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'Help most needed' list
This document lists at most 5 areas where the OpenStack Technical Committee seeks contributions to significantly help OpenStack as a whole. While in most cases things happen naturally through the normal contribution dynamics in the community, in some cases a tragedy of the commons is at play. Guidance, leadership and proper recognition of efforts is therefore needed to encourage individuals or organizations to contribute in areas where they could make a big impact.
Each item should clearly explain why the item matters (value of the effort to the community, operators and users), why we need help there (description of the current situation) and what experience or benefit the volunteer can expect to gain from tackling it. It should also include the name of a TC sponsor (responsible for evangelizing, articulating and channelling the work, but also facilitating connections between candidates and target teams). For an estimate of the commitment required, interested candidates should reach out to the TC sponsor, or the PTL of the affected project.
Intended Audiences
This document was written with at least two audiences in mind.
The first audience consists of contributors who would be working on the items listed here. Each item should provide a descriptive summary that helps developers grasp the overall problem and possibly how to solve it or contribute.
The second audience is corporate or business sponsors. Ultimately, this audience consists of people who have the ability to delegate resources to work on various initiatives. The description of each item should justify why the item is on the list. Descriptions should refrain from being overly technical. Additionally, business sponsors will find the "Value" section beneficial because it describes how investing resources helps reduce maintenance cost, increase interoperability, provide stability, or deliver value to your customers. Essentially, this section should help businesses understand what they are getting out of the investment.
Both audiences will find the contact information supplied with each item useful for connecting with the right group of people to get resources up-to-speed.
1. Documentation owners
Description
The #1 pain point in OpenStack, for contributors and users alike, is complexity. While cutting down complexity everywhere we can is critical; proper documentation is essential in addressing that complexity. It directly benefits operators and users of OpenStack, but also facilitates ramping up new direct contributors to the project itself.
The documentation team has been struggling with limited resources since the dawn of OpenStack, despite the heroic efforts of previous team members. The community outlined an ambitious plan to decentralize the Documentation team, turning it into a guidance and mentoring support team. To be successful, project teams need to own their documentation, which means that the role of documentation owners will be critical.
Volunteers for this role will drive this ambitious transition, by being members of their project team and members of the new decentralized documentation team. On the long-term, they will become a reference go-to person in their project, and respected mentors in the OpenStack community.
Value
Increased Operational Efficiency
Documentation naturally disseminates knowledge, but it should also be easy for readers to find what they are looking for. This process reduces bottlenecks on human resources and support by allowing users, operators, and contributors to find answers to questions themselves. Less time spent answering common questions means more time focusing on more complicated requests, maintenance, and code.
Faster Onboarding
Contributors come from all different backgrounds and experiences. As a result, they often share similar questions about high-level concepts or processes used within the OpenStack community or components. Consistently documenting processes enables contributors without requiring them to pull tribal knowledge from an existing developer. This documentation fast-tracks contributors to making productive contributions.
Consistency
Users, customers, and operators are required to reference a vast pool of documentation spread across multiple repositories and sites. Implementing consistency in wording, format, content, and location provides readers with a first-class experience. Additionally, users build confidence and trust in software when it is well documented.
Contact
For questions about getting involved with this initiative, reach out to the OpenStack Discuss mailing list. You may also contact the Documentation PTL or the Technical Committee sponsor for this item (dhellmann).
2. Community Infrastructure Sysadmins
Description
The project-infrastructure team is responsible for
designing, building and maintaining the systems that are used in the day
to day operation of the OpenStack project as a whole; this includes
development, testing, and collaboration tools. All of the software it
runs is open source, and under public configuration management so that
everyone in the community has the opportunity to participate. One very
effective way to get involved in OpenStack, gaining a deep understanding
of and visibility within the community, is by helping operate this
infrastructure. Attrition due to shifts in employment or availability of
personal time impacts the team's ability to support the community
effectively, and so there is a constant need for new contributors who
can commit to investing sufficient effort to overcome the steep learning
curve associated with these varied technologies.
