Defining a Long-term Strategy and Roadmap for OpenStack

Back in September, 2014 Randy Bias presented at the Silicon Valley Forum for OpenStack on the topic of OpenStack product strategy - or the lack thereof.

For the past two days, members of the OpenStack community came together at the VMWare offices in Palo Alto, California to discuss three topics which are important to the future of OpenStack.  So important, that some people in the community suggest that OpenStack is in danger of collapsing on itself.  The key topics discussed included:

• Establishing a Long-Term Vision for OpenStack
• A Tagging Approach to Project Maturity
• DefCore and RefStack

The 2 days of discussion were very positive as I saw members of different companies come together with a common interest of fostering adoption and increasing the quality of OpenStack.  The main topic of discussion centered around developing a long-term roadmap and establishing a framework in which the Product Workgroup can function within the community.

As we break for the day, we'll be sub-dividing into teams which will be focused on three major areas:

• Definition of the Product Roadmap Process - This group will be focused on how we can best define a roadmap for OpenStack that looks beyond a single release.
• Socialization within the OpenStack Community - working with PTLs, core team members and other resources to gain support and buy-in from the people writing code, performing reviews and actually developing the software.
• Cross-project Coordination - working with the project PTLs to determine how cross-project features are implemented today and determine how we can help the process.

A large majority of attendees in Palo Alto represent the major vendors writing code for OpenStack today.  Our hope is that, by defining these processes, we can better work with the PTLs and the OpenStack community in order to drive quality and adoption of OpenStack software for public and private clouds.

Full details of the meeting can be seen in our Etherpad

If you're interested in getting involved in this effort, please join our Mailing List . If you're a product manager working within the OpenStack ecosystem, this is a group you don't want to be left out of.