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My take on the first OpenStack Forum

From my first Forum session, it was clear these sessions would be highly informative and productive, says the OpenStack Foundation’s Chris Hoge.

May 17, 2017
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At the recent OpenStack summit, we took our first test-drive of a new collaboration track, the OpenStack Forum. Set up similarly to the Design Sessions that were previously held at the Summit (and are now run at the Project Team Gathering, or PTG), the Forum gave developers, operators and users the chance to get together in a single space, share problems and solutions, and put their heads together for high-level planning for future releases.

From my first Forum session, where we discussed the future of base OpenStack service dependencies, it was clear to me that the Forum sessions would be highly informative and productive. In that particular session, we helped to reduce the complexity of maintaining database connectors by deciding to only support MySQL as the database for OpenStack projects. (You can catch up on all the Forum sessions via Etherpad, too.) Additionally, we added etcd version 3 as a dependency for managing global locks. These decisions were reached after a cross- community discussion between developers, operators, and users.

In other satisfying Forum sessions, we worked out road maps for future interoperability programs, publishing OpenStack container artifacts to external locations like Docker Hub and established an initial plan for building out our community relations and outreach with the Kubernetes community.

When I wasn’t attending the Forum, I went to several excellent sessions both in the OpenStack Summit programming and in the adjacent Open Source Days sessions. I came to Boston with nervous anticipation about the format changes and left with a deep sense of satisfaction. Indeed, the Boston OpenStack Summit and Forum were some of the best Summits I’ve ever attended.

I headed home full of excitement about the work ahead for myself and the rest of the community. I feel that with this event we’ve curated an environment where every representative, no matter what their role, has a chance to impact the future and quality of the software and our community.

A big thank you to everyone who attended. I’ll see you in Denver for the PTG and at the next Summit!

Chris Hoge is the OpenStack Foundation’s Interop engineer.

 

Cover photo by:
Marco Carrubba
 // CC BY

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