Merge "Add Vladimir Kozhukalov candidacy for Openstack-Helm 2024.2 PTL"

candidates/2024.2/OpenStack_Helm/kozhukalov@gmail.com

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+Hello Everyone,
+
+Here is my candidacy letter to continue as a PTL for OpenStack-Helm for 2024.2 release.
+
+Let me first remind you what we've managed to achieve during 2024.1:
+
+- OVN is now considered as working well and recommended as the default netowking backend.
+  We now have 2023.2 compute-kit test job with OVN and it worth to have such test job for future releases.
+
+- We switched all our test jobs to the upstream Ingress-Nginx Helm chart and now it is a recommended
+  way to deploy the ingress controller. Users can utilize other ingress controller implementations if they need.
+
+- The mariadb-cluster chart was introduced. It utilizes the Mariadb-Operator for managing Mariadb
+  clusters. At the same time the HA part of the Openstack-Helm mariadb chart was also improved.
+
+- For about a half of test jobs we now utilize the Rook operator for managing Ceph clusters. The ceph-adapter-rook
+  chart was introduced which allows users to deploy Ceph either by means of using Openstack-Helm ceph-* charts
+  or Rook operator.
+
+- The deployment documentation was updated.
+
+- The DPDK test jobs was revived.
+
+- Support of Ceph RBD as a backend for ephemeral VM disks was added.
+
+- The Ansible role for deploying test jobs enviroment was improved. Now we can run all the test jobs on either
+  single-node or multi-node environments. This is important to be able to utilize multiple small nodes for CI instead
+  of one huge node.
+
+There are also some activities that are currently in progress:
+
+- The OpenStack deployment with Metallb.
+
+- Using uWSGI for API services.
+
+I would like to say thank you so much to all our contributors and I am very pleased to be a part of the team.
+
+We still have a lot to do:
+
+- Let's simplify the Openstack-Helm code base even further and use third party Helm charts wherever possible
+  and keep focusing more on Openstack charts.
+
+- Many of our users struggle to deploy the production ready Openstack clusters. This means we need to continue
+  imporving the user documentation. We probably can give some examples of how users can manage their passwords,
+  how they can monitor their clusters and integrate their clusters with their CI/CD tools.
+
+I would like to continue serving as a PTL of the Openstack-Helm and do my best to improve the project.
+
+Thank you,
+Vladimir Kozhukalov
+kozhukalov@gmail.com