January 27, 2020

A total of 1,518 unique change authors approved more than 47,500 changes and published two major releases, code named Stein and Train (due to our undying love of Trains). We started to work on Ussuri, our next release, to be delivered in 2020. In 2018, we introduced the “Extended Maintenance” concept, a period on which bugfixes can be accepted for projects following it (but these won’t produce further releases). As of today, Ocata, Pike, and Queens are in extended maintenance.

Read more »

OpenStack turns 8: Welcoming new users, more collaboration and new projects

 

July 20, 2018

We are celebrating the 8th birthday of OpenStack with the entire OpenStack community during July! OpenStack is an integration engine for diverse technologies, fostering collaboration among emerging communities, and the Foundation facilitates the development of many innovative projects in the open infrastructure space. None of it would be possible without the quickly growing, global community. There are now more than 90,000 community members across 183 countries and more than 670 supporting companies. We think that deserves a worldwide celebration!

Read more »

Developer Mailing List Digest February 17-23rd

 

February 23, 2018

Helpful PTG links

PTG is around the corner. Here are some helpful links:

Success Bot Says

  • mhayden got centos OSA gate under 2h today
  • thingee: we have an on-boarding page and documentation for new contributors! [0]
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”
  • More: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Successes

Thanks Bot Says

  • Thanks pkovar for keep the Documentation team going!
  • Thanks pabelanger and infra for getting ubuntu mirrors repaired and backup quickly!
  • Thanks lbragstad for helping troubleshoot an intermittent fernet token validation failure in puppet gates
  • Thanks TheJulia for helping me with a problem last week, it was really a networking problem issue, like you said so 🙂
  • Thanks tosky for backporting devstack ansible changes to pike!
  • Thanks thingee for Thanks Bot
  • Thanks openstackstatus for logging our things
  • Thanks strigazi for the v1.9.3 image
  • Thanks smcginnis for not stopping this.
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#thanks <comment>”
  • More: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Thanks

Community Summaries

  • TC report [0]
  • POST /api-sig/news [1]
  • Release countdown [2]

Vancouver Community Contributor Awards

The Community contributor awards gives recognition to those that are undervalued, don’t know they’re appreciated, bind the community together, keep things fun, or challenge some norm. There are a lot of people out there that could use a pat on the back and affirmation that they do good work in the community.
Nomination period is open now [0] until May 14th. Winners will be announced in feedback session at Vancouver.

Release Naming For S – time to suggest a name!

It’s time to pick a name for our “S” release! Since the associated Summit will be in Berlin, the Geographic location has been chosen as “Berlin” (state). Nominations are now open [0]. Rules and processes can be seen on the Governance site [1].

Final Queens RC Deadline

Thursday 22nd of April is the deadline for any final Queens release candidates. We’ll enter a quiet period for a week in preparation of tagging the final Queens release during the PTG week. Make sure if  you have patches merged to stable/queens that you propose a new RC before the deadline. PTLs should watch for a patch from the release management team tagging the final release. While not required, an acknowledgement on the patch would be appreciated.

Do Not Import oslo_db.tests.*

Deprecations were made on oslo_db.sqlalchemy.test_base package of DbFixture and DbTestCase. In a patch [0], and assumption was made to that these should be imported from oslo_db.tests.sqlalchemy. Cinder, Ironic and Glance have been found with this issue [1].
Unfortunately these were not prefixed with underscores to comply with naming conventions for people to recognize private code. The tests module was included for consumers to run those tests on their own packages easily.

Some New Zuul Features

Default timeout is 30 minutes for “post-run” phase of the job. A new attribute “timeout” [0] can set this to something else, which could be useful for a job that performs a long artifact upload.
Two new job attributes added “host-vars” and “group-vars” [1] which behave like “vars” but applies to a specific host or group.

Developer Mailing List Digest February 10-16th

 

February 16, 2018

Please help shape the future of the Developer Mailing List Digest with this two question survey: https://openstackfoundation.formstack.com/forms/openstack_developer_digest_feedback
Contribute to the Dev Digest by summarizing OpenStack Dev List threads:

Success Bot Says

  • None for this week. Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”

Thanks Bot Says

  • diablo_rojo on #openstack-101 [0]: spotz for watching the #openstack-101 channel and helping to point newcomers to good resources to get them started 🙂
  • fungi on #openstack-infra [1]: dmsimard and mnaser for getting deep-linking in ara working for firefox
  • fungi on #openstack-infra [2]: to Matt Van Winkle for volunteering to act as internal advocate at Rackspace for our control plane account there!
  • AJaeger on #openstack-doc [3]: corvus for deleting /draft content
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [4]: cmurphy for your investigation
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [5]: to mordred for laying wonderful groundwork with the tox_siblings work.
  • smcginnis on #openstack-infra [6]: fungi jeblair mordred AJaeger and other infra-team members for clearing up release job issues
  • fungi on #openstack-infra [7]: zuul v3 for having such detailed configuration syntax error reporting.
  • fungi on #openstack-dev [8]: diablo_rojo and persia for smooth but “rocky” ptl elections!
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#thanks <comment>”

Community Summaries

  • Nova Placement update [0]
  • Release Countdown [1]
  • TC Report [2]
  • Technical Committee Status update [3]

