CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Ewan Mellor <Ew...@eu.citrix.com>]

Hi all,

I'm putting together a plan for a CloudStack 4.0 release.  This will be the first release under the Apache (incubated) banner, which is the main reason for the change in major version number.

This plan is a draft, and your comments are more than welcome.


Development phase: Now - Friday 10 August.
Release branch opens: Monday 13 August.
Stability and bugfix work: Monday 13-Friday 17 August.
Release candidate build: Friday 17 August.
Testing testing testing: Monday 20 - Friday 31 August.
Release: Tuesday 4 September (the day after Labor Day and the week after Linux Foundation's CloudOpen).


In the development phase we still have some library dependencies that we need to sort out, so that we can ship an official release without depending on non-Apache-licensed software.  There is a list here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/Moving+dependencies+to+ASF+approved+licenses.  Most of this is done now though, and all the major refactoring seems to be under control.

We have a number of feature branches that were taken from the 3.0.x series while we were waiting for the dependencies to get sorted out on master, and these are ready to come into mainline.  Now that we know that things are under control, we should take these and propose them for review and submission into master.


Once the major features are merged and the dependencies are all sorted out, we should create a 4.0 branch and stabilize (it's been a lot of churn in the past couple of months!).  From the plan above, that gives us 1 week of general stability work, plus 2 weeks of testing and iteration on release-candidate builds.  I'll be encouraging people to slow down the rate of bugfixes over those last two weeks, so that we can get more stable and give people time to test things in depth.

All being well, this will give us a decent 4.0 release in early September.

Cheers,

Ewan.

Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Wido den Hollander <wi...@widodh.nl>]

On 07/27/2012 05:13 PM, Chip Childers wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Wido den Hollander <wi...@widodh.nl> wrote:
>> How are we going to decide what is going into 4.0 and not?
>>
>> Do we have a list of functionality what we want to see in 4.0?
>>
>> Wido
>
> If memory serves me, I thought the list previously agreed that 4.0
> would focus on meeting the licensing, IP, etc... requirements for ASF.
>   I think that the new features are fantastic, but I'd prefer if we
> remained very focused on getting to an official ASF release done
> first.
>

My memory says something similar indeed. 4.0 will mostly be the first 
Apache releases with a lot of fixes in packaging en various bug fixes.

> This does beg the question though: how do we want to proceed with
> future release planning and execution?
>

Good one :) We should have something where we can vote. We have JIRA, 
will that suit?

Wido

RE: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Ewan Mellor <Ew...@eu.citrix.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chip Childers [mailto:chip.childers@sungard.com]
> Sent: Friday, July 27, 2012 1:37 PM
> To: cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Subject: Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan
> 
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Ewan Mellor
> <Ew...@eu.citrix.com> wrote:
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Chip Childers [mailto:chip.childers@sungard.com]
> >> Sent: 27 July 2012 08:14
> >> To: cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org
> >> Subject: Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Wido den Hollander
> <wi...@widodh.nl>
> >> wrote:
> >> > How are we going to decide what is going into 4.0 and not?
> >> >
> >> > Do we have a list of functionality what we want to see in 4.0?
> >> >
> >> > Wido
> >>
> >> If memory serves me, I thought the list previously agreed that 4.0
> >> would focus on meeting the licensing, IP, etc... requirements for
> ASF.
> >>  I think that the new features are fantastic, but I'd prefer if we
> >> remained very focused on getting to an official ASF release done
> >> first.
> >>
> >> This does beg the question though: how do we want to proceed with
> >> future release planning and execution?
> >
> > Hi Chip,
> >
> > Yes, we are focussing on getting the licensing and IP issues
> addressed, but it's taken much longer than anyone wanted to sort out
> the policy and legal issues, and meanwhile there's tons of code being
> written by people and held in feature branches.  The policy issues have
> become the long pole.
> >
> > What I really don't want is for Apache 4.0 to have fewer features
> than Citrix 3.0.x.  That would just be broken.  But we have a whole
> team of people who are still writing code, and they don't have anywhere
> official to put it while these policy issues get sorted out.
> 
> Can the community help with the policy issues that you are talking
> about?  I know some of us are working through licensing issues, but
> I'm not sure what else you might be referring to (are these all on the
> wiki page for license issues?).

They're all on the wiki page, yes.  I have just opened a thread on legal-discuss regarding a few of them -- that discussion is going to take as long as it takes.  You can definitely help with code refactoring in the meantime though.  Anything that is dependent on a non-Apache-licensed component needs to be optional in the build (this is good practice anyway, regardless of the legal issues).  The most recent one was the F5 code that you found yesterday.  We need to be able to turn these features off, so that we can make a pure Apache build.  Meanwhile, I am asking for permission to host alternate binaries with these features enabled, so that users don't need to build from source.

> I wasn't suggesting that new features not be added.  Obviously Citrix
> (and others like Wido, etc...) are working on new features, based on
> their personal or organizational priorities.  Don't stop!  I was just
> pointing out that we had agreed that ASF licensing / legal issues were
> the priority for 4.0.  If there is an in-progress feature that isn't
> completed by the time we are ready legally, then I was assuming that
> it doesn't ship with 4.0.

