Merge "Add scas as Chef OpenStack PTL candidate"

candidates/stein/Chef_OpenStack/s@cassiba.com

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+Howdy!
+
+I am submitting my name to continue as PTL for Chef OpenStack. If you
+don't know me, I am scas on Freenode. I work for Workday, where I am an
+active operator and upstream developer. I have contributed to OpenStack
+since 2014, and joined the core team in early 2015. Since then, I have
+served as PTL for four cycles. I am also an active member of the
+Sous-Chefs organization, which fosters maintainership of community Chef
+cookbooks that could no longer be maintained by their author(s). My life
+as a triple threat, as well as being largely in the deploy automation
+space, gives me a unique perspective on the use cases for Chef
+OpenStack.
+
+Development continues to run about a release behind the coordinated
+release to stabilize due to contributor availability. In that time,
+overall testing has improved to raise the overall testing confidence in
+landing more aggressive changes. Local testing infrastructure tends to
+run closer to trunk to keep a pulse on how upstream changes will affect
+the cookbooks closer to review time. This, in turn, influences the
+changes that do pass the sniff test.
+
+For Stein, I would like to focus on some of the efforts started during
+Rocky.
+
+* Awareness and Community
+
+  Chef OpenStack is extremely powerful and flexible, but it is not easy
+  for new contributors to get involved. That is, if they can find it,
+  down the dark alley, through the barber shop, and behind the door with
+  a secret knock. Documentation has been a handful of terse Markdown
+  docs and READMEs that do not evolve as fast as the code, which I think
+  impacts visibility and artificially creates a barrier to entry. I
+  would like to place more emphasis on providing this more well-lit
+  entry point for new and existing users alike.
+
+* Consistency and HA
+
+  Stability is never a given, but it is pretty close with Chef
+  OpenStack. Each change runs through multiple, iterative tests before
+  it hits Gerrit. However, not every change runs through those same
+  tests in the gate due to the gap between local and integration. This
+  natural gap has resulted in multiple chef-client versions and
+  OpenStack configurations testing each change.  There have existed HA
+  primitives in the cookbooks for years, but there are no published
+  working examples. I am aiming to continue this effort to further
+  reducing the human element in executing the tests.
+
+* Continued work on containerization
+
+  With efforts to deploy OpenStack in the context of containers, Chef
+  OpenStack has not shared in the fanfare. I shipped a very shaky dokken
+  support out of a hack day at the 2017 Chef Community Summit in
+  Seattle, and have refined it over time to where it's consistently
+  Doing A Thing. I have found regressions upstream (e.g. packaging), and
+  have conservatively implemented workarounds to coax things into
+  submission when the actual fix would take more months to land.  I wish
+  to continue that effort, and expand to other Ansible-based and
+  Kitchen-based integration scenarios to provide examples of how to get
+  to OpenStack using Chef.
+
+These are but some of my personal goals and aspirations. I hope to be
+able to make progress on them all, but reality may temper those
+aspirations.
+
+I would love to connect with more new users and contributors. You can
+reach out to me directly, or find me in #openstack-chef.
+
+Thanks!
+
+-scas