Principia / DevOps / leadership and governance

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi folks

I'd like to propose a leadership and governance structure for Principia,
our collection of Ensemble formulas.

By way of background, Ensemble is a tool for deploying workloads in the
cloud. It allows you to see what workloads you are currently running,
and it handles dependencies between them, a bit like APT does for
packages in the distro.

Workloads in Ensemble are defined by formulas, which have names and are
published in a repository. A formula would typically be written by a
devops type, someone who loves system administration and brings a
developers eye for re-usable work to it.  Formulas can have dependencies
just like packages. They can be maintained and in future translated.
They can have bugs filed against them and we want to build communities,
teams and a long tail of maintainers for them. So it's probably not
surprising that I think we can use Launchpad to provide a home for all
the formulas; we've got a placeholder at https://launchpad.net/principia
which will be a bit more productive when we work out a few blockers for
using the sourcepackage and UDD bits for formulas.

In short, we'll be building a community of devops, defining, debating,
collaborating and maintaining a large collection of formulas. It's that
community that I think will need steering, in the same way that the TB
provides a forum for architectural and structural issues across the
whole archive.

Right now, this is all embryonic, so I don't want to create a large
group. But I do want us to signal (a) that this is part of Ubuntu, and
(b) who to go to for resolution of technical and social issues related
to Principia and Ensemble. So I think we should create a Principia
Council, with a chair, appointed by the CC.

I think the focus needed here is different to the leadership that the TB
currently provides - this work will be very cloud and devops specific,
and we'll want a team which reflects that. It will also be very
day-to-day, this is a fast-moving area, and it needs more hands-on
guidance than the TB can provide directly. I would be happy for this
group to be accountable to the TB on technical matters, though I think
this group should also be able to grant Ubuntu membership to
contributors which is a function the CC delegates.

As a lead, I would nominate Clint Byrum, a member of the Server Team
with a passion for devops who's taken to Ensemble like a duck to water.
As other members of the Principia Council, I would nominate Yuan Negron
and Marc Cluet, who work in Canonical helping large deployments of
Ubuntu. Clint is an Ubuntu Member but I don't think either Yuan or Marc
are, yet. Nevertheless, the field is so embryonic that I think it is
appropriate to bootstrap in this fashion.

I would think they could build a team of core Principia contributors who
in future could help confirm nominations to the Principia Council, but
again, for bootstrapping purposes I think we need to JFDI this initial
appointment.

Thoughts?
Mark
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