In preparation for the next TC meeting, a survey was sent out to driver maintainers, here is a summary of the feedback that was gathered.
Major observations ================== * Are drivers an important part of OpenStack? YES! * Discoverability of drivers needs to be fixed immediately. * It is important to have visibility in a central place of the status of each driver. * Perspective of a driver developer and a high level person at the company should feel like they're part of something. * OpenStack should stop treating drivers like second-class citizens. They want access to the same resources (publish on docs.o.org, config guides, etc). * The initial wording about what constitutes a project was never intended for drivers. Drivers are a part of the project. Driver developers contribute to OpenStack by creating drivers. Discoverability =============== * Consensus: It is currently all over the place. A common mechanism to view all supported drivers is needed. * Cinder list: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/cinder/drivers.html * Nova list: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/support-matrix.html * Stackalytics list: http://stackalytics.openstack.org/report/driverlog * Opinion: If we intend to use the marketplace (or anywhere on openstack.org) to list in-tree and out-of-tree drivers, they should have CI results available as a requirement. A driver that fails CI is not just a vendor problem, it’s an OpenStack problem, it reflects poorly on OpenStack and the project. * Opinion: What constitutes a supported driver, why not list all drivers? * Opinion: Fixing discoverability can be done independently of governance changes. We have the option of tabling the governance discussion until we get the discoverability properly fixed, and see then if we still need to do anything more. * Opinion: Between giving full access to vertical resources to driver teams, and making the marketplace *the* place for learning about OpenStack drivers, we would have solved at least the biggest portion of the problem we're facing. Driver projects - official or not? ================================== * Fact: There is desire from some out-of-tree vendors to become ‘official’ OpenStack projects, and gain the benefits of that (access to horizontal teams). * Opinion: Let drivers projects become official, there should be no 3rd party CI requirement, that can be a tag. * Opinion: Do not allow drivers projects to become official, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t easily be discoverable. * Opinion: We don't need to open the flood gates of allowing vendors to be teams in the OpenStack governance to make the vendors developers happy. * Fact: This implies being placed under the TC oversight. It is a significant move that could have unintended side-effects, it is hard to reverse (kicking out teams we accepted is worse than not including them in the first place), and our community is divided on the way forward. So we need to give that question our full attention and not rush the answer. * Opinion: Consider https://github.com/openstack/driverlog an official OpenStack project to be listed under governance with a PTL, weekly meetings, and all that it required to allow the team to be effective in their mission of keeping the marketplace a trustworthy resource for learning about OpenStack driver ecosystem. Driver developers ================= * Opinion: A driver developer that ONLY contributes to vendor specific driver code should not have the same influence as other OpenStack developers, voting for PTL, TC, and ATC status. * Opinion: PTLs should leverage the extra-atcs option in the governance repo In-tree vs Out-of-tree ====================== * Cinder has in-tree drivers, but also has out-of-tree drivers when their CI is not maintained or when minimum feature requirements are not met. They are marked as ‘not supported’ and have a single release to get things working before being moved out-of-tree. * Ironic has a single out-of-tree repo: https://github.com/openstack/ironic-staging-drivers -- But also in-tree https://github.com/openstack/ironic/tree/master/ironic/drivers * Neutron has all drivers out-of-tree, with project names like: ‘networking-cisco’. * Many opinions on the “stick-based” approach the cinder team took. * Opinion: The in-tree vs out-of-tree argument is developer focused. Out-of-tree drivers have obvious benefits (develop quickly, maintain their own team, no need for a core to review the patch). But a vendor that is looking to make sure a driver is supported will not be searching git repos (goes back to discoverability). * Opinion: May be worth handling the projects that keep supported drivers in-tree differently that we handle projects that have everything out-of-tree. thanks for reading! stevemar
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