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[Soren Hansen <soren@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've put my name on the ballot for Nova PTL, and I'd like to explain
what I expect to do (my platform, if you will).

Nova is facing many separate, but related problems.

* Nova is too big.
  Very few (if any) core developers are comfortable reviewing every
  part of the code base.  In itself, this isn't necessarily a problem,
  but I think it would be valuable to try to somehow acknowledge that
  the average focus is much narrower than "all of nova".
* Lots of things in Nova that should be orthogonal are not.
  This problem is especially prevalent in the virtualisation layer. The
  layout and number of disks you get attached to instances shouldn't
  depend on the hypervisor you've chosen, but it does. There is lots
  and lots and lots of logic embedded in both the libvirt and XenServer
  drivers that isn't related to the hypervisor, but is a result of the
  origin of these drivers.
* The overall quality is decreasing
  There's an almost unilateral focus on features across the board. The
  topic of almost every session at the summit is some new feature.
  There is very little focus on stability, predictability and
  operation. Personally, I think that shows very clearly in the final
  product.

I'd like to try to shift our focus and turn the proverbial ship around.

I'd like to remove any incentive to rush things into Nova trunk.

1. A much shorter release cycle (as Thierry also suggests[1]) would be
very beneficial. Noone wants to have to wait an extra 6 months getting
some new feature in just because it missed the feature freeze.  However,
just a single month of delay... That should be manageable in most cases.

2. I'd like to make it more straight forward to have things mature
somewhere separete from Nova trunk, but still make it easy to
collaborate on them or get people to test them.

3. I'd like to encourage a stronger focus on QA and testing.
Specifically, I'd love to have more people focused on making it easier
to test things in Nova. Tempest is a great effort, but the unit test
suite is our first line of defence. It should be fast and comprehensive.
Right now, it's neither.

4. I'd like a stronger focus on extensibility and plugability.

5. I'd like us to rethink our configuration management strategy. So far,
we've punted on it and deferred to deployers to choose between Puppet,
Chef or whatever else to handle this. However, many things will crash
and burn if the configuration of various components is out of sync with
each other or with the database. This is particularly clear in the
networking area.

[1]: http://fnords.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/open-dev-releases-quality/

-- 
Soren Hansen             | http://linux2go.dk/
Senior Software Engineer | http://www.cisco.com/
Ubuntu Developer         | http://www.ubuntu.com/
OpenStack Developer      | http://www.openstack.org/