Recently the Project Infrastructure team hosted a two-day “bootcamp”
for people who are interested in contributing to the Project
Infrastructure. The OpenStack project is so large, and continuing to
grow, that creating and operating the developer infrastructure for the
project itself is a unique challenge. Because OpenStack receives code
contributions from more than 600 developers in a release cycle, and
merges as many as 200 changes per day, we are at the cutting edge of
distributed development and testing.
The project infrastructure covers a wide range of tools and services
used by the project, including code review, testing, and
collaboration. The design and operation of these systems is managed
under the Infrastructure Program which is overseen by the TC just like
the rest of the OpenStack project. And like any other OpenStack
program, our team is open and we welcome contributions from anyone.
Managing the infrastructure for a project of this scale is a lot of
work, but it is uniquely rewarding because it affects every OpenStack
project and affords interactions with all of the developers. We heard
a lot of interest from persons and companies who wanted to contribute,
so we held the bootcamp to get anyone who was interested in
contributing together in a room with the current core team of
infrastructure developers.
OpenStack Infrastructure Bootcamp kicks off
Photo: Elizabeth Krumbach, CC-BY 2.0
Day one saw us all together and discussing how contributions are
accepted, how the team operates, and how new members can expect to
become core members in the future. We discussed each major system at
a high level, and worked out how all of the systems interact with each
other.
In the evening, we all got together for dinner and spent several
enjoyable hours talking about how we could improve the system, and
generally getting to know each other.
On day two, we dove deeper into some topics of particular interest to
attendees, and generally had a less structured approach where people
who shared interest in an area got together and discussed it in depth.
I think everyone who attended got a lot out of the event, and we’re
already seeing significant new contributions as a result. I hope that
in several months more time we will have new core members on our
team. I also think this is a good model for other programs in
OpenStack who want to quickly bring new contributors up to speed.
I’d like to thank Monty Taylor for organizing the event, the rest of
the core contributors (or “coremudgeons”) for talking about what we do
for two days straight, and Hewlett-Packard and the OpenStack
Foundation for sponsoring the event.
Some reactions from others who attended:
http://dague.net/2013/06/29/openstack-infrastructure-bootcamp/
http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=8229
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