Hi everyone, I'm announcing my candidacy as ChefOpenStack PTL for the Liberty/Mitaka release. In case you are wondering why I wrote 'Liberty/Mitaka' and not just 'Mitaka', we are not directly coupled to the official release cycle and have just started to work on our stable/liberty release and will continue this for a while until we can start with Mitaka. Since we moved to the big tent a couple of months ago, we have made some significant changes and adaptions in our workflow and are now beginning to get back to speed with our main goals for Liberty and Mitaka. During the Kilo cycle we have started to establish a full integration testing of the OpenStack deployment with our cookbooks and the openstack-chef-repo to avoid any conflicts which may arise from the complexity of handling multiple cookbook repositories. We need to keep this as one of our focus points for the next release cycles. Although these initial steps where already quite helpful, we are still running into a lot of problems due to this mentioned complexity and interdependency between our cookbooks and the cookbooks depended on in these. My main goal for the next release cycle is to reduce this complexity and start the refactoring process for the most important cookbooks deploying the core OpenStack services. One big part in this process will be the refactoring of the service configuration templates and the reduction of partially redundant attributes used and redefined in multiple cookbooks. To simplify the handling of the cookbooks especially for new users, I also think it is necessary to refactor our libraries and move them at least partially into light-weight resources. Apart from this big refactoring topic, I would like to shorten our release cycles to get closer to the official release cycles and allow users to deploy the current OpenStack release with our cookbooks as soon as the OpenStack service projects release a newer version. Last but not least, I think we need to start focussing on advertising the Chef OpenStack project itself to get more of the users to contribute their adaptions into the 'official' project instead of forking it. A big part in this process will be the simplification of the process for new contributors. We might need a better documentation, faster reviews or amazingly fluffy green unicorns here, but we definitely need to focus on this to get more people involved in the project as active contributors if we want to keep up with the constant changes and especially all the new and interesting projects arising. I have had the pleasure to be part of the Chef OpenStack project for about 2 years as a contributor and have also been a core reviewer for over a year now. I would like to focus a bit more on some organisational tasks in this project and continue some ideas I had during the last year as a core reviewer watching and reading some very interesting suggestions and concepts from people using and contributing to the project. Thank you for your time and consideration, Jan Klare irc: jklare mail: j.klare@cloudbau.de