election/candidates/mitaka/Neutron/Armando_Migliaccio.txt
armando-migliaccio 7ce312b53e Adding Armando Migliaccio candidacy for Neutron
Change-Id: I6a2d07bcc457efcab537087dbf9c40427ca5f342
2015-09-15 12:05:41 -07:00

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I would like to propose my candidacy for the Neutron PTL.
If you are reading this and you know me, then you probably know what I
have been up to up until now, what I have done for the project, and what
I may continue to do. If you do not know me, and you are still interested
in reading, then I will try not bore you.
As member of this project, I have been involved with it since the early
days, and I have served as core developer since Havana. If you are wondering
whether I am partially to blame for the issues that affect Neutron, well you
may have a point, but keep reading...
I believe that Neutron itself is a unique project and as such has unique
challenges. We have grown tremendously mostly propelled by a highly opinionated
vendor perspective. This has caused us some problems and we set foot a cycle
or so ago to fix these, but at the same time stay true to the nature of our
mission: define logical abstractions, and related implementations to
provide on-demand, cloud oriented networking services.
As any other project in OpenStack, we are software and we mostly implement
'stuff' in software, and because of that we are prone to all the issues that
a software project may have. To this aim, going forward I would like us to
improve the following:
* Stability is the priority: new features are important, but complete and well
tested existing features are more important; we gotta figure out a way to
bring the number of bugs down to a manageable number, just like nations
are asked to keep their sovereign debt below a certain healthy threshold.
* Narrow the focus: now that the Neutron 'stadium' is here with us, external
plugins and drivers can integrate with Neutron in a losely manner, giving the
core the opportunity to be more razor focus at getting better at what we do:
logical abstractions and pluggability.
* Consistency is paramount: having grown the review team drastically over the
past cycle, it is easy to skew quality in one area over an other. We need to
start defining common development and reviewer practices so that, even though
we deal are made of many sub-projects and modules, we operate, feel and look
like one...just like OpenStack :)
* Define long term strategy: we need to have an idea where Neutron starts and
where Neutron ends. At some point, this project will reach enough maturity
where we feel like we are 'done' and that's okay. Some of us will move on to
the next big thing.
* Keep developers and reviewers _aware_: we all have to work collectively towards
a common set of goals, defined by the release cycle. We will have to learn to
push back on _random_ forces that keep distracting us.
* I would like to promote a 'you merge it, you own it' type of mentality: even
though we are pretty good at it already, we need a better balance between
reviews and contributions. If you bless a patch, you got to be prepared to
dive into the issues that it may potentially causes. If you bless a patch, you
got to be prepared to improve the code around it, and so on. You will be a
better reviewer if you learn to live with the pain of your mistakes. This
is he only way to establish a virtuous cycle where quality improves time
over time.
And last but not least:
* Improve the relationships with other projects: Nova and QA primarily. We
should allocate enough bandwidth to address integration issues with Nova and
the other emerging projects, so that we stay plugged with them. QA is also
paramount so that no-one is gonna hate us because we send the gate belly up.
As for nova-network, I must admit I am highly skeptical by now: if our
community were a commercial enterprise trying to solve that problem we would
have ran out of money long time ago.
We tried time and time again to crack this nut open, and even though we made
progress in a number of areas, we haven't really budged where some people
felt it mattered. We need to recognize that the problem is not just technical
...it is social; no-one, starting from the developers and the employers behind
them, seems to be genuinely concerned with the need of making nova-network a
thing of the past. They have other priorities, they are chasing new customers,
they want to disrupt Amazon. None of this nova-network deprecation drama fits
with their agendas and furthermore, even if we found non-corporate sponsored
developers willing to work on it, let's face it migration is a problem that
is really not that interesting to solve. So where do we go from here?
I do not have a clear answer yet. However, I think we all agree that the
Neutron team wants to make Neutron a better product, more aligned with the
needs of our users, but we must recognized that _better_ does not mean *like*
nova-network, because the two products are not the same and they never will be.
Ok, now that you read this, you are ready to know whether you may want to
vote for me. Having said that, if you think that I am doing a fine job as core
reviewer, you trust my technical in-depth contribution, and you're worried
that my PTL duties may take that away from you...exercise your vote right!
Thanks for reading and forgive the typos!
Armando Migliaccio (aka armax)