Cinder/PTLCandidates/Fall2012/JohnGriffith

= John Griffith =

irc: jgriffith

Personal Bio
I'm a software engineer with a diverse engineering background in the storage industry for the last 15 years. My background includes everything from hardware design to linux kernel drivers, to test automation design as well as management API design and implementation. I'm passionate about Open Source software and the importance of giving back.

OpenStack Bio
Qualifications:

I've been an active contributor to Nova since November of 2011, starting out as many by adding a driver, but then began helping out anywhere and everywhere I could. IRC questions/conversations, assigning bugs to myself and working on them etc.

Contribution over the last six months:

During the last summit I lead conversations around the idea of Cinder and organized the effort to kick off the project. Since then I've been acting as interim PTL for the Cinder project and have successfully driven the effort to promote Cinder to core status as an OpenStack project. I'm continually learning, and absolutely love doing the work!

While it's been a learning experience I have been fulfilling the responsibilities or PTL, and dedicated every day to the success of the project. I'm passionate about the success of Cinder and believe it has vast potential and is critically important to OpenStack as a whole.

Most critical aspects for Cinder in the next 6 months:

The next six months are going to be defining for Cinder. The most important thing is going to be showing a smooth transition from Nova-Volume to Cinder is possible. There's a lot of concern regarding this subject and it's something that I keep in mind with any change/fix or addition to the code.

Aside from the initial release, the critical aspects for Grizzly are going to be gain momentum in terms of visibility and participation, focus on quality and provide new features. Quality is my number one priority, and I think there is a lot of potential to harden the core code in the project and greatly improve the user experience as well as capabilities.

Philosophical ideas regarding being a PTL:

There are of course all of the items listed in the being a PTL guide. In addition however I think it is very important for a PTL to be accessible in a multitude of ways. This includes questions, helping people that want to get involved with OpenStack and most of all listening to ideas/input. One of the things that makes Open Source work is the vast pool of ideas and suggestions from various views and backgrounds, keeping an open mind and constantly challenging existing paradigms leads to a better project.

I believe it's crucial to build a strong core team, listen to input from users, storage vendors and other developers and make something that is truly better than anything else that's out there. I don't believe we should strive to offer the *same* functionality as other cloud platforms, but offer something that is MUCH better!