Open Stack

Excerpts from Mark McLoughlin's message of 2016-11-21 22:49:09 +0000:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 6:42 PM, Jonathan Bryce <jonathan at openstack.org> wrote:
> > Last Thursday, the Board of Directors had a teleconference meeting. The
> > agenda was posted online
> > https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/17Nov2016BoardMeeting
> >
> > The first portion of the meeting was an executive session to finish
> > discussing the Gold Member applications that were unable to be reviewed at
> > the meeting before Barcelona. After the executive session ended, the Board
> > voted in open session to add 3 additional Gold Members, all global companies
> > based in China: China Telecom, ZTE and Inspur. The addition of these 3
> > companies fills up all available Gold Member spots. Some directors expressed
> > an interest in expanding the number of available slots. If you are
> > interested in participating in that discussion, Shane Wang started a
> > discussion thread on the Foundation mailing list on the topic.
> >
> > Next the User Committee gave an update on the work they have been doing to
> > create elected positions voted on by AUC members. They expect to present
> > again at the December Board meeting.
> >
> > Finally, the Board used the remaining time to talk about several strategic
> > issues impacting OpenStack. Toby Ford started the discussion off with some
> > thoughts on items that he sees as a large OpenStack operator around scaling
> > OpenStack environments up and down, and also additional technology options
> > that will be important in the future. The discussion was very lively and
> > something that clearly needed more time and effort to cover. Board members
> > agreed to start to document and collect their thoughts and to revisit the
> > topic again in upcoming Board meetings.
> 
> Thanks, Jonathan. I've posted my own informal recollection of the meeting here:
> 
> https://crustyblaa.com/november-17-openstack-foundation-board-meeting.html
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark.
> 

Regarding competition in the big tent, it has always been my
impression that competition is supported.  We want to avoid
"gratuitous" competition, because we don't want to become a host
for a zillion single-vendor implementations of things that people
should collaborate to build a shared version of, but that just means
replacing an existing service needs to involve a discussion of why
the replacement is somehow superior and that those projects might
have to do a little more work to prove themselves than wholly new
projects would.

Those rules are actually much more relaxed than before we moved to
the big tent model, since we no longer designate a team as owning
a given problem domain.  For example, we have several projects that
compete in the metering and metrics space already.

Competing at something like the hypervisor management layer to
"replace" nova will be a harder sell, because of the way other
services tend to be tied to it -- it's more disruptive to replace
something at the center than around the edges.  Frankly, the way
Ciao was presented to the community did not win over a lot of
supporters, but that's not to say that no competition would be
supported at all. The first two questions I would personally want
answered are about the upgrade path for existing deployment (see
the nova-net/neutron discussion) and whether feature parity and API
compatibility are goals (see DefCore).

Doug