OpenStack Summit Austin 2016 Summary of Summaries

May 17, 2016 at 11:29 · Filed under OpenStack

Background

In the three editions of Lwood since the Austin Summit I provided a summary of mailing list posts where the writer had provided a summary of particular Design Summit Project sessions.

The list below is the combination of these in one (hopefully!) easily searchable list – saves trawling through each Lwood to find them :)

Project Summaries

Summaries posted to the OpenStack-Dev mailing list

Edits: 18/5/16 to add Assaf Muller’s Neutron summary (thanks to Boden Russell for pointing it out);

Etherpads

During the summit a colleague in the Product Working Group suggested that given the mailing list would be quiet, perhaps I could summarise all the Etherpads.  I looked into this and, well, doing it comprehensively is a task beyond my modest abilities and available time, but a few pointers might be of use;

Note that many of the per project summaries mentioned above that went to the OpenStack-dev mailing list link to the relevant Etherpad(s) too.

 

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Lwood-20160515

May 16, 2016 at 20:53 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 9 May to 15 May 2016:

  • ~800 Messages (up about 21% relative to last week)
  • ~233 Unique threads (up about 13% relative to last week)

Busiest week on the list since I started doing Lwood back at the end of June 2015.

Notable Discussions

Future of Cross Project Meetings

Mike Perez provides an update on the future of Cross Project (IRC) meetings.  Now that some momentum has been built the meetings will move to a little bit more of a self service model.

In particular Mike will no longer be announcing if the meetings are -not- occurring – instead folk interested in fixing a particular cross-project issue or feature should introduce a meeting following the process Mike outlines.

The expectation is that most CP meetings will now bring together a subset of projects rather than all of them.

Minor Tweak to automated release announcement emails

Doug Hellmann points out that a recently made change to the script that generates automated release announcements means that the subject line will now include “[new]” in place of the “[release]” tag.

Do you use wiki.openstack.org ? Please tell us more…

Thierry Carrez notes that there are moves afoot to better fine tune the way the Wiki operates and what it’s used for to make it more useful and less of a magnet for Spam.  To that end he asks people to take a few minutes and describe what/where/how they use the Wiki – write up their Wiki use cases in effect.  Please contribute :)

The Monster Thread…

No summary of OpenStack related goings on would be complete without noting a lengthy thread that kicked off a few weeks back and at the time of writing is still going.

The early part of the thread started here – a note from John Dickinson about the Swift team’s plans to code portions of Swift in the Go language (mentioned in last week’s Lwood).  At Thierry Carrez suggestion the process was commenced of seeking Technical Council approval to add Go to the list of supported languages for OpenStack.

That thread is up 141 messages and counting and has been, ahem, spirited in places.  Most of the discussion has been around the core question – using Go to code up parts of OpenStack as distinct from where a Go based API should be made available for OpenStack.  That latter seems to have firmly converged on No/Not Relevant.

The applicability/appropriateness of using Go (or other additional languages) at the core of OpenStack has been the predominant topic as well as (best I can tell) some pretty useful discussion about why Go is thought necessary (versus Python, coding critical sections in C or some such) etc.

Will be interesting to see how this thread pans out as it enters it’s second week and (possibly) second century of messages counts… :)

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup – Part III

While not quite as much traffic as last week, a healthy amount of post-Summit summary discourse on the list last week.

Since the summaries have already spanned three weeks worth of I’m pulling together a consolidated list which will go out later this week – you’ll be able to find it linked from here.

Summaries on List

My thanks to Thierry Carrez for a tweet noting his appreciation for these summaries and for some subsequent retweets – thus encouraged will do ‘em again next time :)

Upcoming OpenStack Events

A few midcycles being organised already

Midcycle

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

PTL/Core nominations & changes

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Santana (Sacred Fire), Thin Lizzy (Johnny The Fox), Tommy Emmanuel (The Journey),  Baby Animals (Early Warning, One Word), The Bottom 40 (Covering Happy by Pharrell Williams), Joe Walsh (Live From Daryl’s House: Funk 49-50 and Rocky Mountain Way) amongst other tunes.

 

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Lwood-20160508

May 10, 2016 at 17:02 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 2 May to 8 May 2016:

  • ~659 Messages (up about 102% relative to last week)
  • ~206 Unique threads (up about 94% relative to last week)

List traffic bounced back to almost exactly pre-summit levels this week past.

