2015 Plan

This is living document describing our plans and current work in progress for Apache CloudStack:

Code work:

• Keep improving quality, remove dead code, cleanup JIRA, cleanup Review Board
• We have successfully moved to GitHub pull requests, we should stop using RB
• 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
• I am going to push for IP clearance of ec2stack and gstack to get them under ASF governance.
• Several Cloud Providers have unveiled new CloudStack UI, maybe it’s time we do the same.
• 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).
• 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.

Things that come to mind:

• Push to get our Ansible module into the Ansible core
• Publish “official” chef recipes to deploy CloudStack
• Identify and publish “official” Puppet recipes
• Build Docker native templates (coreOS, rancherOS, Snappy, Atomic)
• Finally cleanup cloud-init support for CloudStack, this is preventing us from having upstream centOS templates.
• Publish playbooks/recipes to deploy workloads on CloudStack (think Hadoop, Spark, Kubernetes)
• Work actively on up to date integration with CloudFoundry

On documentation:

I and couple others successfully moved our docs to the Read The Docs service. This was a first great move but we need to finish the job.
We need to rethink our documentation tree, maybe merge all guides in one, correct the docs, create a new theme for it.
This is an easy area to contribute to if you are using cloudstack. Just send a pull request (click on the top right ribbon).
If you don’t know how, then it will teach you how to use github, great exercise.
We also need to routinely build the multi languages support.

On Events:

We have at least four great events coming in 2015. Austin, Seattle, Tokyo and Dublin.
Let’s meet at one of those events.
Let’s submit a talk or a poster, tell everyone about the great stuff you are doing with CloudStack.
If you are in a position at your company to sponsor the event, please do, we need your 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 :)


Finally 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.
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.
It’s an easy one, it just needs someone to step up and do it.

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