Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/Soren Hansen

= Soren Hansen =

I'm candidate for Nova PTL as well as the PPB. I work for Cisco.

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 well as my project?

I've spent much less time working on features, and mostly focused on various aspects of testing and integration. After many years doing software development, I think I've finally come to terms with the fact that there are too many bugs for me to fix on my own, so I've tried to make it easier and less painful for everyone to avoid introducting bugs. Specifically, I've tried to build some unit testing facilities to simplify testing some things and speed up testing other things.

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

For OpenStack as a whole, it's lack of coherency and consistency. If I didn't know any better, I wouldn't have guessed that all the parts of OpenStack were part of the same project. They use different mechanics for running things, different logging strategies, debugging is wildly different, install methods have very little in common, configuration file syntax is (still) quite different, etc.. Some of these things are converging, but while convergence is great, it means that many of these operationally important things change drastically between releases, which also is very annoying for people deploying this stuff.

For Nova itself, I think stability and predictability are our primary issues at the moment. I don't consider Nova operationally stable and I don't envy people putting this stuff into production as is Also, different drivers expose not just different feature sets (which is fine), but different behaviour for the same features (which is not fine at all). Also, the barrier of entry for developers is both too high (the whole being incredibly complex and changes are exceedingly difficult to test across all the different permutations of drivers) and too low (changes get in, even though they are poorly tested across the board) at the same time.

I also think it's a shame that the AWS API's are getting so little attention.

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

I've been part of OpenStack since its inception. I've been mostly focused on Nova, but have also played a key part in streamlining many infrastructural things, packaging, etc. I held a seat on the PPB up until the last election.

I think the success of OpenStack is tremendously important for the entire industry. We need an entirely free and open cloud computing stack, and we need an ecosystem of providers running it. I think the best candidate to hold that spot is OpenStack.