Hi Tackers,

I would like to announce my candidacy to continue as Tacker PTL for the Ocata
release.

I'm a member of the Tacker community right from its Neutron ServiceVM days.
I actively participated in its transition into NFV Orchestration area and its
graduation into big-tent. Since becoming an official project our developer 
community has grown and has more diverse [1].

Newton was a packed cycle for us with many stellar achievements from the 
community: VNF Scaling, Audit Events, VNF Forwarding Graph using Neutron
Networking-SFC (we are almost there!) and External Alarm-based Monitoring
using Ceilometer. As usual tons of refactoring work happened to continue 
to shed the "Neutronisms" in the project. 

Along the way, we have become a better openstack citizen following best
practices like Reno release-notes, better release processes, and better
python3 support. We also expanded our core-team with three new members. 

My vision for Tacker Ocata is along the following workstreams identified 
in the recent weekly meeting. 

* Decomposed VIM drivers:
We need to enable a healthy ecosystem of VIM drivers beyond the current 
default openstack VIM driver. Our user community has mixed hypervisor/cloud
technology in their deployments - with some existing pre-openstack systems 
(a.la, VMware), some OpenStack based clouds, and, forward looking into 
Containers and public clouds. All this needs an easy to add VIM driver to
bolt underneath Tacker. Luckily our architecture is designed with this in
mind right from day one. We just need to make it easy (a) for developers to
bring in new VIM drivers and (b) for deployers to quickly add new VIM
capabilities without requiring a fork-lift upgrade of Tacker for every new
VIM type.

As part of this workstream, I'd work towards bringing in a Container VIM 
type interfacing with Magnum / Zun.

Lifecycle Features:
* Finish left over Newton features - VNFC and NSD
* Better integration with external EM / FCAPS systems
* Enable support for VNFs leveraging Neutron's latest VLAN aware VM feature 

Project maintenance:
 * Doc: API reference guide
 * Pecan API framework
 * OSC support
 * Finish python3x TC goal

Tons of fun things to do! However, Ocata is going to be a short cycle.
So, over next few weeks, I'll help to continue to groom these topics and
zoom on those that are implementable in one dev cycle and clearly 
identify some tracks that would carry over to the next cycle.

In Ocata, given an opportunity to serve as your PTL, I'll continue my role 
as the "chief enabler" for this amazing community of developers that I'm so 
proud to lead over the last two cycles. 

- Sridhar Ramaswamy (irc: sridhar_ram)