The OpenStack Denver Project Teams Gathering (PTG) was a very busy, but productive week. There were some shining moments and some things that didn’t work very well. Since I only have Atlanta PTG to compare it to, there were things this time that I would like to see done differently. In Atlanta, there were team sessions scheduled all week, with a loose cross-project focus the first two days. In Denver, this was made more formal, where the first two days were only cross-project sessions. The reason this worked in Altanta was because if you were interested in more than one project, you could pick and choose sessions spread out over the whole week that you needed to be in. Since the project-specific sessions were only the last three days in Denver, this compressed schedule made it much harder to cover everything. What happen as a result was the first two days were sparsely attended discussions, some went well and others not at all. Some developers didn’t even show up for the first two days making true cross-project discussions even harder.
Traveling to Denver was uneventful, although I still don’t much care for flying Southwest. The concept of having to fight for a seat brings back memories of general admission concerts as a teenager and being crammed against a stage. Seating becomes a competition of quickest online check-in that opens 24 hrs before flight time or upgraded “early-bird” priority for an additional cost. Not a good model, and one more thing to have to worry about when traveling.
Monday started off with breakfast with fellow IBMers. I then started off with the Documentation cross-project session. There were some good discussions on future plans and lesson learned from the previous cycle. I had lunch with another IBMer and them went to the skip-level upgrades breakout being driven by TripleO. TripleO will be shifting to using container-based services in the Queens development cycle, but the discussion basically centered around Ubuntu and how they handled migrations and upgrades. The highlight of the day was the final breakout session with representatives from the Kolla, Cinder, and Ironic teams where we discussed the alternative Kolla dev environment instead of using Devstack. There were concerns about the available functionality, but the environment is basically there and ready for developers to start using it. The more use it gets, the better it will become. We all agreed that it was too early to start planning for Devstack replacement for upstream CI testing, for projects that would be interested. Right now, the idea is to just get developers to start using the environment to work out any changes that need to be made to make it more robust. That night, the Ironic team had their team dinner, and even though I have not been as active there this last release, they were all gracious enough to let me tag along.
Tuesday morning started with team pictures, some of which turned out pretty good, but I still haven’t found the repository for all of them. A few were posted here and there, but never all of them, not sure why. Here is the pic for the Kolla team, it turned out pretty good. There were silly versions also, but, meh. 
Next, it was time to find a session that is interesting and hopefully useful. Success. Back to the Documentation team room where progress was made on the remaining focus items for this cycle. Doug Hellman then did a great tutorial session on the new documentation system. He did a great job laying out how it is all organized and how to use and modify the templates. Very useful for the upcoming Kolla work this release. Tuesday lunch and afternoon were a series of very useful non-PTG scheduled impromptu discussions with partners and collaborators.
That evening, IBM did a great job sponsoring the PTG Happy Hour Reception social. There was a really nice introduction made by Sean Dague, which reminded me that we’ve been at this for more than 5 years. It is amazing what has been accomplished in that time, but more importantly, the good friends I’ve made along the way. This social was a really good way to chat with all those friends and enjoy a glass of wine and some tasty food. Thanks IBM.
Wednesday started the much anticipated team specific part of PTG Denver. More devs arrived ready to dive into their team’s plans. Since Ironic, TripleO and Kolla were happening at the same time, it was hard to balance the presence at these discussions. Luckily we were able to have Mike Turek representing our team at the Ironic sessions, so that made it easier for me to focus on Kolla sessions. The session started with a generous time allotted for Kolla documentation restructuring and enhancement. The documentation team came to the session and were a big help getting us organized for a new new table of contents. There was a cross-project discussion that afternoon on TripleO and Kolla collaboration. They went through the release plans to move to using Kolla containers. This session went over some of the needs for the team to be able to use the same orchestration playbooks. That evening we had the Kolla team dinner at a local BBQ restaurant.
Thursday started with a few meetings for downstream topics back at work. I listened in to the Kolla gate discussion, while I caught up on email and followed up with the todo actions from the morning’s meetings. I went by the Cyborg room in hopes of hearing the state of accelerator resources for OpenStack, but was frustrated when I found out that the session had been rescheduled and I had missed it. I switched to the TripleO room for a good overview of their plans for migrating to containers. The plan is to at least migrate to containers in the overcloud in the Queens release, and possibly for the undercloud as well. That afternoon, Tony Breeds drove a discussion on multi-architecture support in TripleO. It went fairly smoothly, with the initial plan to continue to support x86 architecture for the undercloud, adding support for a non-x86 overcloud in Queens. We have some work to do here to make sure that the container images are available to those needing them. That evening, we had the LTC team dinner after yet another happy hour sponsored by the Foundation. It was great to get to hang out with the team in a non-work setting and the food was fantastic.
Friday was a planned work day for the Kolla team. We split up into different groups and addressed topics ranging from the documentation restructuring to upstream testing and Zuulv3. I didn’t get to spend much time with the team as I was flying home that afternoon, but I was able to get started on the patch for the new documentation restructuring table of contents. I stuffed in a few more conversations, had a quick bite of lunch and headed for the airport.
In summary, I think the Denver PTG was successful. The layout of the sessions was a little awkward, but worked fine. There were complaints about the venue and the train noise, but they never really bothered me. As usual, at any OpenStack event I have been to, the best discussions happened outside of the scheduled topics. The best parts are lunch and dinner with team members and interaction with IBMers that I never get to see face to face except at events like this. Next is Sydney for Summit and then, the just announced location of Dublin for the next PTG. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there.