Fellow Stackers,

I just served a term as Manila PTL for Rocky and am writing to say
that if you choose me I'd like to also take on that role for the
Stein release cycle.

I think I've learned the mechanics now and can focus more energy on
priorities.

Today manila itself is pretty solid.  It doesn't need lots of new
features.  Back end vendors always want to expose new bells and whistles,
and that's fine if they help with the review load and contribute to the
community.  Reciprocity makes the world go around.

But I see the adoption curve for manila just now ramping up and my own
focus will be to enable that by working harden manila, and make it
easier to use, both within and outside of openstack itself.

Manila offers self-service file-shares -- RWX, random access storage
-- and abstracts over a variety of file-systems and sharing protocols.

Manila doesn't care whether the consumers of the file systems live
within openstack, it's just a matter of network reachability and the
access rights that manila manages.

Besides being able to run as one part of a full openstack deployment,
manila can run on its own, with keystone to enable multi-tenancy, or
completely standalone.

So I see manila as a true Open Infrastructure project.  It can turn a
rack of unconfigured equipment into self-service shared file systems
without limiting itself to the (very important) Virtual Private Server
use case [1].

I will, accordingly, work to position manila as *the* open source
solution for deploying RWX random access storage across data centers
and across clouds.  To that end we need to:

 * get manila into generalized cloud providers like CSI [2]

 * get manila into the openstack sdk and openstack client

 * get more of the almost thirty manila back ends exposed in
   production-quality deployment tools like tripleo, kolla-*,
   and juju.

 * continue to fix bugs, improve our CI, run more stuff in gate with
   python 3

These are the things that will drive me if you choose me as manila PTL.

Thanks for listening,

-- Tom Barron (tbarron)

[1] https://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2018/07/17#openstack-layer-model-limitations

[2] https://github.com/container-storage-interface/spec/blob/master/spec.md