Latest Technical Committee Updates

The OpenStack Technical Committee meets weekly to work through requests for incubation, to review technical issues happening in currently integrated projects, and to represent the technical contributors to OpenStack. We have about a month remaining with our current crew and elections coming soon. What have we been up to? Here’s an overview of current activities.

User Committee Nominees

We’ve recently put together some more nominees for a User Committee representative to replace Ryan Lane. These nominees are willing to serve in consolidating user requirements, guiding the dev teams when user feedback is needed, track OpenStack deployments and usage (typically done through the annual user survey), and work with user groups around the world.

  • Beth Cohen, Verizon Cloud technology strategist
  • Chet Burgess, Metacloud Chief architect
  • Andrew Mitry, Comcast cloud architect
  • Jonathan Proulx, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senior technical architect
  • Jacob Walcik, Rackspace Principal solutions architect

We’re happy to report that Jonathan Proulx will join the User Committee, and we’re definitely going to ask for more ways for the others to get involved. Thanks to all for their willingness to get involved.

Milestone Gap Analyses for Current Teams

With each milestone for the Juno release, currently integrated teams had a list of technical items to work through based on TC input. Networking (neutron), Databases (trove), Telemetry (ceilometer), Orchestration (heat), and Images (glance) all addressed technical concerns this release. We also discussed with Object Storage (swift) their current plans and the potential for more alignment. For Networking, the neutron team focused on database migrations, test coverage, feature parity with nova-network, and documentation for open source driver options. For Images, the glance team is addressing critical testing gaps. For Databases, the trove team addressed concerns about test coverage and documentation as well as CI and bug triaging. The horizon team, working on the OpenStack dashboard, completed its mission statement and is working on refreshing integration tests while splitting their repos into a separate toolkit from the django app itself. Telemetry, handled by the ceilometer team, gave an update to the TC about Gnocchi, a separate experimental approach to store and retrieve time series data and resource representations such as what ceilometer does for its datapoint collection for say, an instance resizing or migrating to another compute host. The Orchestration efforts with the heat team is all about improving functional testing and upgrade testing and stating their mission statement.

Integration and Incubation Discussions

This six-month period revealed these incubation requests: Designate, Rally, and Manila.

Designate works on providing access to DNS services and was accepted for incubation in the Juno release.

The Manila project was originally based on the Block Storage project cinder and it provides file-based shared storage services with coordinated access. It is designed to support multiple storage backends. As an example use-case, end-users create an NFS share with the REST API, make sure its accessible on the correct network, and sets up the NetApp (or EMC, or GlusterFS, or another storage driver) volume backend.

The Rally project provides SLA management for production OpenStack clouds. While this mission is helpful for performance testing and keeping live clouds running smoothly, the TC concluded it does not need to be a part of OpenStack, rather it is a project that can be adopted outside of OpenStack.

Leading up to Juno also proves busy for integration discussions with these teams: Barbican, Ironic, and Zaqar (you may remember the team name Marconi).

Barbican continues to be incubated, and both Zaqar and Ironic are being discussed so feel free to follow along at next week’s TC meeting.

DefCore: Community feedback and technical leadership for the layers of OpenStack

The TC had a joint meeting again this past week to talk about the definition of OpenStack. Discussion in meetings and online continues with recent communications from Rob Hirschfeld and Sean Dague. These visuals and processes are helping us make our community efforts what we want them to be.

Conversations to Follow

We’re also deep diving into discussions about programs adopting projects or guidelines for adopting new official projects. We’ve had lively discussions about the scope of programs on the openstack-dev mailing list with over 100 responses so it’s definitely a topic of interest.

As a community we are seeking cross-project themes or initiatives, so please follow along on the openstack-dev mailing list.

We hope these summary posts are helpful for sipping from the firehose. Let us know your thoughts through our many feedback channels.

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