Hello everyone!

I would like to announce my candidacy for the Winstackers PTL election.

I have been involved in OpenStack since Havana, and even longer with Hyper-V
and Windows related technologies, and I have been the PTL of Winstackers for 2
cycles.

In the past cycle, we've added another 2 projects to the list of consumers of
os-win: os-brick and designate, and we hope to add many more.

We have also added the pieces necessary for various technologies, which are to
be consumed in the upcomming cycles, such as Fibre Channel support and various utils for Hyper-V Shielded VMs.

And last, but not least, we have added networking-hyperv under Winstackers
governance.

In the new cycle, there are a couple of things that I'd like us to achieve:

* Expand the list of os-win consumers. At the moment, the projects that are
  under consideration are monasca and freezer. New suggestions are welcome.

* Improve os-win's performance and how it consumens PyMI and other libraries.
  PyMI provides a Python native module wrapper over the Windows Management
  Infrastructure (MI) API, and it is used by os-win in order to interact with
  Hyper-V and other Microsoft related technologies. Each cycle we improve PyMI
  and how it is used, increasing the overall performance. These performance
  increases are observed by running Rally scenarios. For example, comparing
  Newton to Liberty, the amount of time needed to bind a Neutron port and its
  security group rules to a Hyper-V vSwtich port has been reduced by at least
  12 times. And there is still room for improvement.

* Improve how os-win is consumed in nova. It order to make os-win easier to
  use and evolve, we need to introduce some os-win objects (for example,
  VirtualMachine objects). Having such objects will also help reduce the amount
  of WMI queries done (expensive operations) and improve the overall
  performance especially for spawning instances.

* oslo Windows CI. There were a few several cases in the past when an oslo
  library release would break Windows / Hyper-V support in some or most
  projects. Having a voting Windows CI on oslo patches can minimize the chances
  of this happening. We are already working on this, and we hope to see it up
  and running soon.

* Add support for new emerging Windows technologies. At the moment, we are
  looking into Windows Containers and the new Windows Server 2016 networking
  stack, which will bring support for VXLAN network types. These new
  technologies will have to fit perfectly into the OpenStack ecosystem.

These are the main objectives I have in mind that I would like to accomplish
during the Ocata cycle, among other minor goals. New goals may appear during
the cycle.

Thank you for your consideration,

Claudiu