Notable Discussions

Swift News

John Dickinson penned a couple of posts to the list last week with some significant news for the Swift project;

In the first he flags the plans for the feature/hummingbird branch which amongst other things includes portions of Swift being written/re-written in go.  Perhaps most noteworthy is the integration of the feature/crypto work to provide at-rest encryption.

In the second he notes that the project is moving away from using the swift-specs repo to collate/debate and manage ideas for future work.  It has instead been replaced by a “shared brain dump” area – aka a Wiki page https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Swift/ideas.

Next Summit Locations

After Barcelona, we’re off to Boston in May 2017 and then Sydney in November 2017 :)

Recognising Glance Cores

Nikhil Komawar wrote an amusing and heartfelt thanks to the glance cores :)

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup – Part II

Once again a lot of post-Summit traffic on the list – here are some curated links to summaries posted to the mailing list and/or etherpads

Summaries on List

A bunch of summaries posted to the list this past week;

Incidentally – if you found the above useful, please shoot me a quick email as it’s a fairly labour intensive summary, one I’m happy to do if it’s actually useful for folk, might skip in future if not!

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Midcycle

A few midcycles being organised already;

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

  • [Cinder] Nominating Michał Dulko to Cinder Core – Sean McGinnis
  • [Tricircle] Proposing Shinobu Kinjo for Tricircle core reviewer – Joe Huang
  • [Openstack-ansible] Nominate Major Hayden for core in openstack-ansible-security – Travis Truman
  • [UX] OpenStack UX core nomination for Lana Brindley and Shamail Tahir – Peter Kruithof Jr.

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you from various points on the road between San Antonio, Texas, USA and Melbourne, Australia.  Been battling a flu so no tunes this time :)

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Lwood-20160501

May 3, 2016 at 07:12 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 25 April to 1 May 2016:

  • ~325 Messages (down about 57% relative to last week)
  • ~106 Unique threads (down about 44% relative to last week)

No surprises – the week of the Austin Summit saw a significant drop in both the number of Messages and Threads on the list.

Notable Discussions

Changes to Summit format

While they weren’t discussed much this week on the dev list itself, there were at least two sessions at last week’s Summit which dug into proposed changes to the format of future Summits (Etherpads here and here).  I’ll attempt to summarise the state of play;

Thierry Carrez described the main change as “Split and Stagger” and provided a diagram that broadly illustrates the intent.

The Summit itself will retain the more end user/commercial sort of focus that has driven much of the schedule of the event and attracted the numerical majority of attendees in recent years.

So that the valuable work of end user to developer collaboration can continue at the Summit, specific Forums will be held to gather requirements, feedback, come up with priorities and the like.  It is these Forums where contributor/project teams will have some representation – PTLs and/or individual developers.  The exact nature of these Forums is being discussed.

The Summit Schedule and location will pretty much continue as it has been to date – North America then Europe/Asia, April-ish and October-ish.

The proposal then calls for Project Team Gatherings (PTGs) which will provide an opportunity for Project team(s) to get together and get work done.  These will be a “distributed” version of the design summit in so far as the co-location of projects will be a bit more ad-hoc.

Timing for the PTGs is expected to be the end of February and the end of August with the first two events probably being held in locations in North America to bootstrap things and establish baseline costs.  Thereafter the intent seems to be to follow a North America then rest of the world style split much like the Summit.

Within the PTG events themselves, the schedule will be somewhat loose – when projects are co-located all-hands style lunches will be the main schedule synchronisation point.  Teams are free to organise their own social events, possibly with a single major get together for the event when multiple projects are co-located.

While the final details are still being determined, it looks likely that participation in a PTG event will permit discounted or free attendance to the Summit, somewhat analogous to the arrangement for current ATCs.

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup

The big news for the week past was of course the Summit in Austin.  A well attended and well run event, I count myself fortunate to have been able to attend courtesy of my employer, Rackspace.

Other than co-presenting the session “And Now For Our Regularly Scheduled OpenStack Roadmap Update!” alongside my Product Working Group colleagues Carol Barrett and Nate Ziemann, I mostly stuck to the Design Summit sessions.  Summarising even this subset of the event would be an all but impossible task, but a few things that caught my attention.

