[Airship-discuss] OpenDev, the future of OpenStack Infra

[Clark Boylan]

Hello everyone,

Sorry for another cross post so soon.

In the land before time we had Stackforge. 

Stackforge gave non-OpenStack projects a place to live with their own clearly defined "not OpenStack" namespacing. As the wheel of time spun we realized that many Stackforge projects were becoming OpenStack projects and we would have to migrate them. This involved Gerrit downtimes to rename things safely. To ease the pain of this, the TC decided that all projects developed in the OpenStack Infrastructure could live under the OpenStack git namespace to simplify migrations.

Unfortunately this had the effect of creating confusion over which projects were officially a part of OpenStack, and whether or not projects that were not OpenStack could use our project hosting. Stackforge lived on under a different name, "unofficial project hosting", but many potential infrastructure users either didn't understand this or didn't want that strong association to OpenStack for their project hosting [0].

Turns out that we want to be able to host OpenStack and non-OpenStack projects together without confusion in a way that makes all of the projects involved happy. In an effort to make this a reality the OpenStack Infra team has been working through a process to rename itself to make it clear that our awesome project infrastructure and open collaboration tooling is community run, not just for OpenStack, but for others that want to be involved. To this end we've acquired the opendev.org domain which will allow us to host services under a neutral name as the OpenDev Infrastructure team.

The OpenStack community will continue to be the largest and a primary user for the OpenDev Infrastructure team, but our hope in making our infrastructure services more inclusive is that we'll also attract new contributors, which will ultimately benefit OpenStack and other open infrastructure projects.

Our goals for OpenDev are to:
  * Encourage additional active infrastructure contributors to help us scale. Make it clear that this is community-run tooling & infrastructure and everyone can get involved.
  * Make open source collaboration tools and project infrastructure more accessible to those that want it.
  * Have exposure to and dogfooding of OpenStack clouds as viable open source cloud providers.
  * Enable more projects to take advantage of the OpenStack-pioneered model of development and collaboration, including recommended practices like code review and gating.
  * Help build relationships with new and adjacent open source projects and create an inclusive space for collaboration and open source development.

Much of this is still in the early planning stages. This is the infrastructure team's current thinking on the subject, but understand we have an existing community from which we'd like to see buy-in and involvement. To that end we have tried to compile a list of expected FAQ/Q&A information below, but feel free to followup either on this thread or with myself for anything we haven't considered already.

Any transition will be slow and considered so don't expect everything to change overnight. But don't be surprised if you run into some new HTTP redirects as we reorganize the names under which services run. We'll also be sure to keep you informed on any major (and probably minor) transition steps so that they won't surprise you.

Thank you,
Clark

[0] It should be noted that some projects did not mind this and hosted with OpenStack Infra anyway. ARA is an excellent example of this.

FAQ

* What is OpenDev?
OpenDev is community-run tools and infrastructure services for collaboratively developing open source software. 

The OpenDev infrastruture team is the community of people who operate the infrastructure under the umbrella of the OpenStack Foundation.

* What services are you offering? What is the expected timeline?
In the near-term we expect to transition simple services like etherpad hosting to the OpenDev domain. It wil take us months and potentially up to a year to transition key infrastructure pieces like Git and Gerrit.

Example services managed by the team today include etherpad, wiki, the zuul and nodepool CI system, git and gerrit, and other minor systems like pbx conferencing and survey tools.

* Where will these services live?
We've acquired opendev.org and are planning to set up DNS hosting very soon. We will post a simple information page and FAQ on the website and build it out as necessary over time. 

* Why are you changing from the OpenStack infrastructure team to the OpenDev infrastructure team?
In the same way we want to signal that our services are not strictly for OpenStack projects, and that not every project using our services is an official part of OpenStack, we want to make it clear that our team also serves this larger community.

* Who should use OpenDev services? Does it have to be projects related to OpenStack, or any open source projects?
In short, open source contributors who share our community values, especially those who might want to help contribute to improving and maintaining OpenDev infrastructure over time. Projects using OpenDev hosted git and gerrit services should have an OSI-approved license.

* Will the OpenStack projects live at git.opendev.org?
All projects hosted with OpenDev will live at git.opendev.org. For backwards compatibility reasons, at the very least git.openstack.org will be an alias for git.opendev.org for the forseeable future. The same is true of the other existing whitelabel git domains such as git.starlingx.io and git.zuul-ci.org. Whether or not other 'whitelabel' domains are created is an open question. Given a neutral domain name, the desire for such sites may not seem as necessary.

* Does this mean the infrastruture team will be spending less time on OpenStack?
OpenStack will continue to be the largest and a primary user for the OpenDev Infrastructure team, and we expect that our work will benefit all users. There will be additional effort required as we transition to the new namespace and reorganize, but over the long term we hope this inclusive approach will help us attract new contributors and ultimately benefit OpenStack.

* Are OpenStack cloud test resources the only resources that will be used?
At the present time all of the donated resources come to us from a combination of OpenStack Public and Private clouds. Nobody from any of the proprietary clouds has asked to donate resources to us. It is conceivable that the shift to OpenDev could open the door to those cloud providers wanting to donate some cloud resources. Assuming nodepool supports talking to those clouds, it is certainly a possibility, but at the moment it's all speculation.

* Is this name associated with the OpenDev Conferences (opendevconf.com) that OpenStack Foundation has previously organized?
Yes! They are related, albeit indirectly. To quote from the conference's promotional site, "the focus is on bringing together composable open infrastructure technologies across communities and industries." The possibility of cross-promotional tie-ins could prove synergistic, since the conference and the collaboratory we're building share a lot of similar values and goals, and are ultimately supported by the same donors, community and foundation.

* How will OpenDev be governed? Will the OpenStack TC retain oversight over it?
The OpenDev governance discussion is just getting started, but like all OSF-supported initiatives, OpenDev follows the Four Opens, so it will ultimately be directly governed by OpenDev contributors. While it won't be under the sole oversight of the OpenStack Technical Committee anymore, OpenDev users (in particular OpenStack) should be represented in the governance model so that they can feed back their requirements to the OpenDev team.