Friends, Stackers, Community,

I write to announce my candidacy for the Manila PTL position for the
Rocky cycle.

I've worked in in OpenStack since Juno and actively in Manila since
Mitaka or so.  I've had more than one employer in that time and think
it's fair to say that I have a reputation for working upstream in the
interests of the community.  I am one of the more active Manila core
reviewers, care about welcoming and engaging new contributors,
encouraging participation, and at the same time preserving code quality
and the integrity of the project.

Ben Swartzlander is moving on to do other cool stuff, including work
as a Manila contributor.  I expect that I share a rather general
perception that no one can fill his shoes as PTL.  That said, I do
think that if we work together to make Manila shine we can make it
truly awesome!

Some areas I'd like us to work on in the near future include:

* python 3 support.  Upstream python 2 support is going away in 2020
  if I understand correctly and between now and then distros are
  likely to drop support for it.  We need to do our part to get manila
  working with python 3 in devstack, and also with python3 when
  deployed at scale via frameworks like kolla, charms, and TripleO.

* performance and scale. We heard recently that Huawei public cloud is
  running manila with thousands of shares and that Cern is planning to
  move from 83 shares to over 2000 shares.  Let's get more success
  stories with more back ends and build a common understanding of any
  bottlenecks and work plans to address these.

* side-by-side deployment with kubernetes and other clouds.  Whether
  running kubernetes on OpenStack, deploying OpenStack services with
  kubernetes, or building standalone software defined storage with
  manila and cinder without other OpenStack services, this is a space
  where we need to explore and be actively engage.

* production quality open source software defined back ends.  Manila
  has great proprietary storage back ends, but shouldn't we have open
  source back ends that work reliably at scale as well?  We could make
  the generic driver great in this regard, or build out distributed
  file system back ends like cephfs with good data path HA and tenant
  separation.  There are perhaps other alternatives that haven't
  surfaced yet.  There's a lot of room here for innovation and
  certainly demand from cloud operators on this front.

* vendor participation: we have a mix of vendors introducing new
  back ends, sustained participation from vendors with existing
  back ends, and some back ends that no longer have attention from
  their vendors even though -- working with a distro -- I see customers
  indicating that they *want* to use those back ends if only the
  vendors were engaged!  Let's welcome new vendors with open arms
  and help all understand the mutual benefit of remaining involved
  with manila as the community evolves and grows.

Those are some of my ideas.  I offer them as much as anything to
stimulate others working on manila to come to PTG and the Rocky cycle
with their own initiatives.

Also, if you haven't been working in manila and any of the above seems
interesting (or just nuts) come on over!  Manila is a great place to
contribute and innovate!

Thanks for listening.

-- Tom Barron (tbarron)