Thanks for the response, Andrew! Some replies inline.
On 02/03/2017 06:47 PM, UKASICK, ANDREW wrote:
Hi Jay
It seems like I blinked and 10 more emails flew by since last night.
;-)
No worries, happens all the time :)
One of the difficulties for people like myself, and I think most of
the LCOO participants are like me, is that I have full-time internal
commitments with my employer that significantly limit the amount of
time I can spend on things like Community email list. Frankly, that's
at the heart of why we've been having conference calls when we
meeting and using Slack. We're just not able to be in IRC rooms
through the day like the people we have committed to full-time
community development work can.
Completely understand. That said, the advantage of IRC channels is that
they're logged and recorded automatically if managed under the OpenStack
infrastructure and therefore give you the benefit of auto-recording and
publishing the meeting minutes.
However, I do understand it can sometimes be difficult to follow IRC
conversations with lots of participants. Definitely has trade-offs.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Pipes [mailto:jaypi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2017 11:32 AM
To: UKASICK, ANDREW <au3...@att.com> >; Edgar Magana <edgar.mag...@workday.com>
>; openstack-operators@lists.openstack.org; user-commit...@lists.openstack.org
Cc: MCCABE, JAMEY A <jm6...@att.com> >
Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [openstack-dev] Large Contributing OpenStack
Operators working group?
Hi Andy, thanks very much for your response. I appreciate it. Comments and
questions inline.
On 02/02/2017 09:44 PM, UKASICK, ANDREW wrote:
Hi Jay.
It's already getting late here and I still have to do my farm chores
but I want to acknowledge your request. I think you've developed quite
a wrong impression of things and clearly some of that is on us because
in the early stages of forming the LCOO working group, we were all
still trying to find our feet and in an effort to just get started, we
wrote some things that in hind sight we would probably change today.
Our group has been maturing and evolving as we have been discussing
our shared purpose and also as a result of our collaboration with
other working groups. The UC, EWG and PWG are all represented in LCOO
and vice versa.
That is comforting to hear, thank you Andy. I am still curious what the LCOO's
purpose is, though, in relation to those working groups and committees. Please
forgive me for being thick-headed! I just don't understand whether the LCOO is
intended to be a driver of contribution
*within* those existing working groups, or whether the LCOO is intended to be a
*separate* driver of contribution that would pick efforts/blueprints/use cases
from those existing working groups and have contributors work on those? Or is
the idea to have LCOO be a sort of aggregator of use cases for Telcos and
operate more as a status and roadmap tracking body? Or something else entirely?
Frankly, that's what we've been asking ourselves too from our first meeting. We had a
"vision" of sorts, but none of us really knew if it was the right vision or how
to make it work. At first we spent a lot of time just getting to know each other,
sharing information, etc. One thing we definitely are is a forum in which large
operators can discuss their challenges and share helpful information. For example,
nearly all members are on old OpenStack releases like Juno, Kilo (or older). Upgrading
is a HUGE pain point. New releases bring major improvements but we can't get to those
releases. How do I deal with a challenge in Kilo is a different kind of discussion that
how do I drive a desired enhancement in Pike or Queens. Most of us are not in purely
technical roles in our companies. Many of us would perhaps better be described as product
managers and also bring more of a business perspective.
But we wanted the group to do more. We did not want to just be self-serving. We wanted to make a
real contribution to the Community. We've only been meeting for an hour (sometimes 2) a week so it
has taken a few months for this to play out but I think we're finding our niche. We've been
developing a close relationship with the Product Working Group and our LCOO group seems to be a
great fit for helping to make their "Story Process" successful. Some of the Members like
NTT and Intel have already been doing that. I guess the rest of us are finally catching up.
Obviously, we need to take on "Stories" that resonate with the business needs of our
various companies because without that we would not be able to draw out the technical resources to
drive it. But that said, there are a lot of pain points and no shortage of business needs. I don't
think anyone really cares where a need originally surfaced in the community or by whom. We have
limited resources, but if the Story needs an owner and we have the means to take it on, it's a
candidate. Beyond that it's a matter of prioritizing. We're only going to be discussing the first
such story next week. It's all still evolving.
OK, that's interesting. Do you envision the LCOO essentially being a
"sponsorship group" and that the Product Working Group (and other
working groups like LDT, Telco/NFV WG, Enterprise WG, etc) being the
groups that create the specs and "sell" the use cases/ideas? In other
words, LCOO would be more of a group that gets together and agrees on a
set of higher-level objectives for telcos and works with the business
internal stakeholders to identify resources the company is willing to
contribute to a particular effort. But the spec-writing and use case
fleshing-out would still be done by the existing working groups?
Much of what you mention from the
Confluence site, which we've only been using for about a month, is I
think also being taken out of context. You called it "closed" but just
as you were able to quickly and easily create an account, get access,
and browse around, so can anyone else.
