Hi everyone,

I'm announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical Committee.
For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm Feilong Wang, currently
working for Catalyst Cloud as a development lead. Catalyst Cloud is a public
cloud running on OpenStack based in New Zealand. Aslo, I've been serving as the
PTL of Zaqar (OpenStack Messaging Service) for 5 cycles. Before that, I was
mainly working for Glance (OpenStack Image Service) as a core reviewer since
Folsom 2012.

Currently the role of the TC is more important than ever. Some large companies
are downsizing their investment for OpenStack or switching their focus
to containers/k8s, but meanwhile many companies from APAC, especially China,
are heavily investing OpenStack. Although it's a pain to lose great
contributors, the companies having real requirements for OpenStack are kept.
It's a good time for us to think about how to define OpenStack, for whom we're
building the software and how to build a collaborative/integrated community.

As a TC member I want to bring focus in below areas:

#1 Users & Operators

Listen closely to the voice of users and operators and this pretty much align
with the mission of OpenStack as below.

"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."

To implement a useful, stable cloud platform, we can't work behind closed
doors, but closely work with the user and operator community. As far as I know,
except the user survey, we don't have more formal process/approach to collect
the feedback from our users and operators, though the operators mailing list
and some random forum sessions at OpenStack summit are helpful. And IMHO,
currently we’re mixing feedback collected from different perspectives. For
example, most of the feedback from operators are how to easily deploy/manage
the cloud. But the tenant user/developers' requirements are more related to
functions, UX, etc. I can see we have put a lot of effort to address the pain
of operators, but obviously, we do also need more work to make the tenant
users/developer’s life easier.

#2 Core and Ecosystem, Big Tent and Constellation

As the PTL of Zaqar, an official but not core project, I'm keen to help the
evolution at this area. From stackforge to big tent to constellation, we're
continuing to explore different approaches to embrace the challenge. So far,
we have generally got some positive responses for the idea of constellation,
but we do need more details to shape it. And I’m happy to raise my hand.
Personally, I’d like to see a focal point/TC member is assigned for each
important use-case/constellation, who will be responsible for driving the
collaboration and integration for that user case.

#3 Diversity and Inclusion

Though OpenStack is a community with good diversity and inclusion, we do still
need some work at this area given there are more and more contributors from
different countries with different languages and cultures. As a Chinese living
in New Zealand, I truly understand the pain of crossing/removing the language
and culture barrier. I have been working with world wide contributors for the
past 5 years, so I believe I can help at this area by sharing/documenting my
experience and drive some activities to bridge the different languages and
cultures.

#4 Integration and Collaboration

As a distributed cloud platform, it's good to decouple different services to
make each service do one thing well. However, seems most of projects are solely
focusing on their own offering and not enough projects are paying attention to
the global impact. I would like to push a more tighter collaboration between
projects and obviously it will make the integration more easier and efficient.
Operators should expect different projects can work together smoothly just like
they're different parts within one project. As a maintainer of a public cloud
running on OpenStack, I know the pain of our ops, when they try to migrate a
service or adding a new service in existing cluster. So I'd like to see more
interlocks between PTL and TC members to understand the gaps and fill the gaps.


It would be an honor to be member of your technical committee. Thanks for your
consideration!

--
Feilong Wang