Open Stack

Egle,  thanks for this write up.  We do need to come to a decision on the
questions you've noted.  I added this to the agenda for the November board
meeting to ensure that we come to decision by then.

Thanks,

AlanClark

 

From: Egle Sigler [mailto:ushnishtha at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2019 2:26 PM
To: foundation-board at lists.openstack.org
Cc: Mark T. Voelker <mvoelker at vmware.com>
Subject: [Foundation Board] Upcoming Interop guideline and the future of
OpenStack Interop Guidelines

 

Foundation Board,

 

Thank you for approving the latest interop guideline during the last board
meeting. As I mentioned during the last board meeting, we are going to start
scoring the next guideline to be approved during the November board meeting
and we are looking for volunteers to join the Interop Working Group. The
current process for creating the next guideline requires talking to the
project PTLs and other members of the community to determine if there are
any significant changes to the projects, determining which tempest tests are
associated with these changes, and scoring the changes based on interop core
criteria [1]. After the scoring is complete, we discuss the results in an
IRC meeting and submit patches for updating the guidelines. 

 

If you can help and would like to learn more about the process, please let
me know!

 

During Shanghai board meeting I would like to have a discussion with the
board about the future of the interop program. With help from the community
and some very dedicated people that included Chris Hoge (secretary of
Interop WG, OpenStack Foundation) and Mark Voelker (co-chair of Interop WG,
VMware) I have co-chaired Interop Working Group for almost 5 years. During
this time the Interop guidelines have become stable, with fewer and fewer
changes made in each new guideline. I think that if the board wants to
continue with the guidelines as-is, with twice a year updates (or more if
needed), we will need new volunteers to co-chair Interop WG and help drive
the program. Another option would be to simplify the trademark program so
that it doesn't require so many volunteer hours. If it relied more on
contractual assertions and less on formal technical checks requiring updated
guidelines, it could be directly handled by the foundation.

 

In addition to the guideline maintenance and updates, there is the work
involved in running and maintaining RefStack. RefStack is used to validate
and submit the results, and needs constant maintenance and updates as well.
A more contractual interop program would not require an overhead of
maintaining an additional project. 

 

I believe that Interop guidelines are instrumental in maintaining OpenStack
interoperability, however, I also believe that we need to make the program
easy to maintain and abide by. 

 

As such, I would like to hand over the program as-is to new volunteers from
the board, or simplify the program down to a contract that can be directly
managed by the foundation.. After this next guideline, the board will need
to decide what path the interop guidelines should take. Current process is
strict and requires a lot of volunteer hours. While the program was being
created and growing, we had a lot of community involvement. Once the
guidelines became stable, we had less and less participation. As of last
week, Chris Hoge, a key member of the Interop Working Group, no longer works
for the Foundation and we will no longer be able to count on him doing a lot
of the heavy lifting when it comes to guideline changes.

 

[1]
<https://github.com/openstack/interop/blob/master/doc/source/process/CoreCri
teria.rst>
https://github.com/openstack/interop/blob/master/doc/source/process/CoreCrit
eria.rst


Thank you,

 

Egle Sigler

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