OpenStack Project Techncial Leads (PTLs)

 

From Thierry Carrez:

I’d like to quickly precise what will be expected, from a release management perspective, from the Project Technical Leads (PTLs) some of us will nominate and elect in the following weeks.

PTLs, like it says on the tin, will have to technically lead each project. That comes with a few rights, but also with a lot of duties that the candidates shouldn’t underestimate…

Rights include the ability to decide between conflicting opinions on a technical debate, or the authority to set the theme for the next release. Exercising those rights will only be possible if the technical opinions of the elected lead are widely respected in the project.

Duties of the PTLs, from a release management perspective, mainly include coming up with a plan for the next release(s). That means staying on top of what everyone proposes, selecting (and rejecting) blueprints for a given cycle, setting priorities, approving designs (potentially with the help of other project drivers), or making sure we don’t duplicate work. The PTLs should also be very impacted by the design summit preparation, making sure we have sessions for what we need to discuss, and encouraging people to submit corresponding blueprints.

As release manager, I can help with the process, but the decisions must come from the PTLs, who have the legitimacy of being elected. During the cycle, I will then help in making sure the defined plan is on track.

With a well-established project like Swift or a relatively-small project like Glance, the PTL work can certainly be done at the same time as regular development. For Nova however, the PTL should expect project coordination work to take a large part of his time, so he could find himself not being able to write as much code as he would want. That should be kept in mind before you accept nominations.

Hoping this helps in clarifying expectations… Happy nominating and voting !

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OpenStack Governance Nominations and Election Process

 

March 8, 2011

As stated in Jonathan Bryce’s OpenStack Governance Update last week, the OpenStack governance process has been modified to better serve the community and include additional community-elected leaders. This blog post details the nomination and election process for the open positions detailed in Jonathan’s post.

PROCESS

Nominations – Starting Tuesday March 8th thru March 18th at Midnight CST any person interested in one of the available positions and meeting the requirements (see below) can either self-nominate or be nominated for an open position. All nomination requests should be sent via email to [email protected] and include the following information:

  • Name of person being nominated including email address
  • Position posting for (PTL NOVA, PTL SWIFT, PTL GLANCE, PPB GENERAL)
  • Company name (individual developers can just put Independent)

All nominated and qualified people will be added to a public Etherpad at http://etherpad.openstack.org/Spring2011-Elections.

Elections – Starting Monday March 21 thru April 1 at Midnight CST all nominated people will be put into an online election system for community voting. Each position open for election has unique requirements for eligibility to vote thus four separate elections will be held at the same time. Details on the election process are still in review and planning; however, information on the process will be posted before the election system is activated.

Results – On April 4, 2011 the final voting results will be published to the community on the OpenStack blog at http://openstack.org/blog.

POSITIONS

Please review the descriptions of the available positions at http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Model to better understand the commitments involved. These are significant leadership positions within the OpenStack community and your contributions via these positions will have a large impact on the overall project. Here are some additional points to be aware of for these positions:

  • Approve and prioritize blueprints for releases, communicate roadmap
  • Coordinate the technical sessions at the design summit that occurs after their elections
  • Resolve any deadlocked conflicts in the community
  • Work with the release manager to ensure releases stay on track and status is communicated broadly
  • Implement project-specific policies such as choosing subject matter experts, code review policies
  • Participate in the #openstack IRC channel and developer mailing lists

The following positions are available for the election process:

Project Technical Leads – PTL Nova, PTL Swift, and PTL Glance

OpenStack is currently designating the following three projects – Nova, Swift, and Glance as requiring a separate project technical lead. Other projects within OpenStack will work with the Project Policy Board to determine needs for a technical lead.

Requirements – From the OpenStack Governance Model:

Anyone who has submitted code which has been accepted into the respective project’s trunk is eligible to run for a PTL seat, and to vote for the PTL. Sitting Project Technical Leads are eligible to run for re-election each cycle, provided they continue to meet the criteria.

Project Policy Board – General Board Seat A, General Board Seat B
Requirements – From the OpenStack Governance Model:

Any registered member of an OpenStack Launchpad group is eligible to run and vote in these elections. The TWO individuals receiving the most votes will assume these seats. If an individual should happen to be elected as both a PTL and General Member of the PPB, then they will take their PTL seat only and the elected General Member seat will go to the next highest vote getter.

If you have any questions on this process, please contact [email protected] who is managing nominations and elections for these positions.

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OpenStack Developer Activity Review (February 28 – March 4)

 

Many people have asked for more insight into the developer activities for OpenStack as the large number of code changes and proposals make it difficult to monitor everything happening. In hopes of exposing more of the developer activities, I plan to post a weekly or biweekly blog post on the latest development activities. If you have any ideas for this blog post, please email me at [email protected]. I am always ready to listen to the community for new ideas.

Activities

Developer Mailing List (archive: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/)

This is select list of topics discussed this week in the developer mailing list and is not a complete list.  Please visit the archive to see all the topics.

