OpenStack Technical Committee Update

Since TC elections are around the corner, the OpenStack Technical Committee had what is likely the last meeting of this cycle. The last update was about one month ago, and a lot has happened since then.

Graduation Discussions

The technical committee completed an integration review for both Ironic (Bare-Metal Provisioning) and Zaqar (Messaging).

Ironic has been in incubation for a long time, and the community has been working hard to complete it so the nova bare-metal driver could be deprecated. The last few steps were completed in time for juno, and Ironic will be joining the list of integrated projects for the Kilo release in April 2015.

The TC was split about the inclusion of Zaqar. Primarily the concerns were raised about the purpose of the project and whether its functionality is technically sound. It was one of the closest votes the TC has seen, but in the end the decision was not to graduate Zaqar at this time. It will remain an incubated project for the Kilo cycle.

Improving the Contributor License Agreement

At its July 2014 meeting, the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors heard information about the impact and options to address the OpenStack Contributor License Agreement (CLA). One of the questions raised was whether the issues being brought forward were simply the opinion of one member of the Board. The Technical Committee agreed to make a recommendation to the board to adopt a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) instead of the existing CLA. This is ultimately a Board decision since it has legal ramifications, but the consensus on the TC is that the DCO will streamline contributions and offers advantages over the CLA.

The Big Tent of OpenStack

Over the past year the TC has been attempting to raise the quality bar on both incubation and integration. This also extends to improving currently integrated projects, which motivated the Gap Analysis that you have read about in previous updates.

There has been a ton of discussion (and possibly one of the most verbose mailing list threads of OpenStack’s history) about changes to the integration process and release cycle. This discussion originated to help address the tensions between being inclusive community and maintaining the quality of OpenStack. Specifically, there are a few related issues:

  • The integrated testing gate has become a huge bottleneck
  • Cross-project teams are at risk of being overloaded
  • People feel incubation is necessary to be “part of OpenStack”

There have been some excellent suggestions discussed around simplifying both the integrated gate and the release schedule. In addition, there has been discussion about opening up the incubation process. The ideal outcome would be for everyone to feel like they can be in the “Big Tent” of OpenStack without overloading the system to the point where we cannot make quality releases.

The TC feels it is important to have some clear proposals on the table for the in-person meeting in paris, so Doug Hellmann congealed the various discussion into a series of governance proposals. No decisions will be made on this until after the TC elections, but this will allow future discussions to be more concrete.

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