Sorry, when I said "closed" I meant that Atlassian products are not
open-source. Atlassian owns the code and owns the content, which is why OpenStack teams
don't use Jira and Confluence for work tracking.
AH! I misunderstood. You're right that Atlassian is not open-source, but let
me say this for them, they're about as close as you can get and still be
commercial. It doesn't seem to be well known, but Atlassian has long (always?)
made their products available for free to open-source projects.
I actually don't equate open source with "no cost" :) A closed platform
is one which cannot be modified by the customer, which is something that
is important to our community. That said, hey I'm definitely familiar
with Jira and other Atlassian products. Mirantis uses them every day. I
just brought up point about being a closed platform because of the LCOO
wiki page's assertion about aligning with the OpenStack Foundation. Hope
that's clear.
> That's probably why they're so widely used. They also give you a copy
of the complete source code and license to modify it without breaking
your support.
Oh? I was not aware of that. This would certainly change my mind about
using Atlassian products...
> Furthermore JIRA, Confluence, etc, are built with a plugin
architecture that works so well that they have their own app store (the
Atlassian marketplace). It works like the apps for your phone. Anyone
can develop extensions and give them away for free or sell them through
the app store. Some will add truly major enhancements, major changes to
the gui etc., yet they can be deployed or upgraded live and in
production with a mouse click. I used to administer a 20,000 user
instance several years ago and it was already working that well back
then. They're also very extensible in other ways with very robust and
stable API's and command line tools through which virtually all
functionality is exposed. Events can be made to trigger scripts and so
forth. It's pretty nice. As you observed OPNFV uses it and so do many
OpenStack Community members including OSIC and your own Mirantis. I know
because I used to have an account in their JIRA instance. ;-)
Yup.
Atlassian gave our LCOO group cloud instances of JIRA, JIRA Portfolio manager,
Confluence, Confluence Questions (kinda like stack overflow), a really useful
Calendar add-on and individual and group video chat (hip chat) for free with a
2,000 user license. They'd give us more tools as well, but we didn't need
them. We're still not even using Hip Chat.
OK.
It's important to not that we only use JIRA for planning & tracking purposes. It does
not take the place of any community tools. All dev work is done as usual. But people in more
of a portfolio management type role often will use JIRA to create epics and stories. Then
you have a story workflow that matches the community flow like BP > Spec > Committed
> Merged. The story describes the work item and contains links to the related bits and
pieces in Launchpad, gerrit, etherpads, etc. When a story goes from Committed to merged for
example, the developer just drags it over to the Merged column in the JIRA Kanban board.
Very simple and it meets a vital need. Using JIRA and building in automation to do all the
tracking is a possibility we've been giving some thought to in the PWG Story Tracker
sub-team. Don't know if that will be pursued or not.
Understood. This is a question/issue that we can have separately from
the "what's the purpose/plan of the LCOO compared to the existing
working groups" question that was really the heart of my initial email.
Consider this a full stop about the closed/open collaboration platform
question for this particular ML thread, cool? We can discuss that in a
followup email or thread so as to keep this thread focused on the
purpose/plan issue.
> > In fact you also had
the complete ability to create your own pages, read and comment on the
pages, edit or even delete the pages, put things on the calendar,
whatever. The pages work like etherpads allowing simultaneous editing
but with much more powerful tools and the convenience of a wiki
format. And hey, it was free. The site is completely open except for
one small section and that is explained if you stumbled across it.
Other working groups routinely put things in secured Google docs and
such. I don't think we're out of line but just this morning we
discussed ways to be more open. We were not publishing all our
meetings in the User Committee email list which was an oversight that
we're correcting. I'd encourage you to just reach out to us with any
questions or concerns before taking what certainly feels like a
confrontational posture in such a broadly public forum.
I recognize that I have a tendency to be ideological and rigid in certain of my
viewpoints, and I am sorry to have offended. Please accept my apologies, Andy.
I sincerely wish to see open and productive collaboration between contributors
and users of OpenStack.
No offense taken! I tried to be on my best behavior but I know I snuck in a
few subtle digs. Please accept my apologies as well. I feel the same way that
you do.\
Cool :)
> > We're all
community members and we're exploring how best to make a significant,
positive contribution. That is what everyone wants to do.
Cheers to that.
I'm not a co-chair of LCOO, but I am a co-chair of a sub-team that we
recently formed to begin laying the groundwork for what we hope will
eventually become some significant contributions from a working group
perspective. I don't speak for the group, I'm just telling you my
opinion. First of all I cannot understand why the community would not
want to welcome people who want to contribute?
Two points here.
Firstly, I certainly do not represent the entire OpenStack community :) I am
but one (sometimes blunt, certainly emotional, but often wrong) opinion out of
many. Please don't equate my questions with the broader OpenStack community not
being welcoming.
