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+Introduction
+============
+
+In the beginning there was Nova. It included volumes, networking,
+hypervisors, and scheduling.  Since then, Nova components have either
+been replaced (nova-network with Neutron) or forklifted out and enhanced
+(Cinder). In so doing, interfaces were defined for how Nova would
+continue to make use of these now-external services, but nova-compute,
+the place where the proverbial rubber meets the road, was left inside
+Nova. This meant that agents for Cinder and Neutron had to interact with
+nova-compute through the high level message bus, despite being right
+on the same physical machine in many (but not all) cases. Likewise,
+some cases take advantage of that, and require operator cooperation in
+configuring for certain drivers.
+
+This has led to implementation details leaking all over the API's that
+these services use to interact. Neutron and Nova do a sort of haphazard
+dance to plug ports in, and Cinder has drivers which require locking files
+on the local filesystem a certain way. These implementation details are
+leaking into public API's because it turns out nova-compute is actually
+a shared service that should not belong to any of the three services,
+and which should define a more clear API which Nova, Cinder, and Neutron,
+should be able to use to access the physical resources of machines from
+an equal footing.
+
+proposed next steps
+===================
+
+ * Produce an accurate analysis on the current state of nova-compute's
+   interaction with other OpenStack services.
+
+ * Produce a cross-project spec for moving nova-compute out of Nova
+   and defining an API for it that meets the needs of all other projects.