My first month as Searchlight's PTL

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At the end of the Rocky development cycle of OpenStack, the Technical Committee intended to remove Searchlight [1] and some other projects (e.g. Freezer) from the Governance (OpenStack official projects). The reasons for that are because Searchlight has missed several milestones and lacked communication of the PTLs (Project Technical Lead). I couldn't stand the fact that a pretty cool project would be abandoned so I nominated to be the PTL of Searchlight for the Stein cycle. I hope that I can do something to revive it.

Why should Searchlight be revived? 

That is the question I tried to answer when decided to take the lead. It's harder and harder for cloud operators to get the information about the resources of other services (e.g Nova Compute, Swift, Cinder etc.) because they evolve very fast and there are more and more resources and APIs are made (Do you hear about the placement API of Nova?). Searchlight is pretty cool in this case because It centralizes all of that information with one set of APIs. So, you don't have to update your software whenever there is a new API update, Searchlight does it for you. Searchlight has a plugin-type architecture so It's pretty easy to add support for a new service. Currently, you can search for information about these services with Searchlight: Ironic, Neutron, Nova, Swift, Cinder, Designate, Glance.

My job as the PTL
  • Analyze Searchlight's current situation and propose the next action plan
  • Clean up the mess (bugs, unreviewed patches, blueprints)
  • Organize meetings with the active contributors
  • Attract more contributors that would create a sustainable project
  • Finally, the most important thing is to release Searchlight in Stein :)
What I did so far
  • Cleaned up most of the patches, fix some bugs, merge some other patches [4], [5], [6], [7]
  • Moved Searchlight from Launchpad to Storyboard [8]
  • Be able to contact the other 2 active contributors of the team :)
  • Have some features to release in Stein-1 (e.g. ElasticSearch 5.x)
Nearest milestone to look for

Stein-1 (Oct 22-26)

My expectations
  • Maintain a solid number of core reviewers (currently we have 3 including me)
  • Fix most of the existing and new-found bugs in Stein-1
  • Create some use cases of Searchlight so that it can attract more users and developers
  • Can release Searchlight's stable/stein

How people can get involved?

 It's really easy to contribute to Searchlight. You can just simply do one of these below:
  • Join the IRC channel #openstack-searchlight and discuss with us how you want to use Searchlight
  • Review some patches [4] [5] [6] [7]. This will help other improve their code and learn from you.
  • Fix some bugs / docs




References:

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Searchlight
[2] http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/kilo/catalog-index-service.html
[3] https://www.openstack.org/software/releases/rocky/components/searchlight
[4] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/searchlight
[5] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/searchlight-ui
[6] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/searchlight-specs
[7] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/python-searchlightclient
[8] https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project_group/searchlight

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