Hey Everyone, Some of you may know me, I've been around the OpenStack community for a while (longer than some, shorter than others). I'm not an "uber hipster", or a "super cool bro-grammer", or even a "mega hacker" trying to write the most clever code possible to impress everyone.
I am however someone that has been contributing to OpenStack for about five years now. Not only via code contributions, but services, support and evangelism. I started the Cinder project with some great help from a few other folks and did the best I could with that while forging ahead into unknown territory. I use OpenStack on a daily basis in a number of private clouds, have helped several average sized companies deploy and maintain OpenStack clouds and have spent countless hours helping people get their heads wrapped around the whole OpenStack Platform thing and how it might be able solve some of their problems. I'm not going to try and claim that I have all the answers related to OpenStack and the TC, in fact, I'm not even going to pretend to know what all the questions are. I'm not going to tell you what a great person I am, or all of my "great achievements" over the years. As we all know, people can write up whatever wonderful things. People can say or write up just about anything and promise the world without really having any idea what they're talking about. What I will say however, is that I believe OpenStack has changed dramatically over the last few years. Some things for the better, some things... not so much. While I think the past is extremely important for the experience it gives, I think what's more important and critical is the future and where OpenStack is going over the course of the next few years. OpenStack is a bit ambiguous for a lot of people that I talk to (both inside and outside of the community). Even more unclear is what do we want to be in another two years, three or even five? Do we want to just continue being a platform that kinda looks like AWS or a "free" version of VMware? Do we want our most popular topic at the key-notes to continue being customers telling their story of "how hard" it was to do OpenStack? I think we're at an important cross-roads with respect to the future of OpenStack. It's my belief that the TC has a great opportunity (with the right people) to take input from the "outside world" and drive a meaningful and innovative future for OpenStack. Maybe try and dampen the echo-chamber a bit, see if we can identify some real problems that we can help real customers solve. I'd like to see us embracing new technologies and ways of doing things. I'd love to have a process where we don't care so much about the check boxes of what oslo libs you do or don't use in a project, or how well you follow the hacking rules; but instead does your project actually work? Can it actually be deployed by somebody outside of the OpenStack community or with minimal OpenStack experience? It's my belief that Projects should offer real value as stand-alone services just as well as they do working with other OpenStack services. I should be able to use them equally as well outside the eco-system as in side of it. I believe the TC should consider driving issues like these and help guide the future of OpenStack. If you like my philosophy (really that's all it is), or agree with it; I'd love the opportunity to try and make some of this a reality. I can't promise anything, except that I'll try to do what I believe is good for the community (especially deployers and end-users). Feel free to ask me about my thoughts on anything specific, I'm happy to answer any questions that I can as honestly as I can. Thanks, John
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