Yes agreed.  If it's not ready, it doesn't get in.  We have plenty of people who are desperate for a new release now -- it's time they got one.

Cheers,

Ewan.

Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Chip Childers <ch...@sungard.com>]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Ewan Mellor <Ew...@eu.citrix.com> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Chip Childers [mailto:chip.childers@sungard.com]
>> Sent: 27 July 2012 08:14
>> To: cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org
>> Subject: Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Wido den Hollander <wi...@widodh.nl>
>> wrote:
>> > How are we going to decide what is going into 4.0 and not?
>> >
>> > Do we have a list of functionality what we want to see in 4.0?
>> >
>> > Wido
>>
>> If memory serves me, I thought the list previously agreed that 4.0
>> would focus on meeting the licensing, IP, etc... requirements for ASF.
>>  I think that the new features are fantastic, but I'd prefer if we
>> remained very focused on getting to an official ASF release done
>> first.
>>
>> This does beg the question though: how do we want to proceed with
>> future release planning and execution?
>
> Hi Chip,
>
> Yes, we are focussing on getting the licensing and IP issues addressed, but it's taken much longer than anyone wanted to sort out the policy and legal issues, and meanwhile there's tons of code being written by people and held in feature branches.  The policy issues have become the long pole.
>
> What I really don't want is for Apache 4.0 to have fewer features than Citrix 3.0.x.  That would just be broken.  But we have a whole team of people who are still writing code, and they don't have anywhere official to put it while these policy issues get sorted out.

Can the community help with the policy issues that you are talking
about?  I know some of us are working through licensing issues, but
I'm not sure what else you might be referring to (are these all on the
wiki page for license issues?).

I wasn't suggesting that new features not be added.  Obviously Citrix
(and others like Wido, etc...) are working on new features, based on
their personal or organizational priorities.  Don't stop!  I was just
pointing out that we had agreed that ASF licensing / legal issues were
the priority for 4.0.  If there is an in-progress feature that isn't
completed by the time we are ready legally, then I was assuming that
it doesn't ship with 4.0.

> My proposal is to have the 4.0 release be time-based -- we ship as soon as we are legally able -- and to take whichever features are written and stable at that point.  We're nearly ready to go (my proposal was only two more weeks of feature development before we go into stability-and-bugfixing) so that would mean that the feature set is whatever code is ready or nearly ready today.  Wido's RBD code went in yesterday, we've got a few more bits of refactoring to do for policy reasons, and there's Alena's VPC branch and the autoscale branch almost ready for review.  If we want to ship our first official release as soon as it is ready (and I do) then that pretty much covers it in terms of features.

+1 - We're in agreement then!

> In terms of future planning, that's a conversation I was hoping to start next week.  We need to decide on whether we're doing feature-driven releases or time-based ones (my preference is time-based, but I'm open to arguments about that) and then we need to decide on a release cadence, a mechanism for feature proposal and review, and whether we're going to have long-term stable branches and if so who would be prepared to maintain them.

To David's point, we agreed on time-based releases (once we get to 4.0).

-chip

Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[David Nalley <da...@gnsa.us>]

> In terms of future planning, that's a conversation I was hoping to start next week.  We need to decide on whether we're doing feature-driven releases or time-based ones (my preference is time-based, but I'm open to arguments about that) and then we need to decide on a release cadence, a mechanism for feature proposal and review, and whether we're going to have long-term stable branches and if so who would be prepared to maintain them.
>


These issues have already been decided on the list.

In short - time based releases; what cadence is TBD - largely because
we don't completely grok the process around how much work a release
will be - and whether a given time frame is practical. Every 3 or 4
months seems to be current consensus, pending finding out if that is
practical.

The consensus has been that we would provide releases only for
showstopper bugs and security issues until the next time-based
release.

RE: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Ewan Mellor <Ew...@eu.citrix.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chip Childers [mailto:chip.childers@sungard.com]
> Sent: 27 July 2012 08:14
> To: cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Subject: Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan
> 
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Wido den Hollander <wi...@widodh.nl>
> wrote:
> > How are we going to decide what is going into 4.0 and not?
> >
> > Do we have a list of functionality what we want to see in 4.0?
> >
> > Wido
> 
> If memory serves me, I thought the list previously agreed that 4.0
> would focus on meeting the licensing, IP, etc... requirements for ASF.
>  I think that the new features are fantastic, but I'd prefer if we
> remained very focused on getting to an official ASF release done
> first.
> 
> This does beg the question though: how do we want to proceed with
> future release planning and execution?

Hi Chip,

Yes, we are focussing on getting the licensing and IP issues addressed, but it's taken much longer than anyone wanted to sort out the policy and legal issues, and meanwhile there's tons of code being written by people and held in feature branches.  The policy issues have become the long pole.

What I really don't want is for Apache 4.0 to have fewer features than Citrix 3.0.x.  That would just be broken.  But we have a whole team of people who are still writing code, and they don't have anywhere official to put it while these policy issues get sorted out.