  • Authn Authz Proposal – Vish Ishaya posted information on a prototype solution for Authentication (authn) and Authorization (authz) at http://plansthis.com/auth. Instructions for the prototype are included.
  • Gzip Compression – Brian Lamer has implemented a simple WSGI implementation of gzip compression however it does not support streaming and he is opening a discussion on how best to move forward. Several developers responded but the overall consensus is to allow a tool such as Nginx/Apache/etc to handle this outside of the system as Glance does. Jorge Williams suggested that Brian submit the code anyway as someone may find another use for it.
  • Multiple Versions in OpenStack API – Brian Waldon asked about the plan to support both OpenStack API 1.0 and 1.1 as the Versions WSGI application seems to be able to deploy multiple versions of the OS API within the same codebase.  Several developers including Eric Day, Ewan Mellor, and Sandy Walsh responded to this question; more information at https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg01187.html.
  • OS API server password generation – Dan Price announced a blueprint on adding support for password generation when creating services and asked for feedback. Blueprint – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/openstack-api-server-passwords; Details – http://etherpad.openstack.org/openstack-api-server-passwords.  Further discussion from Ed Leafe, Justin Santa Barbara, Mark Washenberger, Scott Moser, George Reese, and Rick Clark can be followed at https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg01175.html.
  • Management API – Glen Campbell has created a preliminary proposal for admin/management API for Nova at http://wiki.openstack.org/NovaAdminAPI. Glen’s focus is to determine the features required for Rackspace, which may or may not be needed by the community.

Statistics

  • Number of OpenStack Developers on Contributors List – 153 (+2 for week)
  • Cactus Release Status – Blueprints (http://wiki.openstack.org/releasestatus/)
    • Essential – 5 Design Approved; 1 Implemented – 1 Needs Code Review – 1 Beta Available
    • High – 12 Blueprints; 3 Implemented – 1 Needs Code Review – 1 Blocked
    • Medium – 21 Blueprints; 2 Needs Code Review; 3 Implemented
    • Low – 16 Blueprints; 1 Needs Code Review; 6 Implemented

For the latest on development activities on OpenStack please check these sites for more details:

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Community Weekly Newsletter (February 28 – March 4)

 

OpenStack Community Newsletter – March 4, 2011

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please email [email protected].

Midokura booth at Cloud Days in Tokyo

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (2/25– 3/3)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 27 Active Reviews
    • 166 Active Branches – owned by 49 people & 10 teams
    • 1,849 commits by 62 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 3 Active Reviews
    • 48 Active Branches – owned by 19 people & 4 teams
    • 215 commits by 11 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack  tweets;  re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets  ** Looking for new tool to gather this data **
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  277  Tracked Bugs; 44 New Bugs; 33 In-process Bugs; 6  Critical Bugs; 30 High Importance Bugs; 106 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  165 Blueprints; 8 Essential, 15 High, 26 Medium, 22 Low, 94 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 8,791 Visits, 19,315  Pageviews, 53.16% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 43.24%; /projects 11.34%; /projects/compute 16.86%; /projects/storage 11.38%; /Community 7.21%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Governance Update

 

March 3, 2011

We’ve built quite an open source community together since we launched less than eight months ago!  What started as a small group of people committed to building an open cloud standard, has grown to hundreds of developers and more than 50 participating organizations virtually overnight.  From the beginning, this community was founded with the goal of diversity of participation and a firm commitment to what we call “the 4 opens”:  Open Source, Open Design, Open Development and Open Community.

As we take stock of the amazing interest and growth, keeping in mind the initiative’s goals and commitment to openness, the time has come to evolve the governance process to match the new reality of a larger, more diverse community.  To that end, the governance process has been updated, with full details published here.

As you read through the highlights below, we encourage you to get personally involved to steer this community to an even bigger, brighter future.  Whether it’s participating in a spirited debate on the mailing list, attending the bi-annual design summits, or even running for one of the elected positions, there are a lot of ways to get involved and there’s no time like the present to dive in.  Nominations and elections will be held later this month for many elected positions.

Highlights:

  • Each Project — OpenStack Compute (Nova), OpenStack Object Storage (Swift), and the OpenStack image service (Glance) will elect their own Project Technical Leads (starting later this month, March 2011) to run the projects and make day-to-day technical decisions.  Elections will be held every six months, just prior to each design summit, and these elected leaders will be instrumental in guiding those public design summits and setting the future direction of their project.
  • The Project Oversight Committee – which has been charged with setting policies that span projects as well as determining when new projects should be added – will be renamed the Project Policy Board effective immediately, to better reflect their mission.
  • This Project Policy Board will be revamped to become more nimble and ensure broad representation.  Specifically, 2/3 of the seats on the board will now be elected rather than appointed by Rackspace:
    • 5 General Board Seats elected to one-year terms, with elections occurring prior to each design summit (2 each spring*, 3 each Fall)
    • 3 Board Seats reserved for the winners of the Project Technical Lead elections* (more as we add projects)
    • 4 seats appointed by Rackspace
  • We are establishing an OpenStack Advisory Board of senior advisors comprised of major commercial sponsors (those who are building businesses on OpenStack), enterprises and service providers who are deploying it, and category experts.  The primary function of this body is to provide guidance on OpenStack’s mission, and to evangelize on its behalf.  Prior to the Spring 2011 Design Summit, Rackspace will appoint the initial members from a variety of organizations – but the board will then determine its own plans and requirements for expansion.

*Upcoming Elections:  As noted above, a total of 5 seats are up for election later this month, March 2011, prior to the Spring 2011 Design Summit.  3 of these will be Project Technical Leads for the respective projects, and will also sit on the Project Policy Board representing those respective communities, and 2 will be General Board Members.  More details soon regarding the nomination and election process.

Again, we invite everyone to get involved and have your voice heard.  If you’re interested in running for the Project Policy Board, or becoming a Project Technical Leader, now’s the time to throw your hat in the ring.  Registration for the second public Design Summit will open in the next few days, in which members of the community set the roadmap and make technical decisions to drive the projects forward.  You can get plugged in with our new community page at openstack.org/community.