Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/Thierry Carrez

= Thierry Carrez (ttx) =

I'm candidate for election at the PPB.

OpenStack bio
I've been handling release management for the OpenStack project since November 2010. This task is mostly about coordinating efforts in the project to converge to regular releases, publicizing what we are working on to reduce useless duplication of effort, helping the PTLs in managing their projects, and trying to facilitate development and collaboration in general. I've been an elected member of the PPB since March 2011. I also recently set up the OpenStack vulnerability management team to add some strict procedures to how we handle incoming security reports. In my free time, I help with the core development infrastructure (CI team), I try to triage incoming bugs, and I contribute features and bugfixes, mostly for Nova and mostly in the security improvements area.

Questions
1. Since the last elections, what areas have you focused on and what contributions have you made in order to improve OpenStack as a whole?

As an elected member of the PPB, I tried to represent the interests of the project as a whole and the community of contributors that makes it possible, rather than the interests of a given company or project. My focus is on making sure the decisions we make always increase the quality and the coherence of our regular releases, without affecting negatively the openness and transparency principles that this project is built on. As a code contributor, my focus is on making OpenStack more secure, more auditable and more instrumented.

2. What are the most pressing/important issues facing OpenStack as a whole?

I think the most pressing issue is stability. Until this point the project was relatively young, so the users were patient and forgiving. But we need to seriously muscle our game and live up to their high expectations. We have several efforts under way (in CI, QA or release management) to improve in that area: the next 6 months will be where we succeed or fail. The second issue is that, as a project, Nova is too big and too monolithic. Managing it as a single project becomes an impossible task. We need to return to smaller teams of experts in specific areas -- and that's also a task that we need to complete in the next 6 months.

3. What is your relationship to OpenStack & why is its success important to you and/or your company?

OpenStack is important to me personally because I think the way we develop it, based on open source, open design, open development and open community, is the right way to do software development. I'm a strong believer and public advocate of open innovation, the ability for multiple companies to not waste their time duplicating each other's efforts and collaborate in an open project. If we fail, then I'm proven wrong... I'll do all I can to defend this model and make it succeed.

Links

 * My blog: http://fnords.wordpress.com/
 * Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/tcarrez