My name is Sridhar Ramaswamy and I'd like to announce my candidacy as
Tacker PTL for the upcoming Newton cycle.

Tacker is a newly minted big-tent project. I was involved in Tacker
right from the days when it used to be a Neutron ServiceVM project and
during its transition to the NFV Orchestration use case. I was leading
the project in an informal PTL role over the last two cycles. We had
the goal of getting into the big tent in Mitaka and few weeks back we
successfully got accepted - woot! Credit goes to the amazing community
that believed in Tacker and taken it this far.

Mitaka cycle was a quite packed. We are landing many features -
TOSCA-parser integration, MultiSite VNF placement, Enhanced VNF
placement (using Nova NFV smarts) and automatic resource creation. We
also did tons of code clean up to detach Tacker from its original
Neutron roots. Beyond all this I'm really proud of growing the team
that is quite diverse for an early stage project [1]. We also
increased our core team size in Mitaka.

Still we have lot more to do in front of us and if elected I'll work
towards the following goals for Newton:

Features: NFV Orchestration is a broad space. We have a lot to build.
However, we got to pace ourselves as we go through this journey. We
have many interesting features in the radar like Network Services
Descriptor (NSD) to orchestrate a sequence of VNFs to stand up a
network service and VNF Scaling - another highly sought out feature.
I also support the recent decision to use networking-sfc APIs for
Tacker VNF Forwarding Graph. I'm confident we would be able to land
this in Newton.

Technical Debt: We did lots of code cleanup over Mitaka cycle. Still
we mostly focused on getting new features. In the Newton cycle, we
need to increase our investment in refactoring the aging code that we
forked off from Neutron. Some of the possible refactorings in our
sights are in wsgi layer (pecan), in APIs (micro-versioning) and heat
driver modularity. Decomposing Tacker server into subcomponents is a
stretch goal which we should get started in the Newton cycle.

Release sanity:  Now that we are under big tent we need to adhere to
proper cycle deadlines and milestones. We are learning quickly the
knobs in the area of release management. I'll work towards getting
our release pipeline in order in Newton.

Gate test: We have a decent amount of gate tests. However, we need to
keep adding more. I'll work towards increasing the number of gate
tests particularly using VNFs like OpenWRT.

Community: Growing the community is one of the top goals in Newton. We
need to increase our core team as well. As always I'll do my best to
welcome new community members, vendors, and operators to join Tacker.

Overall we need to balance out our investments between new features
and technical debt / project stabilization in Newton.

Thanks for your consideration.
- Sridhar
IRC: sridhar_ram

[1] http://stackalytics.com/?release=all&module=tacker-group&metric=patches