Lessons and outcomes from the Hong-Kong summit

Just back from an amazing week at the OpenStack Summit in Hong-Kong, I would like to share a number of discussions we had (mainly on the release management track) and mention a few things I learned there.

First of all, Hong-Kong is a unique city. Skyscrapers built on vertiginous slopes, crazy population density, awesome restaurants, shops everywhere... Everything is clean and convenient (think: Octopus cards), even as it grows extremely fast. Everyone should go there at least one time in their lives !

On the Icehouse Design Summit side,the collaboration magic happened again. I should be used to it by now, but it is still amazing to build this level playing field for open design, fill it with smart people and see them make so much progress over 4 days. We can still improve, though: for example I'll make sure we get whiteboards in every room for the next time :). As was mentioned in the feedback session, we are considering staggering the design summit and the conference (to let technical people participate to the latter), set time aside to discuss cross-project issues, and set up per-project space so that collaboration can continue even if there is no scheduled "session" going on.

I have been mostly involved in release management sessions. We discussed the Icehouse release schedule, with a proposed release date of April 17, and the possibility to have a pre-designated "off" week between release and the J design summit. We discussed changes in the format of the weekly project/release status meeting, where we should move per-project status updates off-meeting to be able to focus on cross-project issues instead. During this cycle we should also work on streamlining library release announcements. For stable branch maintenance, we decided to officially drop support for version n-2 by feature freeze (rather than at release time), which reflects more accurately what ended up being done during the past cycles. The security support is now aligned to stable branch support, which should make sure the vulnerability management team (VMT) doesn't end up having to maintain old stable branches that are already abandoned by the stable branch maintainers. Finally, the VMT should review the projects from all official programs to come up with a clear list of what projects are actually security-supported and which aren't.

Apart from the release management program, I'm involved in two pet projects: Rootwrap and StoryBoard. Rootwrap should be split from the oslo-incubator into its own package early in the Icehouse cycle, and its usage in Nova, Cinder and Neutron should be reviewed to result in incremental strengthening. StoryBoard (our next-generation task tracker) generated a lot of interest at the summit, I expect a lot of progress will be made in the near future. Its architecture might be overhauled from the current POC, so stay tuned.

Finally, it was great meeting everyone again. Our PTLs and Technical Committee members are a bunch of awesome folks, this open source project is in great hands. More generally, it seems that we not only designed a new way of building software, we also created a network of individuals and companies interested in that kind of open collaboration. That network explains why it is so easy for people to jump from one company to another, while continuing to do the exact same work for the OpenStack project itself. And for developers, I think it's a great place to be in: if you haven't already, you should definitely consider joining us.