Hey everyone, Wow, how six months flies! I'd like to announce my candidacy to continue on as Cinder PTL for the Newton release cycle. A lot has been accomplished in the Mitaka cycle. After a lot of work by many folks, over a couple development cycles, we now have what we consider a "tech preview" of rolling upgrades. It just hasn't had enough runtime and testing for us to say it's "official". We will likely need to fix a few minor things in the Newton timeframe before it's fully baked and reliable. But it has come a long way and I'm really happy with the progress that has been made. Another priority we had identified for Mitaka was active/active high availability of the c-vol service. We were not able to complete that work, but many pieces have been put in place to support that in Newton. We fixed several API races and added the ability to use something like tooz for locking. These are foundation pieces for us to be able to start breaking out things and running in a reliable active/active configuration. Microversion support has been added and there is now a new v3 API endpoint. This was a bit of a controversy as we really had just started to get folks to move off of v1 to v2. To be safe though I decided it would protect end users better to have a clearly separate new API endpoint for the microversion compatibility. And now hopefully it is our last. Replication was another slightly controversial feature implemented. Late in Liberty we finally agreed on a spec for a v2 version of replication. The v2 spec was approved so late that no one actually had time to implement it for that release. As we started to implement it for Mitaka we found that a lot of compromises had crept in during the spec review that it had the risk of being too complex and having some of the issues we were trying to get rid of by moving away from replication v1. At our midcycle we had a lot of discussion on replication and finally decided to change course before it was too late. Whether that ends up being the best choice when we look back a year from now or not, I'm proud of the team that we were willing to put on the brakes and make changes - even though it was more work for us - before we released something out to end users that would have caused problems or a poor experience. Other than that, there's mostly been a lot of good bug fixes. Eight new drivers have been added from (I think) five different vendors. The os-brick library is now 1.0 (actually 1.1.0) and is in use by both Cinder and Nova for common storage management operations so there is not a duplication and disconnect of code between the two projects. We were also able to add a Brick cinder client extension to be able to perform storage management on nodes without Nova (bare metal, etc.). None of this goodness was from me. We have a bunch of smart and active members of the Cinder community. They are the ones that are making a difference, working across the community, and making sure Cinder is a solid component in an OpenStack cloud. Being part of the Cinder community has been one of the best and most engaging parts of my career. I am lucky enough to have support from my company to be able to devote time to being a part of this. I would love the opportunity to continue as PTL to not just contribute where I can, but to make sure the folks doing the heavy lifting have the support and project organization they need to avoid distractions and be able to focus on getting the important stuff done. I think in Newton we need to continue the momentum and get Active/Active Cinder volume service support implemented. We need to continue to work closely with the Nova team to make sure our interaction is correct and solid. But also work to make Cinder a useful storage management interface in environments without Nova. I will continue to encourage developer involvement and vendor support. We need to improve the user experience with better error reporting when things go wrong. And last, but definitely not least, we need to continue to expand our testing - unit, functional, and tempest - to make sure we can avoid those errors and deliver a high quality and solid solution. I really feel I'm just getting into the swing of things. I would love the opportunity to serve as PTL for the Newton release. Thank you for your consideration. Sean McGinnis (smcginnis)