OpenStack’s big tent has expanded to house new projects: Monasca, Senlin, Fuel, Freezer
and Winstackers. In this series of posts, we’ll give you a quick overview of these projects, introduce you to the project team leads (PTLs) and find out what they’re looking for from the community.

In this post, Superuser talks to Fuel PTL Dmitry Borodaenko, development manager at Mirantis.

Fuel is a deployment service whose mission is to streamline and accelerate the process of deploying, testing and maintaining various configurations of OpenStack at scale.

What new features/enhancements/fixes are expected for the Mitaka release?

This one is going to be a short cycle for Fuel: we’re transitioning from lagging a few months behind OpenStack releases to closely following all key upstream release milestones. In a way, it’s an enhancement: developers and operators will be able to deploy Mitaka with Fuel, evaluate it and experiment with it as Mitaka is being developed, instead of some time in the middle of the next release cycle.

Our main topic will be life cycle management: managing configuration changes, applying security updates, adding and removing hardware, upgrading the control plane, and so on. Ultimately, we want to make all day-two operations as simple and predictable as the initial deployment.

This is a broad topic that will take more than one release to complete. In Mitaka, we’ll only have time to cover fundamentals, such as introducing a shared configuration service and evolving our orchestration engine.

What contributions do you need most from the community?

We want to make Fuel more accessible to new contributors, make it easier
to hack on. This means improving developers documentation,decoupling individual components to make them easier to understand and adapt for your own needs, eliminating the differences between Fuel and other OpenStack projects in CI and other engineering processes and, in general, reducing the number of surprises for new Fuel contributors.

We have a proposal in the works for a "Hack on Fuel" workshop in Austin, where we’re going to teach people how to find their way around Fuel codebase, adapt different components to their needs, and troubleshoot their changes.

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions.
For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [fuel]
To get code, report bugs, view blueprints, etc. check out the Fuel Launchpad page
The Fuel team holds weekly meetings Thursdays at 16:00 UTC at the #openstack-meeting-alt channel on IRC.

Cover Photo // CC BY NC