Secondly, I absolutely *do* want to welcome people who want to contribute! And
I'm not just talking about development contributions. I value documentation,
bug reporting, spec writing, use case development, architectural research,
marketing and all sorts of other contributions.
My goal is not to put up walls to contribution. Instead, my goal is to ensure
that the avenues by which the OpenStack community gathers contributions (of all
forms) don't overlap, since such overlap inevitably leads to missed
opportunities and duplicated efforts.
Understood. We want to be smart about this. We've been learning a lot (me
especially since I probably started out as the most clueless one). The mistakes
we've made are not for lack of desire to do our best; we're just learning.
A secondary goal of mine is to reduce bureaucracy in our governance and ensure
that we have as unimpeded a pipeline as possible between the folks describing
work that needs done, and the folks that are doing that work. Please take my
questions as an effort to examine whether the additional process and structure
of the LCOO is indeed warranted in order to accomplish the goals the LCOO
member companies have.
Understood. One thing I've learned is that the UC and the working groups I've become
involved with all want that as well. There have been a lot of challenges but I think
they're all moving things in a very good direction. Solid, mutually beneficial
partnerships between "the folks describing work that needs done, and the folks that
are doing that work" (as you say) I think will really be the key.
++
> Because the companies participating in LCOO are contributing on both
ends, I'm hopeful that we may be able to help with that.
Cool. Again, I sincerely hope to see a productive and efficient driver
of customer use cases in OpenStack (and the broader cloud ecosystem).
Just want to make sure things that overlap/duplicate are done so for a
specific reason and not because of a lack of knowledge about those
overlapping groups/areas.
> > I don't think that we
deserve to be called about and have our right to exist challenged.
You all work alongside the companies that have come together under
LCOO every day. We're all community members. There is nothing
nefarious going on, no hidden agenda, no secret bid for power or any
other such thing.
Yes, I do work alongside the member companies of the LCOO every day. I'm close
colleagues and friends with a number of folks in the LCOO.
However, I am not questioning anyone's right to existence. I am merely
questioning whether the LCOO is set up in a way to ensure the success of its
member companies' roadmaps.
Fair enough. Sorry I was getting defensive. It was late and I had not gotten
any supper yet... makes me grumpy.
LOL, you and I share the hangry gene I see :)
> > There is no need for fear and anyone is welcome to
attend meetings, view agendas and minutes, comment on and add to them.
IMO, our identity could be best characterized as large operators whose
companies are also committed to being significant contributors to the
development effort. That brings some unique character to LCOO. We
wanted to avoid creating a forum where everyone comes with their
complaints, demands and wish lists. We wanted to create a group in
which everyone has real skin in the game. In which everyone is a
contributor. Our identity is also as USERS of openstack.
I think all of the above is awesome! That said, I don't think there are things
about the existing OpenStack contributor ecosystem that have
*prevented* any of the LCOO member company's contributors from actively
participating in the development of OpenStack projects. If there *are* things about
the contributor ecosystem that have inhibited participation from Intel, Orange,
AT&T, Reliance, NTT, etc, then let us address those issues directly. I
personally would be pleased to have a discussion on those topics, as I'm sure the
User Committee would as well.
Personally I was able to attend my first Summit in Austen. It was jaw dropping and
awesome. I have always been a big fan and support of open-source from the start. I
actually managed to get the first open-source tool approved as "Standard" at
ATT years ago (CVS).
As a former AT&T employee, I understand just how much work that was! :)
> My experience with OpenStack has been nothing but positive in every
way. I LOVE the way that open-source empowers the little guy. I'm very
happy to have gotten the opportunity to become a part of this in my
professional life. It's ALL GOOD!
<snip> >
Another aspect of what we've been doing is providing a forum in which
participants can discuss the challenges they're experiencing from a
USER perspective. Share information, solutions, help one another. For
example we had some meetings where AT&T presented about Gluon which
you seem to have keyed in on. But the Gluon project is not being
managed from within LCOO meetings. Gluon is a project that AT&T
initiated, but as you saw, it's being managed separately. LCOO does
not have an OPNFV jira instance. We do have an LCOO Jira instance,
but we're still getting it ready to begin using it. You could have
jumped right into it when you were in our Confluence site. They're
integrated. We also dedicated many sessions to sharing what each
other is working on in the community. But none of that work has been
planned or driven from within LCOO thus far and that is not our
focus. We want to be aware of one another's efforts, offer feedback
and support, but LCOO is not the BORG. That said though, we are
hoping to take on a small number of efforts for the Community of the
nature I described earlier under the PWG Process linked above. I'm
optimistic that we may be able to do that in time to (if all goes
smoothly) see actual development underway in Queens. That's something
that we'll need JIRA for, to help with the planning and tracking
across the broad openstack portfolio. That's the same way that many
others in the community use JIRA, including OSIC who we recently had
meetings with to explore how they were using it.
