I am announcing my candidacy for Mistral PTL for the Rocky release cycle.

If you don't know me, I am d0ugal on Freenode. I have been working full time on
OpenStack since the Icehouse release cycle in 2014. I started to contribute to
Mistral in 2016 and joined the core team later that year. Since then I have
been dedicating more of my time to the Mistral project. I am also a core in
TripleO, which relies on Mistral. I am employed by Red Hat.

Mistral has consistently been improving at a steady pace under the leadership
of Renat, the current PTL, with well defined cycle goals. I hope to continue
this work and focus our efforts in the following areas:

* CI and testing

  In the Queens cycle we made some key improvements here, we enabled voting on
  the devstack CI jobs and transitioned to zuulv3 but we still have work to do.
  The Tempest jobs can still be unstable and only exercise small portions of
  the API. The coverage jobs have remained non-voting as they are unstable. We
  don't test database migrations.

* Documentation and Onboarding

  I would like to put a stronger focus on documentation, to make the Mistral
  onboarding process easier for new users, operators and contributors. Mistral
  has proven itself to be very powerful and useful but I think we need to make
  it easier and more attractive to new users. This will likely require an
  overhaul of the documentation and a stricter requirement of documentation for
  changes and additions.

* Further work on mistral-extra

  mistral-extra will provide a library of Actions that will let workflow
  authors easily integrate with more services and tools. In Queens we made good
  progress with mistral-lib, a new library for writing actions. In Rocky I
  would like to see more progress with mistral-extra. The first addition is
  likely to be Ansible integration and the relocation of the OpenStack actions
  from the main Mistral repo. This work will increase Mistrals utility and
  lower the barrier to entry for new workflow authors.

* Consistency, Stability and HA

  Some components, like the event engine have been added without HA taken into
  consideration. I would like to see us resolve these and set a higher standard
  for further additions to avoid this problem returning. The cron triggers
  subsystem also doesn't meet the quality standard we should expect - enabling
  it creates high load and it requires refactoring.


These are some of my personal goals and ideas. However, I see the PTL role as
much about coordination and collaboration. This is why I believe a focus on
onboarding, documentation and stability would be best for the project. I hope
to incorporate ideas from other community members and help everyone work more
efficiently.

I would love to speak to more new users and contributors. You can reach out to
me directly or find me in #openstack-mistral.