Linux, open source, audio, and stuff

At the beginning of this year,  I was being asked to share my team’s experience standing up PowerKVM CI with teams that were just getting started.  Jay Pipes, Anita Kuno and the OpenStack infrastructure team were feeling overwhelmed by all the new third-party CI systems. So, after a brief discussion, we agreed to start this work group after the Atlanta Design Summit. We set out to help improve the third-party testing experience in OpenStack and have now grown into a large group of CI operators.

As a result, we held our very first meeting at the Paris Kilo Design Summit Third-Party CI work group session. The session event page showed 89 signed up and that number was close since I was estimating around 80-100 attending.  It was such a pleasure to get to meet everyone I have been interacting with for the past several months.

(Picture by Elizabeth K. Joseph)

The session started with a background overview by Anita. I then led the discussion on the agenda items agreed upon in the weekly Third-party CI meetings. These items are listed in the etherpad for the session, so I won’t repeat them here.

During the session, I asked those attending a few questions and did a quick show of hands and came up with some interesting answers:

1.  The majority of CI operators attending had contributed at least one patch to OpenStack. I was somewhat surprised with this response. After discussing it and thinking it through, I realized that this made sense. The operators that understand how to participate in an open source community, understand how important it is to come to design summit.
2.  Almost everyone attending the session knew about the Third-party CI weekly meetings. But, not nearly that many actually attend.
3. Most Third-party CI systems have some functionality that they did not get from upstream CI, that they had to create for themselves.  Most of those system teams are willing to share what they have created and learned with the third-party community.

Time in the session went way too quickly. We spent a good portion discussing how to bootstrap teams, improve docs and finding alternate meeting times, but then had to rush through improving reliability and better self-regulating. I spent the rest of the week in numerous hall discussions on these topics.

My takeaways are:

1.  Figure out how to help the operators that didn’t come to summit become contributors to OpenStack community, and to participate in the Third-party CI work group.
2.  Get other third-party operators to start contributing to the care and feeding of this work group and the weekly meetings.
3.  Create an additional meeting time for those teams that would like to attend the weekly meeting, but can’t because of time zone differences.
4.  Help coordinate and participate in a work group focused on improving third-party CI documentation.
5.  Pull together the efforts to contribute a third-party CI monitoring tool and dashboard (more on that in a later post).

We are now at a place where we as third-party CI systems can organize and help improve the consumability of OpenStack CI and ourselves in the process.  If you were not able to attend the summit session, I encourage you to get involved, attend a weekly meeting if you can, and be on the lookout for an additional meeting time that would be more convenient.

Thanks everyone that attended!