Each release cycle, OpenStack project team leads (PTLs) introduce themselves, talk about upcoming features for the OpenStack projects they manage, plus how you can get involved and influence the roadmap.

Superuser will feature weekly summaries of the videos; you can also catch them on the OpenStack Foundation YouTube channel. This post covers Cinder, Neutron and Nova.

Cinder

What Cinder

The goal of the project is to implement services and libraries to provide on demand, self-service access to Block Storage resources. Provide software defined block storage via abstraction and automation on top of various traditional backend block storage devices.

Who Sean McGinnis, PTL. Day job: Senior principal software engineer at Dell.

Burning issues

“A lot of what we discussed in Austin might not be interesting to the end users, but the had a lot of changes in Mitaka that developers working on the code need to be aware of, things like implementing micro-versions in the API and rolling upgrades,” he says. “There’s a lot we need to be aware of that hopefully as these features mature will be useful to the end users too.”

What’s next

“I’d love to have feedback from users about what they’re looking for with replication, so we can be sure we meet their use cases,” he added.

What matters in Newton

Get involved!

”We can always use help – core reviews, documentation, you don’t need to be a programmer,” McGinnis says. “If you want to be a part of the community and get involved, we would love to have you.” He suggests dropping in on IRC and asking who might need help.

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions

For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [cinder]

Participate in the weekly meetings: held in #openstack-meeting, on Wednesdays at 16:00 UTC.

Neutron

What

Neutron’s goal is to implement services and associated libraries to provide on-demand, scalable, and technology-agnostic network abstraction.

Who Armando Migliaccio, PTL. Day job: software architect, HP Networking at Hewlett-Packard.

Burning issues

“We had a lot of exciting sessions in Austin,” Migliaccio says. “There’s usually a lot of yelling, but the discussions are good.” The outcome, he says, is a path forward for a number of things that were “long overdue.”

What’s next

“It’s hard to come up with just three things, he says “these are the top priorities — as well as challenges. Hopefully, we won’t disappoint our user base.”

What matters in Newton

“People often ask me what will happen in 10-12 month’s time and I usually struggle to give an answer because in open source, you’re never really in full control,” he says. “We’re very ambitious, so we end up over-subscribing ourselves. Some of the things we’re talking about now will spill over into Ocata.”

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions

For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [neturon]

To get code, ask questions, view blueprints, etc, see: Neutron Launchpad Page

Neutron’s regular IRC meetings start one hour after the main openstack meeting, on the same #openstack-meeting channel: http://wiki.openstack.org/Network/Meetings

Nova

What Nova, OpenStack’s compute service. The project aims to implement services and associated libraries to provide massively scalable, on demand, self-service access to compute resources, including bare metal, virtual machines, and containers.

Who Matt Riedemann, who has been with IBM for over 10 years.

Burning issues

“A big thing that’s already happened in Newton has been the backlog, some of it we have been carrying since Kilo. We put a freeze on new specs up until the Summit,” Riedemann says. “We need to get a lot of this backlog cleaned up before we can add new features.”

What’s next

“It’s about redefining a lot of data models so everything’s not in a single data base,” he added. “In Mitaka we laid a lot of the foundations but didn’t get a lot of code merged. In Newton we’ve already made some pretty good progress.”

What matters in Newton:

You can find all the planned updates at the Nova specs repo but Riedemann says the top priorities are the Cells v2 work, the scheduler work, the API policy defaults and the API-refs doc cleanup. Looking ahead to the Ocata release, he says that interoperability will also be a focus as the team lays the groundwork on the APIs.

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions

For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [nova]

“You can really tell in the Newton design sessions that Nova is really naturally grown into effective sub-teams,” Riedemann says. “There are lot of broad things that need work and people can get their feet wet with.” Check out the Nova wiki for more information.

Participate in the weekly meetings: Thursdays alternating 14:00 UTC (#openstack-meeting) and 21:00 UTC (#openstack-meeting).

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