Wow --Sebastien! That looks like a well-thought-out plan.
I know that there's been a lot of energy put towards making Apache CloudStack
an even better project. Here's to continued building from strength to strength
--hats off to all involved! I'll be at ApacheCon and happy to meet up should
you need anything.
Warmly,Sally
From: Sebastien Goasguen <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]
Sent: Monday, 23 March 2015, 10:15
Subject: Thoughts on CloudStack while starting as new VP
Dear members of the CloudStack community,
Last week the Apache Software Foundation board unanimously voted a resolution
to make me the new VP of Apache CloudStack. This came after a unanimous vote of
the CloudStack PMC and is regular process of our community as described in our
bylaws.
I am excited to take on this new role after two amazing VP (Chip and Hugo)
since CloudStack came to the ASF. Many thanks to them and especially Hugo for
the work he has done in the past year.
The ASF is setup so that the governance of a project really belongs to the
community itself. CloudStack is what we all make it to be, we all have equal
footing when time comes to develop the code, create events, take decisions and
so on. As VP I do not have a special say in our direction. This governance
model is in stark contrast with other open source project that follow more of a
benevolent dictator model. I mention this as a bit of disclaimer and to
re-enforce the fact that while I have views about what we should do, they are
my personal views and that they do not represent any sorts of official
roadmaps, and that anyone is welcome to disagree :)
In Budapest, we had a great conference. Chip and I showed several CloudStack
use cases. Our user base is strong with over 300 production deployments. Our
community is large and diverse with 2000 people on the mailing lists, but we
need to keep advocating for CloudStack, make it an even greater software and
grow our community. At the very least this helps us learn from each other,
better our own skills and our employers IT infrastructure. At the very best AWS
switches to CloudStack :)
So here are some food for thoughts that will hopefully excite you, want to get
engage, talk about CloudStack and bring on board your friends:
On the code:
-----------------
- Keep improving quality, remove dead code, cleanup JIRA, cleanup Review Board
We have successfully moved to GitHub pull requests, we should stop using RB
- Simplify the dev process and adopt a new committing system to avoid
regressions at all costs.
We have talked about this for a long time but have failed had doing something
concrete. It is time.
- Remove the AWSAPI (there is a branch without it right now), we should merge
it in master
I am going to push for IP clearance of ec2stack and gstack to get them under
ASF governance.
- Several Cloud Providers have unveiled new CloudStack UI, maybe it’s time we
do the same.
- Solidify the testing infrastructure, keep Jenkins builds running
- Brainstorm on the future of CloudStack and IaaS in general. What should
CloudStack be in 10 years ?
While CloudStack is what it is now, nothing prevents us to re-architect,
re-think, re-code it within the current framework.
- Finally, package the mgt server and the KVM agent as Docker containers
Docker is a great portability mechanism. We should embrace Docker as a
packaging tool (first) and provide container images for our mgt server (at a
minimum).
This could become a type of release artifact that could be easily continuously
built.
On the ecosystem:
-------------------------
We have a really strong ecosystem. From configuration management tools, API
wrappers, PaaS plugins etc.
We need to feature our ecosystem clearly on our website, support it and keep on
growing it as new technologies emerge.
Things that come to mind:
- Push to get our Ansible module into the Ansible core
- Publish “official” chef recipes to deploy CloudStack
- Identify and publish “official” Puppet recipes
- Build Docker native templates (coreOS, rancherOS, Snappy, Atomic)
- Finally cleanup cloud-init support for CloudStack, this is preventing us from
having upstream centOS templates.
- Publish playbooks/recipes to deploy workloads on CloudStack (think Hadoop,
Spark, Kubernetes)
- Work actively on up to date integration with CloudFoundry
On documentation:
-------------------------
I and couple others successfully moved our docs to the Read The Docs service.
This was a first great move but we need to finish the job.
We need to rethink our documentation tree, maybe merge all guides in one,
correct the docs, create a new theme for it.
This is an easy area to contribute to if you are using cloudstack. Just send a
pull request (click on the top right ribbon).
If you don’t know how, then it will teach you how to use github, great exercise.
We also need to routinely build the multi languages support.
On Events:
-------------------------
We have at least four great events coming in 2015. Austin, Seattle, Tokyo and
Dublin.
Let’s meet at one of those events.
Let’s submit a talk or a poster, tell everyone about the great stuff you are
doing with CloudStack.
If you are in a position at your company to sponsor the event, please do, we
need your help to make those great events.
Open Source is about collaboration and sharing, so let’s meet around the globe
from Sao Paulo to Dublin to Tokyo and talk Cloud, DevOps and Docker :)
Finally on the Website:
-------------------------
We can live without a website, but having a good one is a great way to showcase
our community and our work.
The current website is an improvement to what it was before but we need to do
much much better.
I recently did a small experiment and we could use github page. There is now a
gh-pages branch in our repo.
Anyone can actually contribute to that branch and it will rebuild a site
automatically.
If we could find a great web designer in our community, we could rebuild our
site and make it a very modern, polished site that would attract even more
people.
It’s an easy one, it just needs someone to step up and do it.
There is much more to this list, It is almost a brain dump. I figure that if we
could work on those five areas and improve them, even just a bit, our project
would be so much stronger. Some of them are easy, it’s just a question of
sitting down and doing it.
So while I cannot tell you what to do, and cannot assign people to some of
these tasks. I encourage you to look at that list and see if there is an area
or a thought that strikes your mind and excites you. If there is, the only
think I ask is that you send a pull request or at the very least an email to
tell the rest of us what you are doing.
To conclude, we do have a bit of bi-polar syndrome in tech, we need rock solid
software in production but we also want to work on the latest cool
technologies. I think we can do both, and if we can do something that is both
cool and rock solid in prod than we will have that amazing feeling of
accomplishment and doing great work
Let’s keep on making CloudStack great in the coming year and let’s have fun
doing it,
-Sebastien
@sebgoa
