Hi all:
In case anyone was wondering why the mailing list has been quiet for the last few days, this e-mail will hopefully offer some explanation. Red Hat will be scaling back its sponsorship of the Apache Deltacloud project, effective immediately. In practice this means fewer Red Hat engineers will be working full time on Deltacloud. Red Hat created the Deltacloud project over 3 years ago and has provided *significant* support with a number of full time developers (also implying such things as travel and conference budget) through the Apache Software Foundation's incubation process and after Deltacloud became a top level Apache project.
In those 3 years Apache Deltacloud has attracted a large community following, with contributions from many many people and organisations:
* The IBM Smart Business Cloud driver was contributed by IBM developer Eric Woods - and another IBM engineer, Tong Li, contributed to the CIMI API exposed by Deltacloud
* The Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform driver was provided and is maintainted by Fujitsu engineer Dies Koper, who has also made significant contributions to the CIMI API
* Daniel Molina (an engineer on the OpenNebula project) contributed and maintains the OpenNebula driver for Deltacloud
* Luciano Castro (an Aruba engineer) contributed and maintains the ArubaCloud driver - Luciano Castro
* Sang-min Park, an engineer with Eucalyptus, contributed the Eucalyptus driver
* Ivan Meredith, a Rimuhosting engineer, contributed the Rimuhosting driver
* Countless contributions, bug fixes, feature requests, documentation contributed by many many individuals to whom I apologise for not being able to name exhaustively in the list above
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Q: But Why? ----------- A: Red Hat remains firmly committed to open source cloud technologies and will continue to participate and invest in a variety of projects, including Red Hat OpenStack, its community offering RDO and various other associated and related projects. At this time Red Hat has decided that Deltacloud has reached maturity and can rely on its own community as an independent Apache project. Red Hat's other open source cloud technology commitments mean that the engineering and QE teams previously dedicated to the Deltacloud project will be re-assigned to those efforts.
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Q: Is Red Hat going to "kill Deltacloud". ----------------------------------------- A: Red Hat cannot "kill Deltacloud"; Deltacloud is a top-level Apache project, with an active community of developers and users which goes far beyond Red Hat.
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Q: What will happen with the Deltacloud CIMI implementation? ------------------------------------------------------------ A: The Deltacloud CIMI implementation remains, to our knowledge, the only current 'real-world' implementation of the DMTF CIMI specification. I expect that individuals/organisations wishing to expose the CIMI API in front of their own cloud services will continue to leverage Apache Deltacloud to this end and in the process contribute to and help to further develop the Deltacloud CIMI implementation. Red Hat will continue to participate in the DMTF Cloud Management Working Group that is developing the CIMI specification.
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Q: What will happen with the Deltacloud release process/cycle? -------------------------------------------------------------- A: The current monthly release cycle is unsustainable, at least right now. This was made possible by the outstanding engineering and QE team that Red Hat has sponsored to work full-time on the Deltacloud project. The release cycle moving forward will be determined by the community.
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Q: Is Red Hat washing it's hands of Deltacloud altogether? ---------------------------------------------------------- A: NO, absolutely not. The Apache Deltacloud PMC will continue to have a number of Red Hat engineers and those that have previously worked on the project will continue to monitor issues/questions/patches on the mailing list/JIRA/irc - albeit at a reduced rate.
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Q: What about the mailing list, irc, JIRA, community call? ---------------------------------------------------------- A: The mailing list and JIRA will remain in place as they are administered directly by the Apache Software Foundation. For now, the community calls will be put on hold, however anyone is free to organise and chair these calls moving forward.
Please respond to this e-mail with any further questions you might have that aren't addressed above,
all the best, marios