Mailing List summaries

Most Project summaries end up in the various Etherpads (discussed below) but some good posts to the mailing list too;

Etherpads

A colleague in the Product Working Group suggested that given the mailing list would be quiet, perhaps I could summarise all the Etherpads.  I looked into this and, well, doing it comprehensively is a task beyond my modest abilities and available time, but a few pointers might be of use;

Want to test your code on a real 1,000 node cluster – for free ?

Check out the OSIC clusters.  Disclaimer – I work for Rackspace who along with Intel kicked off the project – but it’s pretty cool I reckon and is already proving quite a boon for OpenStack developers :)

OpenStack Health CI Result visualisation tool

Masayuki Igawa notes that the rather neat looking openstack-health project would welcome feedback on their initial release of this Visualisation tool for CI results.

Looks pretty slick – check it out :)

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Aside from a few posts relating to Summit specific (and so now passed) events, just the one event related thread this week;

Midcycle

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

None noted this past week, apologies if there were and I missed them!

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you from various points on the road to San Antonio, Texas, USA. For no particular reason, no tunes this time :)

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Lwood-20160424

April 26, 2016 at 06:06 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 18 to 24 April 2016:

  • ~752 Messages (up about 19% relative to last week)
  • ~190 Unique threads (down about 2% relative to last week)

The overall Thread count was about the same, but a couple of quite long threads upped the Message count significantly.

Notable Discussions

Winding down the kolla-mesos project ?

It looks like the kolla-mesos project faces an uncertain future.  In a post earlier in the week Steve Dake notes that the major implementers of the project “don’t intend to continue its development within the Kolla project governance” and so development is being scaled back.

Sergey Lukanov clarifies things midweek in his post – seemingly efforts are now instead being put into a kubernetes based approach which will be developed with the relevant upstream projects.

Even if the specific projects involved aren’t particularly on your radar, Sergey’s post and the brief discourse that follows make an interesting read and a good example (IMHO) of pragmatic decision making.  Likewise the thread following Steve’s post provides a good summary of what standard practice is nowadays for a project being wound up.

Summit Preparations aplenty

As one might expect, a bunch of project specific posts flagging the whereabouts of relevant etherpads, formal and informal meetings and the like.

I’m not sure I’ve captured all of them, so I’d encourage you do your own quick search, but posts I did find included Heat, TripleO, Puppet, OpenStack-Operators and Glance.

I also note there were many cancellation notices for standing meetings – once again double check but whatever OpenStack project meeting you’d normally have, is probably off for this coming week at least!

Party Party Party!

Michael Krotscheck notes that HPE are looking for sponsors to continue the Core Party after Austin.

As the thread goes on to discuss, the Core Party has been a somewhat contentious event, seen by many as being at odds with the inclusionary nature of the OpenStack Community – this no reflection on the organisation sponsoring it more it’s existence at all as I read it.

The thread goes on to note that one desirable aspect of the parties has been the opportunity it presented for a quiet conversation.  Tom Fifield helpfully points out that there will be spaces at the Tuesday night “Street Party” that will facilitate this very thing with some quiet spaces where the music isn’t so loud.

Users Managing Users

Adrian Turjak wrote an introduction to StackTask – a project that will “allow users to self manage additional users and roles on their projects without being admin, but in future will grow to handle other normally admin restricted tasks.“

It’s all Open Source software, well tested (in use in production), uses Keystone underneath so isn’t re-inventing the wheel and, usefully, is easily pluggable/extensible.

The user management piece is up and running – and what the authors required primarily, but they look to now be shifting their efforts toward a richer feature set.  Worth a look :)

Proposal for a Massively Distributed Cloud Working Group

Adrien Lebre penned a proposal for the creation of a new Working Group to provide a forum to discuss massively distributed (or the so called Fog/Edge Computing paradigm) use cases.  The main distinction to current large scale deployment working groups looks to be the emphasis on geographical (WAN-wide) distribution of resources and the attendant issues this introduces.

There will be a presentation or two at the Summit this week in Austin as well as a proposed face to face session on Tuesday afternoon at same.

L3 High Availability testing at beyond desktop scale

Ann Kamyshnikova’s email announced the results of some interesting work she’s been doing on a 49 node system (3 controllers, 46 compute) looking at the performance of Neutron.

