Hi friends, I'd like to throw in my hats (yes, all of them, I'll get to that shortly) for the Ironic PTL election. In case you don't immediately recognize me, I'm 'jroll' on IRC, where you can always find me. I've been working on the Ironic project for a year and a half now, as one of an architect of the first public cloud deployment of Ironic. It's amazing to see how far we've come. When I joined the project, it could boot a server. Now we have a laundry list of hardware drivers, support for cleaning a node after teardown, ironic-python-agent, Bifrost, UEFI support, and so on and so on, with plenty more on the way. Over the last cycle or so, I've helped lead the charge on moving the project even faster. It took much debate, but we now have fine-grained API versioning that helps us advance our API faster and signal changes to users. We're also beginning to embark on our new release model, which I have great hopes for: we shipped 23 bug fixes in the 16 days between 4.0 and 4.1. I'd like to continue serving our users by releasing frequently. Back to the hats: I've worn many while working on Ironic, so I think I have a unique perspective on the different aspects of the project. With my deployer/operator hat on: * Let's make deployments easier. Deploying Ironic with the rest of OpenStack is complex, and we need to improve the docs and tools around that. We should also point people at Bifrost more often, where they just need the Cobbler use case of spinning up a bunch of metal. * Let's make operator's lives better. Ironic has cases where things can get into bad states. Let's document those (or better yet, fix them!). We should also make it easier for operators to get an insight into their environment. Some of our logs are vague or hard to find; we need to improve that. We should also work on the metrics spec to give ops insight into Ironic's performance. With my developer hat on: * Let's build a good devref, similar to Nova's. It's difficult for new or casual contributors to find their way around the project, because we don't have docs on how we develop code and the conventions around doing so. For example, when does a patch need to bump the API version? Cores know this; is it documented? * I'd also love to see us grow our core reviewer team. We mostly do a good job at keeping reviews timely. However, our reviewers are also fantastic developers, and it would be great if they had more time to write code. I think we should evaluate giving more people +2 power, and trusting them not to land code if they aren't familiar with that part of the system. With my leader hat on: * Let's collaborate better with Nova. In the past, we haven't done a good job of this, and there was even some animosity between the projects. We now have two Nova liasions that help out by bring patches to nova-core's attention. It's a good start, but I think we need people working on Ironic that follow development in Nova that could impact us; truly collaborating to make sure Nova doesn't break us, and vice-versa. These folks should be actively reviewing Nova specs and code to ensure it doesn't break our model, and working to bring our model back in line with what Nova expects. * Let's also start paying better attention to cross-project initiatives in OpenStack; collaborating with the API working group, cross-project specs, etc. I've started doing this, but the community needs more people doing it. We should be reviewing specs from these teams and making sure we implement those initiatives in a timely fashion. Most recent example: Keystone v3. We're way behind on getting that work done. There's other things I'd like to accomplish as well, but those are the main pieces. As for my downstream hat, it won't be getting as much use if I'm elected. You can look at my history as one of the most active Ironic developers on IRC, helping people solve problems, reviewing code, and helping design large features. I've confirmed with my employer that if I'm elected PTL, nearly 100% of my focus will be upstream, and you'll be seeing more of me, for better or worse. :) Regardless of the outcome, I'm looking forward to serving the Ironic community during Mitaka. Thanks for reading, // jim