70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
Hello! I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
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Committee.
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For those who do not know me, I have been involved with OpenStack since the
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very beginning, working for Rackspace as a core member of the Nova team. An
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internal job change took me away from active development after Essex, but since
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being hired by IBM, I've been back working on Nova since Kilo. As a result of
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this long involvement, I have always had a strong interest in helping to shape
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the direction of OpenStack, and if there is one thing people will agree about
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me, is that I'm never shy about voicing my opinion, whether the majority agree
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with me or not. Many of the earliest design decisions were very contentious,
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and while I didn't always prevail in those discussions, I felt that I helped
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move the conversation forward. More recently, I have participated in nearly all
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TC meetings for the last two years, and now would like to join the TC as a
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member.
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There seems to be a lot of concern about the impact of the Big Tent, and how
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all these new projects are diluting OpenStack, or somehow leading us astray
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from what we should be doing. In my opinion, this is all a distraction.
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Determining whether a project is "official" is simply a matter of controlling
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the branding of OpenStack, and not changing what OpenStack is. If there is room
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for improvement, it is in communicating what this means so that we eliminate
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the confusion for those who are coming to OpenStack without this historical
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knowledge.
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One thing I feel strongly about is that since the Mission Statement for
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OpenStack is "to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing
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platform...", that what we do should always advance cloud *computing*. So while
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I applaud the work being done by many of the telecommunication companies to
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push the limits of network virtualization, unless it is useful to making
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virtual machines communicate better, it really should be outside of OpenStack.
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I do recognize that this is not a clear distinction, since someone can always
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come up with a remote edge case where it could possibly be used, but we cannot
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be all things to all people (or all companies). Having a clear focus is
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important to success.
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OpenStack is now over 6 years old, and that is forever in technology terms. And
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while it has been continuously updated, these updates are restricted by the
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requirement that they remain compatible with previous versions, and,
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increasingly, that the updates are made with zero downtime. These are important
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goals, and some very amazing work has been done to make them a reality. But one
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of the consequences of this focus is that there is little serious discussion
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about potential architectural changes that would greatly improve OpenStack, if
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it requires downtime or breaking backwards compatibility. Suggestions for
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experiments along these lines are usually met with the (very valid, in my
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opinion) statement that we already have more development work than we can
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handle, so diverting some of our resources to explore other possibilities would
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set us further back. Unfortunately, this is the same argument that is used to
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justify the build-up of technical debt. I would like to see us begin to think
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about this, and have the TC direct this conversation, with input from
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operators, the recently-formed Architecture Working Group, developers from the
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various OpenStack projects, and any other interested parties. Yes, this is a
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"moonshot" idea [0], but I believe that it is essential for the long-term
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technical viability of OpenStack that we never stop looking ahead.
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I have a great deal of respect for the other candidates who are seeking a
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position on the TC, and thus understand that you, as a voter, have a difficult
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job in selecting only six. I would indeed be honored if you would support me.
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Thank you,
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Ed
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Email: ed@leafe.com
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Foundation Profile: http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/280
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Freenode: edleafe
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Website: https://blog.leafe.com
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Twitter: @edleafe
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[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moon_shot (definition 3)
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