The ensuing thread discussed the results and also flagged the availability of a large (100’s of nodes) cluster that is available to all through OSIC.

Release Hiatus until 2 May

Doug Hellman reminds us that with the majority of the Release team travelling to Summit or about to, there will be no further releases until May 2nd unless anything dramatic crops up.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Events wise, really “just” lots of discussion around the Austin summit :)

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you from sunny Austin, Texas, USA, surrounded by my wonderful fellow OpenStack developers and users. No tunes other than what drifted up from 6th Street one evening when I was working on it a little earlier in the week :)

Comments

Lwood-20160417

April 23, 2016 at 00:47 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 11 to 17 April 2016:

  • ~634 Messages (up about 3% relative to last week)
  • ~194 Unique threads (up nearly 3% relative to last week)

Steady as it goes this week on the list and a particularly short Lwood as it turns out.

Notable Discussions

Gaming Stackalytics Stats – continued

The thread kicked off last week by Davanum Srinivas and reported in last weeks Lwood continued a little this week.  If it was of interest I’d commend spending a few minutes to read the remainder – one option being canvassed informally was to revert to the default Stackalytics view being based on Commits for a while.

PTL Communications

Most of us aren’t PTLs but if you’re curious about some of the expectations placed on the folk that perform this valuable work for the OpenStack community, Doug Hellman wrote a summary of the expectations around release related communications for PTLs that you might find interesting.

Design Summit Preparation – Etherpads

As one would expect – a few emails this week in preparation for the upcoming summit in Austin.  Most were project specific but Matt Riedman helpfully advised that he’d stubbed out the Newton Design Summit Etherpad pages here.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Events wise, really “just” lots of discussion around the summit in Austin later this month.

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news

This edition of Lwood brought to you by the sounds of a hammer drill in the hotel room next to mine and miscellaneous noises of the fair city of Melbourne, Australia.

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Lwood-20160410

April 15, 2016 at 14:39 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 4 to 10 April 2016:

  • ~615 Messages (down nearly 12% relative to last week)
  • ~189 Unique threads (down around 20% relative to last week)

A little quieter this week on the list and my cold/flu has finally just about gone :)

Notable Discussions

TC Elections

Tony Breeds reported the results of the TC elections that wrapped up late last week, the full results are available here.  The seven successful candidates were – Thierry Carrez, Morgan Fainberg, John Garbutt, Flavio Percoco, Mike Perez, Matthew Treinish and Davanum Srinivas.

In his post, Eoghan Glynn did some interesting post election analysis about voter participation rates, in short they seem to be dropping about 10% per election despite an average increase in voter base of more than 20% over the same period.  The thread continued a little with some discussion about the nature of the voter base (one time contributors to OpenStack vs more engaged contributors) and how this might be analysed in the future. All in all an interesting read.

Handling FPGAs as resources for Nova ?

Roman Dobosz kicked off an interesting thread about integrating FPGA resources into OpenStack through Nova.

With a growing interest in acceleration hardware of all sorts of different forms and end functions, it’s a matter of when not if we’ll need a well integrated and hardware agnostic way of doing this within OpenStack.

Pleasingly there seems to be a good range of voices in the discussion, at a cursory glance I saw mention of x86, ARM and POWER architectures as well as NFV, GPU and Crypto style use cases.  Interesting times! :)

Gaming Stackalytics Stats ?

Davanum Srinivas flagged some concerns around the potential for OpenStack contributors to “game” their statistics as reported by the popular Stackalytics website.  This kicked off quite an interesting thread – the nub of the issue being what appear to be somewhat arbitrary +1’s of proposed changes.

In the ensuing discussion it was pointed out that some guides for people new to OpenStack recommend, if informally, reviewing code to learn about it and then using +1 to flag you’ve done so.  Instead it’s been suggested that greater use be made of +0 which has traditionally been taken to mean either “I have a question” or “I’ve read this but not really equipped to judge”.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Events wise, really “just” lots of discussion around the summit in Austin later this month.

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

  • [Horizon] Proposing Rob Cresswell to Horizon core – Matthias Runge
  • [Ironic] Proposing Anton Arefiev to ironic-inspector-core – Dmitry Tantsur
  • [Neutron] Nominating Assaf Muller to Neutron core team – Armando M
  • [Neutron] Proposing Hirofumi Ichihara to Neutron core team – Akihiro Motoki

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Al Di Meola (Electric Rendezvous), Pivotal Point (It Doesn’t Look Good on Paper) and Dire Straits (Telegraph Road, Making Movies) amongst other tunes.

