[DISCUSS] CloudStack Primate SIG

[Rohit Yadav <ro...@shapeblue.com>]

All,

Primate has so far been led with a small set of collaborators [1] including myself who've been involved in its development. I've had a meeting with some of the community members yesterday, and we think Primate can benefit from a community-wide collaboration.

For this purpose, I want to propose to lead a small SIG (special interest group) within the project that I can help organize at least until Primate reaches feature parity wrt the old UI, i.e. until its first technical release (est. for the next 3 months by end ~Jan 2020). The SIG primarily requires development collaboration but users are encouraged to test Primate and give feedback.

Action - contributors who are interested, can you (a) share your availability in the next 2-3 months and (b) RSVP your email to me privately so I can share the next SIG meeting details with you. Thanks.

Based on the recent discussion and feedback (collaborators from ShapeBlue, EWerk and Indiqus) I propose the following once we move Primate to a repository under ASF [2] next week:

  *   Hour-long bi-weekly meeting on Hangout/Meet/Slack where we discuss, plan, schedule and assign task(s) to be attempted/done in two weeks
  *   Share meeting-notes/summary, project updates and progress, and action items on dev@ ML bi-weekly basis
  *   Keep development and collaboration in-line with CloudStack project
     *   Github based development in the new repo [2]
     *   Discuss features/bugs via Github issues
     *   Code reviews/discussion on pull requests
     *   Require merging guideline: preferably 2 x LGTM code reviews (in the voting we've proposed 1xLGTM until technical preview to avoid bottlenecks)
     *   Milestones and projects to track progress, triage/plan
     *   Use Github wiki or docs [3] folder within repo for documentation
     *   Testing via Travis (TBD), maybe manual testing/screenshots until we figure out PR/QA automation and best practices

We're yet to figure out release process, upgrades, migration etc that needs discussion as part of Primate SIG, but let me braindump my views that releases be:

     *   Linear and forward (assuming, Primate doesn't assume any version/specific features; all features should be auto-discoverable via API and their supported params/responses)
     *   Primate should support any CloudStack version that has auto-discovery feature like cloudmonkey - Ideally, all features/views/actions must be implemented without assuming a version of CloudStack; but use API auto-discovery and supported API params/responses to figure out UX/UI components, this way
     *   Faster and quicker releases than CloudStack
     *   Should at least be tested against 4.13.x and 4.14.x
     *   Must say which versions of CloudStack are supported (versions and feature matrix)
     *   Optionally released as browser extension/addon based?

Thoughts, feedback, objections? Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/shapeblue/primate/graphs/contributors
[2] New repo request: https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-primate, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-19274
[3] https://github.com/shapeblue/primate/tree/master/docs


Regards,

Rohit Yadav

Software Architect, ShapeBlue

https://www.shapeblue.com

rohit.yadav@shapeblue.com 
www.shapeblue.com
Amadeus House, Floral Street, London  WC2E 9DPUK
@shapeblue