Personally I resent having our right to form a working group like
this challenged at all. But I hope I've been able to lay some of your
concerns to rest. The bottom line is that we're all in this together.
Politics be damned, let's pull together and do all that we can to
make OpenStack as great as it can be and make the world a better
place along the way.
Trust me, politics was the last thing I had in mind when I wrote my
questions about the LCOO!
> > Here in the USA where I live, I find myself
rather disgusted with politics right now. Let's move forward.
You and me both, Andy. And I'm happy to move the conversation forward
with you, constructively.
Do you like beer? I DO! Let's meetup in Boston and get to know each other
better. :-)
Yes, beer and me go way back. Let's definitely meet in person in Boston
(or sooner, depending on events)
And if you can, please come and meet with our LCOO folks while you're there.
We'll be on the schedule so you can find us.
That goes for everyone! ;-)
That would be great! :)
Best,
-jay
-Andy
Best,
-jay
-Andy > >
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Pipes [mailto:jaypi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2017 7:23 PM
To: Edgar Magana <edgar.mag...@workday.com> >;
openstack-operators@lists.openstack.org; user-commit...@lists.openstack.org
Cc: MCCABE, JAMEY A <jm6...@att.com> >; UKASICK, ANDREW <au3...@att.com> >
Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [openstack-dev] Large Contributing OpenStack
Operators working group?
On 02/02/2017 05:02 PM, Edgar Magana wrote:
Jay,
I am including the WG chairs to make sure they answers your questions and
addresses your concerns.
In Barcelona the UC asked exactly the same questions and recommended to the
co-chairs of the LCOO WG to work with the existing WG to identify overlapping
activities and either to work together or go ahead with the WG if there were
not overlapping on goals and deliverables.
Was there any follow-on from that request from the UC?
I will let the co-chairs to follow up yours questions. BTW. I do not think this
topic should be posted in the openstack-dev mailing list. So, I will BCC it.
Sure, no problem.
Andrew and Jamey,
Please, address these questions. Let’s work all together to make sure that we
have all groups aligned and coordinated.
Thanks, Edgar, appreciated. Andrew and Jamey, please do let me know if you
would like me to rephrase or elaborate on any questions. Happy to do so. I
genuinely want to see alignment with other groups in this effort.
Best,
-jay
Thanks,
Edgar
On 2/2/17, 12:14 PM, "Jay Pipes" <jaypi...@gmail.com> > wrote:
Hi,
I was told about this group today. I have a few questions. Hopefully
someone from this team can illuminate me with some answers.
1) What is the purpose of this group? The wiki states that the team
"aims to define the use cases and identify and prioritise the
requirements which are needed to deploy, manage, and run services on top
of OpenStack. This work includes identifying functional gaps, creating
blueprints, submitting and reviewing patches to the relevant OpenStack
projects, contributing to working those items, tracking their completion."
What is the difference between the LCOO and the following existing
working groups?
* Large Deployment Team
* Massively Distributed Team
* Product Working Group
* Telco/NFV Working Group
2) According to the wiki page, only companies that are "Multi-Cloud
Operator[s] and/or Network Service Provider[s]" are welcome in this
team. Why is the team called "Large Contributing OpenStack Operators" if
it's only for Telcos? Further, if this is truly only for Telcos, why
isn't the Telco/NFV working group appropriate?
3) Under the "Guiding principles" section of the above wiki, the top
principle is "Align with the OpenStack Foundation". If this is the case,
why did the group move its content to the closed Atlassian Confuence
platform? Why does the group have a set of separate Slack channels
instead of using the OpenStack mailing lists and IRC channels? Why is
the OPNFV Jira used for tracking work items for the LCOO agenda?
See
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.openstack.org_wiki_Gluon_Tasks-2DOcata&d=DwICAg&c=DS6PUFBBr_KiLo7Sjt3ljp5jaW5k2i9ijVXllEdOozc&r=G0XRJfDQsuBvqa_wpWyDAUlSpeMV4W1qfWqBfctlWwQ&m=haOSpIhsa6KyDvuhRFigFVTLrTJxJ1Zv3kfm0JwTTtY&s=kntt00JEwpizTxQus4U9FhnwF_7WicJ7oRncGmkYPGc&e=
for examples.
4) I see a lot of agenda items around projects like Gluon, Craton,
Watcher, and Blazar. I don't see any concrete ideas about talking with
the developers of the key infrastructure services that OpenStack is
built around. How does the LCOO plan on reaching out to the developers
of the long-standing OpenStack projects like Nova, Neutron, Cinder, and
Keystone to drive their shared agenda?
Thanks for reading and (hopefully) answering.
-jay
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