 

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Lwood-20160403

April 7, 2016 at 16:23 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 28 March to 3 April 2016:

  • ~698 Messages (up about 9% relative to week of 21-27 March)
  • ~237 Unique threads (up about 15% relative to week of 21-27 March)

There was no Lwood for the period 21 March to 27 March  – I had a rotten cold/flu that put me out of action for pretty much the whole week.  By the time I felt vaguely well enough to read list traffic the moment seemed to have well and truly passed for the summary.  I’ve tried to at least capture the People and Projects related traffic from the “lost” week however and presented that in this edition.  Apologies for any inconvenience caused by the absence of last weeks’ edition and the late arrival of this one!

Notable Discussions

Not so much Swagger after all ?

Anne Gentle writes that plans to move to Swagger for API reference information is being reviewed in light of discovering it doesn’t match OpenStack’s current API designs as well as was first thought.  There are well advanced plans on where to go fro here – more specifics in Anne’s email.

Neutron being renamed ?

Jimmy Akin penned a timely warning for all that there are some issues with the Neutron name infringing on certain trademarks.  The ever efficient OpenStack community were quick to suggest alternatives, one of my favourites was the idea of using an alternative alphabet – hence it could become “Нетронь” or even “ניוטרון”

Seriously, if you want to see OpenStack collaboration at it’s finest, it doesn’t get much better than this thread.  Curiously though the conversation came to an abrupt halt around midday on April 1st.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Unless I missed it there didn’t seem to be any new events mentioned on the list these last two weeks.  There is of course the summit in Austin later this month. Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list though!

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

It wasn’t all PTLs and TCs these last couple of weeks…

TC Elections

As Tony Breeds noted here the period for submitting Candidate Proposals for election to the Technical Council kicked off on March 25, 00:00 UTC and remained open until April 1, 00:00 UTC.  Tristan Cacqueray formally noted the election open shortly thereafter – it will conclude later this week (April 7, 23:59 UTC) – that’s varying degrees of Thursday or Friday depending on where you are!

Of the outgoing TC members, Robert Collins, Jay Pipes and Mark McClain noted they would not be seeking re-election though thankfully all three intend to remain involved with OpenStack!

There are nineteen candidates in total vying for seven open positions on the TC.  They’re a well rounded and capable bunch so it’s likely to be a close election – we’ll know next week of course…

In alphabetical order they are; Anita Kuno (anteya), Carol Barrett (carolbarrett), Chris Dent (cdent), Davanum Srinivas (dims), David Lyle (david-lyle), Dean Troyer (dtroyer), Ed Leafe (edleafe), Flavio Percoco (flaper87), Gal Sagie (gsagie), Gordon Chung (gordc), Ildiko Vancsa (ildikov), John Garbutt (johnthetubaguy), Julien Danjou (jd__), Matthew Treinish (mtreinish), Mike Perez (thingee), Morgan Fainberg (morgan), Shamail Tahir (Shamail), Steven Dake (sdake) and Thierry Carrez (ttx).

Per Tristan’s email if you’re eligible to vote you should have already received an email with a link to do so.  Please exercise your OpenStack democratic right :)

PTL Election Results

The PTL Elections concluded last week, Tristan Cacqueray provided the good oil in his note here.

There are now 48 PTLs, up from 42 in the October 2015 Election – this a result of some new projects and the creation of the Stable Branch Maintenance role.  Three of the PTL roles were decided by the TC as no one came forward for the role – excellent folk were found though :)

A little spreadsheet munging yielded a few more stats and a couple of graphs as shown below.

 

Lwood-20160403-graph2

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news

Again my apologies for the absence of Lwood last week and the late arrival of this one.  Normal service will be resumed next week :)

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Burning For Buddy – A Tribute to the Music of Buddy Rich, Choirboys (Choirboys) and The Cult (Pure Cult) amongst other tunes.

Comments

Lwood-20160320

March 21, 2016 at 21:43 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 14 to 20 March 2016:

  • ~744 Messages (up about 9% relative to last week)
  • ~258 Unique threads (up about 28% relative to last week)

A fairly normal week all considered – the uptick in traffic largely PTL election related :)

Notable Discussions

New API guidelines for review

Chris Dent writes that there are five new API guidelines ready for review by interested folk;

Election Season Continues!