My proposal is to have the 4.0 release be time-based -- we ship as soon as we are legally able -- and to take whichever features are written and stable at that point.  We're nearly ready to go (my proposal was only two more weeks of feature development before we go into stability-and-bugfixing) so that would mean that the feature set is whatever code is ready or nearly ready today.  Wido's RBD code went in yesterday, we've got a few more bits of refactoring to do for policy reasons, and there's Alena's VPC branch and the autoscale branch almost ready for review.  If we want to ship our first official release as soon as it is ready (and I do) then that pretty much covers it in terms of features.


In terms of future planning, that's a conversation I was hoping to start next week.  We need to decide on whether we're doing feature-driven releases or time-based ones (my preference is time-based, but I'm open to arguments about that) and then we need to decide on a release cadence, a mechanism for feature proposal and review, and whether we're going to have long-term stable branches and if so who would be prepared to maintain them.

Cheers,

Ewan.

Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Chip Childers <ch...@sungard.com>]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Wido den Hollander <wi...@widodh.nl> wrote:
> How are we going to decide what is going into 4.0 and not?
>
> Do we have a list of functionality what we want to see in 4.0?
>
> Wido

If memory serves me, I thought the list previously agreed that 4.0
would focus on meeting the licensing, IP, etc... requirements for ASF.
 I think that the new features are fantastic, but I'd prefer if we
remained very focused on getting to an official ASF release done
first.

This does beg the question though: how do we want to proceed with
future release planning and execution?

-chip

Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Wido den Hollander <wi...@widodh.nl>]

On 07/26/2012 01:42 AM, Ewan Mellor wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm putting together a plan for a CloudStack 4.0 release.  This will be the first release under the Apache (incubated) banner, which is the main reason for the change in major version number.
>
> This plan is a draft, and your comments are more than welcome.
>
>
> Development phase: Now - Friday 10 August.

How are we going to decide what is going into 4.0 and not?

Do we have a list of functionality what we want to see in 4.0?

Wido

> Release branch opens: Monday 13 August.
> Stability and bugfix work: Monday 13-Friday 17 August.
> Release candidate build: Friday 17 August.
> Testing testing testing: Monday 20 - Friday 31 August.
> Release: Tuesday 4 September (the day after Labor Day and the week after Linux Foundation's CloudOpen).
>
>
> In the development phase we still have some library dependencies that we need to sort out, so that we can ship an official release without depending on non-Apache-licensed software.  There is a list here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/Moving+dependencies+to+ASF+approved+licenses.  Most of this is done now though, and all the major refactoring seems to be under control.
>
> We have a number of feature branches that were taken from the 3.0.x series while we were waiting for the dependencies to get sorted out on master, and these are ready to come into mainline.  Now that we know that things are under control, we should take these and propose them for review and submission into master.
>
>
> Once the major features are merged and the dependencies are all sorted out, we should create a 4.0 branch and stabilize (it's been a lot of churn in the past couple of months!).  From the plan above, that gives us 1 week of general stability work, plus 2 weeks of testing and iteration on release-candidate builds.  I'll be encouraging people to slow down the rate of bugfixes over those last two weeks, so that we can get more stable and give people time to test things in depth.
>
> All being well, this will give us a decent 4.0 release in early September.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ewan.
>
>

RE: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Ewan Mellor <Ew...@eu.citrix.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Brockmeier [mailto:jzb@zonker.net]
> Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 7:56 AM
> To: cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Subject: Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan
> 
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 12:42:33AM +0100, Ewan Mellor wrote:
> > This plan is a draft, and your comments are more than welcome.
> >
> >
> > Development phase: Now - Friday 10 August.
> > Release branch opens: Monday 13 August.
> > Stability and bugfix work: Monday 13-Friday 17 August.
> > Release candidate build: Friday 17 August.
> 
> Just checking - do you plan on only one RC, or to have multiple RCs in
> the testing phase? We might need a couple, if some of the other
> incubating projects I've looked at are any indication.

Oh, multiple RCs, definitely!  If we were going to get it right first time, we wouldn't need two weeks of testing ;-)

We can cut our first release candidate on 17 August, and then we've got two weeks from 20 to 31 August to test and make as many additional builds as we think we need.  That will depend on what we find during testing.  If the first candidate has serious flaws then we'll turn a new one around straight away, but if it's generally stable then I'd want to slow things down so that people can test more deeply into the features rather than resetting their systems every day with a new build.

Cheers,

Ewan.

Re: CloudStack 4.0 release plan

[Joe Brockmeier <jz...@zonker.net>]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 12:42:33AM +0100, Ewan Mellor wrote:
> This plan is a draft, and your comments are more than welcome.
> 
> 
> Development phase: Now - Friday 10 August.
> Release branch opens: Monday 13 August.
> Stability and bugfix work: Monday 13-Friday 17 August.
> Release candidate build: Friday 17 August.

Just checking - do you plan on only one RC, or to have multiple RCs in
the testing phase? We might need a couple, if some of the other
incubating projects I've looked at are any indication.

Best, 

Joe
-- 
Joe Brockmeier
http://dissociatedpress.net/
Twitter: @jzb