Hi everyone,

The Mitaka cycle for OpenStack-Ansible (OSA) has had the following successes:

1. Our community has grown. The activity in the IRC channel has shown that we
   now have more people making use of OSA to deploy both private and public
   OpenStack clouds. Our development team now includes two non-Rackspace core
   team members who are comitted to ensuring that OSA's development process
   has more diversity in its inputs and outputs.
   We have also increased the breadth of roles available to our deployers. Most
   importantly they were developed by non-core development team members.

2. The roles are more modular. We've split out the Ansible roles into
   composable units which are usable without the dynamic inventory, LXC and
   without the general playbook tooling which has been implemented in the
   integrated build OSA repository.

3. Multi-OS platform support enablement has progressed. Several of the roles
   in our stable are already passing the CentOS-based gate check, even though
   this work was very low priority in the cycle.

4. Usability has improved. We've done an amazing job of improving install guide
   documentation, improving developer documentation, and adding release notes
   for the Mitaka release and retrospectively for the Liberty release.

It would be my honour to serve as PTL for the Newton cycle to continue the
journey along the following themes:

1. Grow the community
   I would like to continue to increase our community participation through the
   engagement with other OpenStack Projects and the Operator community. I
   believe that it's crucial to the success of the project to increase the
   diversity of contributors. Our work in the Mitaka cycle has laid a good
   foundation on which I'd like to build through active engagement with the
   respective communities to share how OSA can meet the needs of both the
   Developer and Operator communities.

2. Improve testing
   In the Mitaka cycle we laid the foundation for broader and deeper testing
   for each role and for the integrated tests. In the Newton cycle we need
   to complete that work in order to ensure that we have greater confidence
   that every patch submitted produces a functional build and does not
   introduce regressions in existing deployments.
   We need to ensure that each role is tested both in terms convergence and in
   terms of function.
   We also need to ensure that we have integrated testing for a broader variety
   of scenario's to ensure that each scenario that is considered a supported
   deployment design is tested.

3. Improve usability
   While OSA is reasonably simple to use to deploy OpenStack, a barrier to
   most new users is understanding how to customise the inventory and how to
   prepare the host networking.
   I'd like us to reduce this barrier to entry in the Newton cycle in order
   to further simplify an OpenStack deployment for a new user.

4. Improve platform support enablement
   In the Newton cycle we have agreed to ensure that we take advantage of
   Ansible 2.x and that we also implement support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This
   work will implement the patterns which make it much easier to add more Linux
   distributions to our supported platform list.

I look forward to working with you all for the next cycle and hope that we can
meet our lofty goals!

Jesse
IRC: odyssey4me