The week now past saw and end to the PTL Candidate nomination period as variously noted by Tony Breeds and subsequently Tristan Cacqueray when Nominations actually closed.

Tony subsequently announced the opening of Voting a few minutes later.

In the People and Projects section below there’s a summary of both retiring PTLs and a link to the Confirmed Candidates page for PTLs that have nominated.

Slot allocation for Newton Design Summit

Thierry Carrez kicked off a thread on Slot Allocation for the upcoming Design Summit in Austin next month.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Unless I missed it (certainly possible in 200+ threads!) once again no new events came up on the list this week. Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list though!

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

PTL’s stepping down

PTL Candidates

The PTL nomination period closed during the course of last week and as a result the list of Confirmed Candidates is now available through the elections page.

By way of quick summary there was more than one candidate for Cinder, Fuel, Glance, Heat, Infrastructure, Keystone, Kolla, Magnum, Packaging-RPM and Telemetry. For all other projects the nominated PTLs are confirmed into the role unopposed.

As to the individual candidate statements, on reflection I realised it doesn’t really make much sense for me to reiterate in Lwood what is now in the official pages anyway, so please head over there if you’re curious about who has put their hand up for what :)

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news

The end of this week marks Easter and is a four day holiday here in Australia (Friday through Monday inclusive) At this stage I plan on actually taking Monday off, so Lwood for next week will likely go out a day late, apologies for any inconvenience caused…

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Boston (Boston), Yes (90125) amongst other tunes.

Comments

Among excellent Company

March 18, 2016 at 12:18 · Filed under Music

RoA-CastBandCrew-20160313

Rock of Ages Canberra 2016 – Photo courtesy of Pat Gallagher – Click for a larger version :)

For the last few months I’ve been involved in Canberra Philharmonic’s production of Rock of Ages. As I write this we’re down to the last three shows of a thirteen show run – it’s been one of the most enjoyable musical experiences of my life and well up there on the overall list of Cool Things I have Done :)

The show itself has garnered some excellent and I believe well deserved reviews (in date order – 1, 2, 3 & 4) and the Company are amongst the nicest and most talented folk I’ve had the good fortune to work with.  We have a lot of fun putting the show on – it really does rock – and the audience reception has been fantastic even on the nominally “quieter” nights early in the week.

While I’m something of a tragic when it comes to going to Musicals, this is the first time I’ve actually been in one and I doubt I could have hoped for a better entree.

Being in a Musical is a bit like being in an awesome band but with about 12x the number of people.  A very talented bunch, egos refreshingly held well in check and a degree of camaraderie, mirth and esprit de corps that would leave a well organised sporting team looking for ways to improve themselves.

My intention is to write a bit of a lessons learned post in the not too distant future, being as I am basically a rock keyboardist who has been fitting in to the world of Pit Musician.  But some initial thoughts;

  • It’s nice to leave your gear at the show unchanged for a few weeks.  Turn up, uncover gear, power up, line check, rock out Act 1, intermission, rock out Act 2, shut down, cover up gear, socialise a little, go home, try to sleep, sleep.  Rinse, repeat.
  • Saturdays with two shows (Matinee and Evening) are tiring. On the plus side you get to do it twice and with careful food selection and a power nap, easy to make the night show as energetic as the afternoon.
  • It’s fun to be in costume (RoA is unusual in that the band are on stage at the back rather than in the “Pit” below stage)
  • Vamp means keep playing the same section over until the Conductor signals you to keep going – this accommodates dialog or other things taking longer than usual
  • Learning the tunes from an original cast recording is an excellent start – but you miss a lot of the little connecting pieces that go under dialog or between scene changes
  • Playing to a Conductor is tricky, doubly so if you’ve only ever really worked to a click or a live drummer
  • Being able to sight read would make things a fair bit easier…
  • In Ear Monitoring with a professional rig and individual mix controls is amazing
  • There really are some cracker songs from back in the 80’s

If you have the opportunity to get involved in a show, I commend it to you.

To my fellow RoA Company members and, particularly, my Bandmates – my heartfelt thanks.  It’s been a joy :)

 

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