Day Two of the OpenStack Product Management Kilo Midcycle

Details https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-product-management-midcycle

Neutron is a critical OpenStack project. Any major changes can make or break a business relying on OpenStack networking. To start off day two, Gary Kotton ran down the details of  a major change, the Neutron service split. Due to lengthly patch review / merge cycles along with inconsistent vendor contributions, the Neutron vendor plugins were moved to the github Stackforge organization repositories from the github OpenStack Neutron repository. This will make the OpenStack Neutron project tighter around code contributions. This change also has the side effect of making CI testing more complicated and lengthening bug tracing. We included this talk, not to debate the right or wrong of the change, rather to inform the broader community. If your OpenStack company is not aware of the Neutron service split and it’s impact on your company, then you better know quickly.

We had no shortage of ideas and possible directions for this group to go. Allison Price, Stefano Maffulli, and myself (Rob Hirschfeld was close by, but unavailable for this part of the day) ran down different ways of going forward.

simple openstack organization layout
Simple OpenStack Organization Layout

We settled on the basics. Identifying the gap this group seeks to fill. It’s the space between the Customers and the Contributors. So what can we do that is actionable in this space?

Leaving out some of the sausage making, we decided that a Multi-Release Roadmap is what Customers and Contributors need here. It’s the gap. So to fill this gap with least amount of OpenStack project disruption while providing goodness we divided ourselves into three groups.

The first group will listen to OpenStack project pain points and priorities from each project cores and lead. The focus is only listen at this point and gather what the projects need. We are calling this the Socialization Effort. The results will be presented at the Vancouver summit. This group has an etherpad here https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-product-management-socialization.

The second group will define a roadmap process. Much like the DefCore work, this is a very early effort. The roadmap process will require a lot of feedback and socialization before it is considered complete.

Early Version of the Release Roadmap
Early Version of the Release Roadmap

The Win the Enterprise group has been very successful in gathering user stories. Each of the user stories have one or more features. There are many verticals like Enterprise, Telecommunications, or Cloud Service Providers that need to support features that are missing from OpenStack. Through the community a feature or two is selected to serve the needs of one or more verticals like scalability in the image above. Blueprints would be the result to implement the features. The feature implementation would be tracked over many OpenStack releases.  Coordination with the many OpenStack partner companies on priority user stories and their features will be critical for getting developer support. We want to include personas and some other ideas into this process, so expect refinements by the Vancouver Summit.

Not to jump the gun, BUT Shamail Tahir came up with an excellent first features idea. The OpenStack Mission is “to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.” Would it not be a good idea to make “simple to implement” and “massively scalable” happen?

The third group will focus on cross project communication. Devananda van der Veen talked us through how we can make this work. The efforts with the other two groups above will need to be communicated using OpenStack developer friendly methods like cross project specs https://github.com/openstack/openstack-specs/blob/master/doc/source/index.rst.  This group has an etherpad here https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-product-management-task-cross-project.

Our next steps will be to discuss group progress on the OpenStack Product Management mailing list, hold a monthly IRC meeting https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings#OpenStack_Product_Management_Meeting, a few of us will meet at the Philadelphia Ops Midcycle, and we will present two summit talks.

We want to move OpenStack forward with the smallest amount of change possible. I believe our plans above have a good chance of success. Let me and the broader group know what you think.

Author: sarob

1 thought on “Day Two of the OpenStack Product Management Kilo Midcycle

Comments are closed.