## Description:
VCL is a modular cloud computing platform which dynamically provisions and
brokers remote access to compute resources including virtual machines,
bare-metal computers, and resources in other cloud platforms. A self-service
web portal is used to request resources and for administration. VCL became a
TLP on June 20, 2012.
## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention at this time
## Activity:
- Code for the upcoming release is just about complete.
- The most significant new feature is support for automatically joining an
Active Directory domain when a Windows image is loaded. This is complete
but needs a bit of testing.
- Work continues on documentation. We are starting fresh using a VCLDOCS
Confluence space created long ago but never really used. This is making it
easier to keep track of what has been reworked rather than trying to
update and sort out all of the old, disorganized pages. Pages will be
moved en masse once enough content has been updated and organized to
surpass the old docs.
## Health report:
Overall, the health of the project is fair but could be improved. I think
there are a few factors that have limited the appeal of potential
contributors:
- Poor documentation. Hopefully our updated documentation will increase
interest. This alone, however, won't likely make a huge difference. There
are other projects with poor documentation that draw a respectable amount
of development contributions.
- Staleness. The codebase does not use any of the modern frameworks of the
month. It's basicly old fashioned PHP and Perl. There are some JavaScript
components, but these mainly use the Dojo Toolkit which seems to be losing
popularity. We could think about a significant rewrite and use things such
as Angular, Laravel, etc.
- Marketing. The project began at NC State University and still has a strong
NCSU relation. Years ago, leaders at NCSU along with colleagues at IBM did
a great job spreading the word about VCL to other universities and
contacts. Many of these people have either retired or moved on to other
roles. Regardless, NCSU's past marketing is appreciated but this is the
PMC's responsibility. We need to work to think of ways to make the project
more attractive to contributors and to communicate it. Someone recently
mentioned VCL in a thread on a higher education list hosted by Stanford. I
have alerts set up for such occurances and responded with additional
information. We should do a better job monitoring other lists and venues
including other ASF projects for opportunities. VCL also integrates with a
number of other technologies. There may be opportunites to have the
project included on other website's such as the "Applications using
libvirt" page. [1] This will be discussed by the PMC members.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 7 PMC members.
- No new PMC members added in the last 3 months
- Last PMC addition was Aaron Coburn on Tue Jun 19 2012
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 8 committers.
- No new committers added in the last 3 months
- Last committer addition was Young Hyun Oh at Sun Dec 08 2013
## Releases:
- Last release was 2.4.2 on Wed Apr 15 2015
## Mailing list activity:
- Mailing list traffic is essentially flat. Dev list traffic increase is
due to the final tasks to prepare the release. User list traffic is down.
This could partially be due to the holidays.
- dev@vcl.apache.org:
- 128 subscribers (down -2 in the last 3 months):
- 109 emails sent to list (77 in previous quarter)
- user@vcl.apache.org:
- 169 subscribers (up 1 in the last 3 months):
- 12 emails sent to list (20 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
- 18 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 8 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
[1] https://libvirt.org/apps.html