Because our community is global, its support needs span most timezones. Unfortunately, the bulk of long-term contributors to Infrastructure are concentrated in the Americas and so this leaves APAC and EMEA community members with far fewer options for immediate assistance with urgent issues. Gaining more contributors who are active during those times (whether they live in those parts of the World or not) would provide a substantial benefit to the community. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds because it's harder to get as much overlap with the current bulk of the team for shadowing and knowledge transfer, but there are still some existing team members in those timezones who can help mitigate that somewhat.
In particular, the team seeks developers and systems administrators with a background both in maintaining Unix/Linux servers and free software, and places heavy emphasis on systems automation and configuration management (primarily Ansible and Puppet at the moment). Everything possible goes through code review, and gets extensively documented and communicated with the rest of the community over IRC and mailing lists. Server resources are donated by companies operating OpenStack services so there is substantial opportunity both for people who have experience in those technologies as well as anyone wishing to gain more familiarity with them.
Value
Reusability
The infrastructure team leverages resources donated from companies operating OpenStack services. The community uses the software it produces as a tool for testing it. Every day, contributors submit thousands of patches for review. Infrastructure tools deploy each patch and test it against thousands of tests and scenarios. This volume provides an opportunity to improve the software we write by giving us first-hand experience with issues at scale. The benefit of fixing these issues for the OpenStack CI system is two-fold:
- It makes the test platform more stable and robust
- Products or services benefits from the fix being applied upstream
Don't Repeat Yourself or Your Testing (DRY)
The culture built around extensive testing in OpenStack makes it easier for us to trust patches proposed for review. We've integrated this culture into our review process. Duplicating a social and technical CI system of this size takes incredible amounts of time, people, and patience. Bolstering the CI system we already have in place allows you to focus on testing that is specific to your product or service.
Immediate Feedback
The OpenStack CI system is the backbone of feedback for contributors and operators. Users get this feedback early, ideally before the patch lands. Ensuring early feedback through a robust CI system and testing means fewer surprises down the road when you attempt to integrate your product into a new release or deploy a new version of a service.
Contact
Join the #openstack-infra channel on the Freenode IRC network or reach out through the openstack-infra mailing lists on lists.openstack.org if you would like to get involved. It’s a rewarding chance to learn and help others, but most of all it’s fun! The Technical Committee sponsor for this initiative is Jeremy Stanley (fungi).
3. Designate Contributors
Description
Designate is a service that manages DNS Zones and Recordsets. It supports multiple DNS Servers, and DNS Service Providers, making it vital for any network or web-based application.
They need contributors to help find and fix bugs, develop new features, and help maintain the quality of the project, including cross-project initiatives. Designate is quite stable, with any new features requiring long term planning, design, and phased implementation.
Designate welcomes everyone, from someone starting in the community to senior contributors who want new, interesting problems to tackle. Contributors will get to work on a project that will be a central part of any OpenStack deployment and work on a project that needs to scale from a small single node install to a system controlling DNS servers worldwide.
Value
Flexibility
DNS is fundamental in gracefully directing users and applications to services. It allows the flexibility to replace underlying hardware while presenting consumers with a consistent endpoint. Designate provides this flexibility to operators and end users.
Designate supports a wide range of drivers for various DNS servers and providers, which allows deployers to integrate Designate into pre-existing DNS infrastructures.
Self-Service
Self-serviceability is a core tenet of OpenStack technical vision. Designate helps OpenStack clouds adhere to that principle by exposing DNS functionality directly to end-users. Designate allows cloud operators to delegate the control of DNS zones to end users, to avoid complex ticket based workflows for DNS updates.
User Experience
When end users are building applications in a cloud native way, relying on external tooling to provision DNS entries adds complexity. With the advancement of IPv6, services required to have DNS entries, to avoid application user confusion.