PTG Bot HOWTO for Dublin

The third PTG is an event where topics of discussion are loosely scheduled in tracks to maximize the attendee productivity. To keep track of what’s happening currently we have an event schedule page [0]. Below are some helpful discussions in using PTG bot:

Track Leads

Track leads will be able issue various commands [1] in irc channel #openstack-ptg:
  • #TRACK now <what’s being discussed>
  • example: #swift now brainstorming improvements to the ring.
  • Cross project interactions #TRACK now <what’s being discussed with other #TRACK>:
  • #nova now discussing #cinder interactions
  • What’s next #TRACK next <what will be discussed>:
  • #api-sig next at 2pm we’ll be discussing pagination woes
  • Clear all now and next entries for a track #TRACK clean:
  • #ironic clean

Booking Reservable Rooms

Reservable rooms and what’s being discussed works the same with it showing on the event schedule page [0].
Different set of commands:
  • Get the slot codes with the book command:
  • #TRACK book
  • #TRACK book <slot_code>
  • example: #relmgt book Coiste Bainisti-MonP2
Any track can book additional space. These slots are 1 hour and 45 minutes long. You can ask ttx, diablo_rojo or #openstack-infra to add a track that’s missing. Keep in mind various teams will be soley relying on this for space at the PTG.
Additional commands can be found in the PTG bot README [1].

PTL Election Results and Conclusions

PTL election is over and the results are in [0]! Congrats to returning and new PTLs!
There were three elections that took place:
  • Kolla [1]
  • Mistral [2]
  • Quality Assurance [3]
On the statistics side, we renewed 17 of the 64 PTLs, so around 27%. Our usual renewal rate is more around 35%, but we did renew more at the last elections (40%) so this is likely why we didn’t renew as much as usual this time. Much thanks to our election officials for carrying out this important responsibility in our community!

Election Process Tweaks

Discussions have started with ways to improve our election process. Current scripts in place have become brittle that are needed for governance documentation building that use gerrit lookup functions. Election officials currently have to make changes to an exception file [0] when email address with foundation accounts don’t match gerrit.
Discussed improvements include:
  • Uncouple TC and PTL election processes.
  • Make TC and PTL validation functions separate.
  • Change how-to-submit-candidacy directions to requires candidates email address to match their gerrit and foundation account.
Comments, concerns and better ideas are welcome. The plan is to schedule time at the PTG to start hacking on some of those items so feedback before then would be appreciated by your election officials!

Developer Mailing List Digest February 3-9th

 

February 9, 2018

Please help shape the future of the Developer Mailing List Digest with this two question survey: https://openstackfoundation.formstack.com/forms/openstack_developer_digest_feedback

Success Bot Says

  • stephenfin on #openstack-nova [0]: After 3 years and 7 (?) releases, encryption between nova’s consoleproxy service and compute nodes is finally possible ✌️
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [1]: zuul and nodepool feature/zuulv3 branches have merged into master
  • ildikov on #openstack-nova [2]: OpenStack now supports to attach a Cinder volume to multiple VM instances managed by Nova.
  • mriedem on #openstack-nova [3]: osc-placement 1.0.0 released; you can now do things with resource providers/classes via OSC CLI now.
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [4]: All tox jobs have been converted to Zuul v3 native syntax, run-tox.sh is gone.
  • ttx on #openstack-dev [5]: All teams have at least one candidate for PTL for the Rocky cycle! Might be the first time.
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”

Community Summaries

  • Release countdown [0]
  • Nova placement resource provider update [1]
  • TC Report [2]
  • POST /api-sig/news [3]
  • Technical Committee Status Update [4]

Dublin PTG Schedule is Up

PTG schedule is available [0]. A lot of rooms are available Monday/Tuesday to discuss additional topics that take half a day and can be requested [1]. For small things (90 min discussions) we can book them dyncamically during the event with the new PTG bot features. Follow the thread for updates to the schedule [2].

Last Chance for PTG Dublin Tickets

PTG tickets for Dublin were sold out this week, and the Foundation received many requests for more tickets. Working with the venue to accommodate the extra capacity, every additional attendee incrementally increases costs to $600. It’s understood the importance of this event and the need to have key team members present, so the OpenStack Foundation has negotiated an additional 100 tickets and will partially subsidize to be at sold at $400 [0].

New Zuul Depends-On Syntax

Recently introduced url-based syntax for Depends-On: footer in your commit message:
    
Old syntax will continue to work for a while, but please begin using the new syntax. Zuul has grown the ability to talk to multiple backend systems (Gerrit, Git and plain Git so far).
From a change in gerrit you could have:
    
Or from a Github pull request:
    
Tips and certain cases contained further in the full message.

Call For Mentors and Funding

The Outreachy program [0] helps people of underrepresented groups get involved in free and open source software by matching interns with established mentors in the upstream community.
OpenStack will be participating in Outreachy May 2018 to August 2018. Application period opens on February 12th.
Interested mentors should publish their project ideas [1]. You can read more information about being a mentor [2].
Interested sponsors [3] can help provide a stipend to interns for a three month program.

Community Goals for Rocky

TC voted by not approved yet:
  • Remove mox [0]
  • Toggle the debug option at runtime [1]
Comment now on the two selected goals, or the TC will approve them and they’ll be discussed at the PTG.

End of PTL Nominations

Official candidate list available [0]. There are 0 projects without candidates, so the TC will not have to appoint an PTL’s.
Three projects will have elections: Kolla, QA and Mistral.