Yesterday’s meeting with the OpenStack App Developer Working Group proved that new developers approaching OpenStack enter a system designed to make them fail.

The community seems to be distracted to uncover new problems while the old and known problems are not being addressed. I’m running for a seat on OpenStack Foundation Board: if you care about the developer’s experience, consider voting for me (search your inbox for OpenStack Foundation – 2016 Individual Director Election, you can also change your vote.)

The App Developer Working Group drafted a detailed analysis of the app developer experience with major cloud providers AWS, Azure and Google Compute and compared such experience with Rackspace Cloud. It’s a great piece of work.

The first thing you notice in the report? The team at Intel who ran the analysis chose Rackspace as an ‘OpenStack reference cloud’. That choice is debatable but during the meeting when we discussed alternatives, it became clear that there is no good choice! There is no vanilla OpenStack implementation when it comes to application developers, they’re all snowflakes (as Randy Bias put it)… All of the public clouds in OpenStack Marketplace have made choices that affect, one way or another, app developers. If we want to assess the whole development experience on OpenStack, we need a different framework.

As an open source community we can’t compare AWS, Azure and Google Compute to either all of OpenStack public clouds or only one. Powering up TryStack to be an app developers playground wouldn’t really work either.

This is a much larger conversation: we need to discuss more on the User Committee mailing list, do less in-person meetings, share intentions online with others before turning them into actions and waste time.

I’m concerned by the lack of focus within the community: when operating OpenStack became a visible issue, the whole community focused on helping operators out. We need to do the same for app developers.