Designate adds an important part of the value add for cloud infrastructure, and ensures that OpenStack has feature parity with other cloud providers.
Integrations
Designate integrates with many other tools to allow for zero touch management of DNS Zones and Records. The integration with neutron allows admins to have PTR records (for reverse DNS lookups) managed for Floating IP ranges, without giving direct privileged access to the reverse zone to users.
Tools like letsencrypt certbot allow for auto provisioning of SSL certs using DNS-01 validation, while tools like Heat, Terraform and Ansible allow for the provisioning of DNS Zones and Records to be integrated into pre-existing workflows for applications.
Kubernetes external-dns support adds simple annotation based DNS management for applications running in kubernetes clusters with load balancers or ingress support.
Consistency
The OpenStack community continues to evolve, and this evolution requires large cross-project initiatives. Furthermore, users and operators expect consistency across the OpenStack platform. Examples from recent history include OpenStack-wide support for Python 3 and easing operator pain by moving policy configuration into code. Ensuring Designate stays up-to-date with these initiatives is imperative in reducing operational costs, complexity, and user frustration.
Contact
If you are interested, please join #openstack-dns on Freenode or contact the Designate PTL (Graham Hayes - mugsie), the Technical Committee sponsor (TBD). You may also email the openstack discuss mailing list with the tag [designate] in the subject.
4. Glance Contributors
Description
Glance is a service to manage disk images for OpenStack clouds. It was one of the first projects developed in the OpenStack ecosystem. Nearly every OpenStack deployment contains a Glance service. Without Glance, Nova cannot create servers.
Glance is looking for new contributors who would be willing to provide reviews, to work on bugs, or to work on new features. Glance has welcomed interns, junior developers, and more senior developers. In every case, it is a great way to grow and contribute to OpenStack.
Value
Maintenance Costs
Glance is a critical service in OpenStack. Contributions to the future of the image registry are essential to the stability of OpenStack. More importantly, Glance is not feature-complete. There is significant technical debt that needs to be taken care of and several features to implement.
Consistency
The OpenStack community continues to evolve, and this evolution requires large cross-project initiatives. Furthermore, users and operators expect consistency across the OpenStack platform. Examples from recent history include OpenStack-wide support for Python 3 and easing operator pain by moving policy configuration into code. Ensuring Glance stays up-to-date with these initiatives is imperative in reducing operational costs, complexity, and user frustration.
Contact
Interested? Join the Glance IRC channel (#openstack-glance) or reach out to the OpenStack discuss mailing list using the [glance] tag.
5. Goal Champions
Description
As OpenStack matures, large initiatives linger that affect the
community as a whole. Like with any large body of work, someone needs to
step up and coordinate the group, keep track of progress, call for and
chair regular meetings, and publish status updates. PTLs do this work
for project teams, leaders do it for various cross-project working
groups and SIGs, and champions do it to help us complete release-cycle-goals over a
cycle. Additionally, efficient coordination is one of the most
productive ways to get things done, especially in large communities.
The work of those champions is essential to the success of OpenStack, and yet it is often challenging to find volunteers for those positions. Contributing as a goal champion takes time (several hours per week), and that commitment needs to be properly recognized and celebrated.
Volunteers for this role will make a direct impact on the productivity of others, become respected leaders in OpenStack community, build influence among their peers, and make great candidates for future elected leadership positions in OpenStack.
Value
Opportunity for Influence
As a sponsor or partial sponsor of a community-wide initiative, you have the opportunity to influence the decision-making process. This influence is particularly true if you have existing workarounds or have attempted alternative solutions, both of which are essential perspectives to have in the goal selection process.
Early Adoption
By sponsoring a community goal champion, you have someone in-house to answer questions about the ongoing work and decision making process upstream. This can be an excellent resource in minimizing disruption to downstream products and services, especially tracking a large piece of work across services and projects.
Contact
If you are interested in helping with community goals, contact the Technical Committee sponsor for this item (dhellmann).