I would like to propose my candidacy for the Neutron PTL. If you are reading this and you know me, then you probably know what I have been up to up until now, what I have done for the project, and what I may continue to do. If you do not know me, and you are still interested in reading, then I will try not bore you. As member of this project, I have been involved with it since the early days, and I have served as core developer since Havana. If you are wondering whether I am partially to blame for the issues that affect Neutron, well you may have a point, but keep reading... I believe that Neutron itself is a unique project and as such has unique challenges. We have grown tremendously mostly propelled by a highly opinionated vendor perspective. This has caused us some problems and we set foot a cycle or so ago to fix these, but at the same time stay true to the nature of our mission: define logical abstractions, and related implementations to provide on-demand, cloud oriented networking services. As any other project in OpenStack, we are software and we mostly implement 'stuff' in software, and because of that we are prone to all the issues that a software project may have. To this aim, going forward I would like us to improve the following: * Stability is the priority: new features are important, but complete and well tested existing features are more important; we gotta figure out a way to bring the number of bugs down to a manageable number, just like nations are asked to keep their sovereign debt below a certain healthy threshold. * Narrow the focus: now that the Neutron 'stadium' is here with us, external plugins and drivers can integrate with Neutron in a losely manner, giving the core the opportunity to be more razor focus at getting better at what we do: logical abstractions and pluggability. * Consistency is paramount: having grown the review team drastically over the past cycle, it is easy to skew quality in one area over an other. We need to start defining common development and reviewer practices so that, even though we deal are made of many sub-projects and modules, we operate, feel and look like one...just like OpenStack :) * Define long term strategy: we need to have an idea where Neutron starts and where Neutron ends. At some point, this project will reach enough maturity where we feel like we are 'done' and that's okay. Some of us will move on to the next big thing. * Keep developers and reviewers _aware_: we all have to work collectively towards a common set of goals, defined by the release cycle. We will have to learn to push back on _random_ forces that keep distracting us. * I would like to promote a 'you merge it, you own it' type of mentality: even though we are pretty good at it already, we need a better balance between reviews and contributions. If you bless a patch, you got to be prepared to dive into the issues that it may potentially causes. If you bless a patch, you got to be prepared to improve the code around it, and so on. You will be a better reviewer if you learn to live with the pain of your mistakes. This is he only way to establish a virtuous cycle where quality improves time over time. And last but not least: * Improve the relationships with other projects: Nova and QA primarily. We should allocate enough bandwidth to address integration issues with Nova and the other emerging projects, so that we stay plugged with them. QA is also paramount so that no-one is gonna hate us because we send the gate belly up. As for nova-network, I must admit I am highly skeptical by now: if our community were a commercial enterprise trying to solve that problem we would have ran out of money long time ago. We tried time and time again to crack this nut open, and even though we made progress in a number of areas, we haven't really budged where some people felt it mattered. We need to recognize that the problem is not just technical ...it is social; no-one, starting from the developers and the employers behind them, seems to be genuinely concerned with the need of making nova-network a thing of the past. They have other priorities, they are chasing new customers, they want to disrupt Amazon. None of this nova-network deprecation drama fits with their agendas and furthermore, even if we found non-corporate sponsored developers willing to work on it, let's face it migration is a problem that is really not that interesting to solve. So where do we go from here? I do not have a clear answer yet. However, I think we all agree that the Neutron team wants to make Neutron a better product, more aligned with the needs of our users, but we must recognized that _better_ does not mean *like* nova-network, because the two products are not the same and they never will be. Ok, now that you read this, you are ready to know whether you may want to vote for me. Having said that, if you think that I am doing a fine job as core reviewer, you trust my technical in-depth contribution, and you're worried that my PTL duties may take that away from you...exercise your vote right! Thanks for reading and forgive the typos! Armando Migliaccio (aka armax)