openstack/election
Code Issues Proposed changes

Adding Steven Dake candidacy for TC

Browse Source 
Change-Id: I0b7f44b504ab7105b429647ca672ab13c4c0f776
This commit is contained in:
Steven Dake 2016-03-29 12:08:17 -07:00
parent 636ff1ea64
commit 1264b8c8c6
1 changed files with 148 additions and 0 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

148
candidates/newton/TC/Steven_Dake.txt Normal file
View File

@ -0,0 +1,148 @@
All My Peers:
TL;DR - I will increase adoption of OpenStack by removing governance
RED TAPE and mentoring individuals interested in these objectives.
A brief history of time:
I started my journey in OpenStack by doing a gap analysis of AWS to
OpenStack at my previous employer Red Hat, Inc. This gap analysis
turned up all kinds of gaps in OpenStack four years ago. I
personally believed for OpenStack to be successful, it needed to expand
beyond a compute kit and deliver a complete IaaS platform.
Four years ago there was not really a way to add projects to OpenStack.
There was no big tent, but instead an incubation track. It was very
poorly defined (half a wiki page), so I went about the efforts of
solving one of the most fundamental problems in OpenStack: Adding a
new project to OpenStack. I did this by combining my previous gap
analysis with my experience starting and leading Open Source projects
to solve one of the most fundamental gaps in OpenStack: Orchestration.
This led to the founding of the Heat project with Angus Salkeld of
which I served as PTL for 18 months. At the time the bar to add
projects to OpenStack was stratospheric. Fortunately the
dedication and perseverance of the Heat project team resulted
in the addition of Heat as an incubated and later integrated
project as did another project Ceilometer led by Nick Barcet
that also went through the same process at nearly the same time as Heat.
Once Ceilometer and Heat were integrated into the integrated
release of OpenStack, a herd of projects attempted incubation
into OpenStack and the technical committee was faced with a dilemma.
In early 2014, OpenStack governance isolated projects into
"programs". The technical committee believed it was necessary
to integrate all these new projects into existing programs.
The learning process from that led to the origination of the
Big Tent, of which I am a super hard-core fan. Once the Big Tent
was reality, the bar for entry as a legitimate OpenStack project
was far lowered, creating a framework for new innovative projects
to flourish, evolve, and add value to the OpenStack community.
In mid 2014 I was feeling a little frustrated after recruiting a
fantastic diversely affiliated team and community and still
feeling like a track athlete for jumping all the hurdles in the
way of making Heat an integrated program. How could others go
through this effort without all the hurdles? I lacked an answer.
Fortunately the technical committee cut the RED TAPE by introducing
the Big Tent in late 2014 which re-energized me into solving
OpenStack's next two major gaps. The first gap was lack of
support for container workloads (solved by Magnum), where Adrian
Otto served a PTL while I recruited a majority of the core
reviewer team and implemented much of the original architecture.
At the nearly the same time in 2015, I personally believed existing
deployment of OpenStack was too complex and error prone and formed
the Kolla project.
I recruited a great core review team with Kolla and trained this
young team on how to "Open Source". I feel Kolla is one of OpenStack's
greatest successes - a team with a high degree of diverse affiliations
to solve OpenStack's #1 problem: How do I deploy the damn thing!
Now, I as the PTL of Kolla am faced with a problem: RED TAPE!
The technical committee decided during the Big Tent process that
projects should be labeled with tags. Whether tagging is dangerous
or not to OpenStack projects I leave for a different forum, but
there is Operator value in the tagging process.
Tags provide a mechanisms to automate information transfer and serve
as a selection criteria for the OpenStack Operator community who
represent the folks that are actually going to deploy the software
the OpenStack developer community creates.
The current tags as they are written are full of RED TAPE [1]. It
is not easy writing a tag that doesn't require onerous hurdle jumping.
I wrote a couple type: tags myself [2][3] and it is not the blame of
the technical committee that the tags can appear so onerous to fresh
projects like Kolla that have only been in the Big Tent for ten
months. It is a complex challenge handling all cases with a
limited document. To correct the deficiencies of the governance
repository, we need to collectively involve the community in the
governance repository development process.
I don't want to "overthrow" the technical committee as it stands.
I think they have done a fantastic job of keeping up with rapid
pace of OpenStack’s growth. I honestly don't think I could have
done a better job in the past. That said, I would appreciate the
opportunity to contribute to the technical committee’s efforts
bringing to the table my 4 years of experience as PTL or co-PTL
of the Heat, Magnum, and Kolla projects as well as my previous
work in Open Source including leadership positions in the high
availability community, leading Corosync, and serving as
an author for the Linux Foundation's Carrier Grade Linux
specifications. My professional mission in the past has been
to make OpenStack and the developers I mentor grow. I want to
expand my professional mission with:
“Grow the OpenStack ecosystem by reducing or removing hurdles
and mentoring individuals interested in these objectives.”
If elected for the technical committee I will deliver on this
mission by:
* Promoting project affiliation diversity wherever possible.
* Serve as a Champion for community members wishing someone
else would just remove the RED TAPE so they could get on
with their jobs by authoring and driving changes to the
governance repository at request.
* Enforce via automated tooling and human intervention an accurate
accounting of the tags used in the governance repository so that
Operators can actually count on the tags being accurate rather
than applied inconsistently.
* Mentor fresh Project Team Leads how the governance repository
operates.
* Mentor Project Team Leads on the governance repository workflow
to solve their own problems.
* Lead the development of a feedback loop between the technical
committee and Project Team Leads relating to tagging and
RED TAPE removal.
* Democratize the governance repository so thirteen individuals
don't decide feature tagging of technical projects; rather the
project teams feed their ideas into the governance repository
directly. This can already be done today but is rarely undertaken.
I am able to do most of these things today in an unofficial
capacity. Becoming a member of the technical committee with your
vote would help reach a wider audience with my mission and permit
me to have a bigger impact by helping shape the governance of
OpenStack.
I would be pleased to accept your vote and serve as your technical
committee representative and deliver on the commitments made above.
With my twenty years of R&D development experience coupled with my
four years of PTL experience and extensive technical involvement
in the growth of OpenStack [4][5], I believe I am in a fantastic
position to serve as your voice and mentor others to use theirs.
Warm Regards,
Steven Dake
My freenode IRC nickname is: sdake
[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/294212/
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/295528/
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/295971/
[4] Reviews: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=sdake&release=all&metric=marks
[5] Commits: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=sdake&release=all&metric=commits