Some Thoughts on the OpenStack TC Election

Neutron Kilo Retrospective and a Look Toward Liberty

Scaling OpenStack Neutron Development

Whitebox Switching Compared to the Smartphone Market

OpenStack Liberty Summit Talks I’m Involved With

Now that we’re past a very busy December which included the Neutron mid-cycle in Lehi, Utah, the Neutron Spec Proposal and Approval Deadline, the Kilo-1 release of Neutron, as well as some holiday’s enjoyed around the world in December, I thought it was time to take a moment and blog about where we are in Neutron, and some of the important changes coming in the Kilo release. These changes will affect everyone from developers to deployers, from operators to packagers.

Note: This post was co-authored by my good friend Thomas Graf. My last post was around how to effectively contribute to an Open Source community. This post received a fair amount of traction, and I was happy with the conversation it created around Open Source contributions. There are plenty of people who hopefully benefited from this discussion. Recently, I’ve been having some discussions with my friend Thomas Graf around upstream community engagement.

Since being elected as the OpenStack Neutron PTL, I’ve been mostly heads down working to ensure the Neutron project has a successful Juno release. Increasingly, and especially near OpenStack Juno milestone deadlines, I’m seeing frustration from new contributors around their contributions to Neutron. I sent an email to the openstack-dev mailing list this morning addressing this in a terse form, this blog is an attempt to expand upon that email.

There has been a flurry of press around Cisco’s release of OpFlex. If you want the nitty gritty details, please read the IETF draft available here. What exactly is OpFlex? The IETF draft sums it up nicely: It’s clear that Cisco intends to make OpFlex an open standard together with it’s partners in the vendor, provider and Open Source communities. We’re working hard to make that a reality. On the Open Source front, I’m leading a team of people who are working hard on the code around this new OpFlex Policy Agent.

My good friend Dave Meyer just wrote a great blog post at SDN Central available here. A key point which Dave makes is this: Dave is spot on with his analysis here. We need to stop thinking about artifacts as being only things such as installable software, firmware images, or even pieces of hardware. In the Open Source world, the community is an artifact. Vibrant mailing lists filled with discussion are artifacts.