2015 Plan

This is living document describing our plans, thoughts and current work in progress for Apache CloudStack.

If you want to work on an item, do not hesitate to write your name, a date and status below the corresponding bullet point.

If you have other items in mind, please add them in the appropriate section.

Code work:

• Keep improving quality, remove dead code
  • coverity scans, sonar etcs.
  • Would be nice to see a dashboard to monitor progress or a weekly email to the list
    
    
• Cleanup JIRA
  • JIRA has over 1400 open issues, a lot of them are not up to date.
  • Hold a JIRAthon to close as many as possible
  • Define JIRA best practices
  • Define commit habit of editing CHANGES.md when making a commit
    
    
• We have successfully moved to GitHub pull requests, we should stop using RB
  • 4/6/2015 S. Goasguen got consensus on list, all reviews updated with a note to move to GH PR.
    
    
• Simplify the dev process and adopt a new committing system to avoid regressions at all costs.
  • We have talked about this for a long time but have failed had doing something concrete. It is time.
    
    
• Remove the AWSAPI (there is a branch without it right now), we should merge it in master
  • Get IP clearance for ec2stack and gstack to get them under ASF governance.
  • 4/6/2015 I. Duffy started VOTE thread to donate ec2stack and gstack to CloudStack project.
    
    
• Several Cloud Providers have unveiled new CloudStack UI, maybe it’s time we do the same.
  • Talk to exoscale, PCextreme, CloudOps
  • Could we get a donation for a user facing UI
    
    
• Solidify the testing infrastructure, keep Jenkins builds running
  
  
• Brainstorm on the future of CloudStack and IaaS in general. What should CloudStack be in 10 years ?
  • While CloudStack is what it is now, nothing prevents us to re-architect, re-think, re-code it within the current framework.
    
    
• Finally, package the mgt server and the KVM agent as Docker containers
  • Docker is a great portability mechanism. We should embrace Docker as a packaging tool (first) and provide container images for our mgt server (at a minimum).
    • 4/6/2015 PL Dion and S. Goasguen maintainer of the cloudstack org on hub.docker.com
  • This could become a type of release artifact that could be easily continuously built.

Ecosystem work:

 
"We have a really strong ecosystem. From configuration management tools, API wrappers, PaaS plugins etc."
"We need to feature our ecosystem clearly on our website, support it and keep on growing it as new technologies emerge."

• Push to get our Ansible module into the Ansible core
  • 4/6/2015. This is really the work of Rene Moser now a CloudStack committee
    
• Publish "official" ansible playbook to deploy CloudStack
• Publish “official” chef recipes to deploy CloudStack
  • We have quite a few Chef users, we should finish to polish up "official" chef recipes to deploy CloudStack
• Identify and publish “official” Puppet recipes
  • Same with Puppet
    
• Build Docker native templates (coreOS, rancherOS, Snappy, Atomic)
  • We already have coreOS ones
• Finally cleanup cloud-init support for CloudStack, this is preventing us from having upstream centOS templates.
  • Identify the issue with the current cloudstack datasource in cloud-init
• Publish playbooks/recipes to deploy workloads on CloudStack (think Hadoop, Spark, Kubernetes)
  • Getting a cloud is one thing but you need to deploy apps on top it and also deploy platforms
  • Provide ready to use recipes/playbooks to deploy platforms on a cloudstack cloud
  • 4/6/2015. .S. Goasguen I am working on Kubernetes and Mesos ansible playbook
• Work actively on up to date integration with CloudFoundry
  • Cloud foundry is a supporter of the CloudStack days in 2015
  • Let's get an up to date integration with cloudstack done (via terraform of the like)
• Work to get our packages in upstream distros
  • There has been some recent work to improve our deb packages, can we build on that to get in Debian ?

On documentation:

In 2014 we successfully moved our docs to the Read The Docs service.

This was a first great move but we need to finish the job and re-organize the docs once and for all.

We need to:

• Re-think our documentation tree
  • Maybe merge all guides in one
• Correct the docs
  • There are still lots of issues that came from the old docs
• Create a new theme for it.
  • 4/6/2015 PL Dion working on something there.
• Close all old JIRA tickets that relate to old docs
  • Maybe during JIRAthon
• Delete wiki pages that relate to old docs
• Make sure google indexes the new docs and has not kept the old ones
• Remove the old docs from the svn website repo
• Routinely build the multi-language support from transifex translation
• If we find a sponsor we might be able to get O'Reilly to publish a CloudStack cookbook.
  • 4/6/2015 S. Goasguen to ask O'Reilly about feasibility.

On Events:

We have at least four great events coming in 2015. We need leads and a program committer for each of those.

• Austin
• Seattle
• Tokyo
• Dublin.

Let’s meet at one of those events.

 Let’s submit a talk or a poster, tell everyone about the great stuff we are doing with CloudStack.

 If you are in a position at your company to sponsor the event, please do, we need everyone's help to make those great events.

 
"Open Source is about collaboration and sharing, so let’s meet around the globe from Sao Paulo to Dublin to Tokyo and talk Cloud, DevOps and Docker ..."

On the Website:
 

We can live without a website, but having a good one is a great way to showcase our community and our work.

 The current website is an improvement to what it was before but we need to do much much better.
 

I recently did a small experiment and we could use github page.

• There is now a gh-pages branch in our repo.
• Anyone can actually contribute to that branch and it will rebuild a site automatically.
• 4/6/2014 Update. It does not seem that we can use this for c.a.o due to SSL certs and a few other things
• 4/6/2014 S. Goasguen moved website to use middleman. This is currently committed to svn repo

If we could find a great web designer in our community, we could rebuild our site and make it a very modern, polished site that would attract even more people.

"Let’s keep on making CloudStack great in the coming year and let’s have fun doing it" -Sebastien Goasguen, 2015 CloudStack VP