AB Meeting/April 2015 Minutes

Attendees

* Lars Kurth
* Laura Kempke (LF)

* Guido Trotter (Google) 
* Paul Voccio, Antony Messerli (Rackspace) 
* Mark Hinkle, James Bulpin (Citrix) 
* Larry Wikelius (Cavium) 
* Konrad R Wilk, Daniel Kiper (Oracle) 
* Philippe Robin (ARM) 

Quorum:

Attachments [1] Xen Project 2014 Budget Report.pdf [2] Xen Project 2015 Q1 Budget Report.pdf

Agenda

Financial and Membership Review

A) Review of 2014 Financial's (this should be fairly short)
Lars walked through [1] - no questions
 
B) Review of 2015 Q1 Financial's (assuming I get the data by today as promised)
Lars walked through [2] - no questions
Lars asked, whether a) it is OK to publish these reports quarterly and b) whether in future we should do these off-line and just cover questions via the list

*All agreed*

C) Status update on prospective new members (Lars/Laura): since the last meeting I reached out to Alibaba, Linode, XILINX, Cloudious System, Dornerworks and Galois

Lars: Alibaba is planning to join and Wensong Zhang, the VP of their Xen and Linux group indicated that he is planning a trip to the US (time and exact location not clear). He indicated that if possible, he would want to meet some Xen Project AB reps. I am volunteering to put this together
Larry: was asking whether I knew more details already?
Lars: No, so I propose for …

ACTION: all AB reps that are interested, to get in touch with Lars and see whether we can find common ground (no promises)

Lars: recalls that Alibaba also joined Linaro
Larry: confirms that they joined the Linaro Enterprise WG (LEG)

Lars: no response from Linode and XILINX
Lars: Cloudious System is a not in 2015, but maybe 2016
Lars: Dornerworks and Galois are interested, but it will take 2-3 months to make a decision due to different budget cycles

Test Infrastructure Update and Sys Admin for Xen Project Infrastructure

A) Status Update: For the Test Infrastructure see https://blog.xenproject.org/2015/04/15/introducing-xen-projects-new-test-lab/
There are some loose ends, such as 
* Getting the correct licenses for Windows VM testing (this is currently with Steve Westmoreland from the LF). 
* Some HW and BIOS issues (albeit progressing slowly) - affecting 6 of 24 machines
* Some bugs we found in Xen, Linux and some driver issues which prevent us from taking 6 of 24 machines into service

Lars: we are making progress on some of these, albeit more slowly than hoped. Nevertheless, we are at more capacity that with the old system
and are step-by-step working through remaining issues. From what I can see, we will be able to take some more machines into service in the
next 2-3 weeks. 

Lars: Am concerned about the licensing situation for Windows VM testing: in particular, as there does not appear to be a straightforward solution
Lars: On how to best do this. Right now we are covered, but we can only grant access to community members that are covered by an MSDN license
Lars: This is unsatisfactory

ACTION: Lars will follow up with Steve Westmoreland

B) In previous meetings we discussed whether we should find an additional supplier, who can provide sysadmin for our web facing systems, aka
* source code hosting (shell accounts, git, gitweb, some hg,homegrown commit email generator)
* blog hosting (wordpress)
* wiki (mediawiki)
* role mail aliases, dns, etc.
* mailing lists (mailman, mhonarc)
* a few other minor VMs
* possibly also jenkins.openstack.xenproject.org

Lars: Given the overhead of dealing with suppliers, based on the experience with AllNet, I would like to have all options on the table. 
Lars: Ideally, I  would want to have a single supplier, who can work with the COLO as well as do the above sysadmin jobs

James: working with AllNet has been quite frustrating. 
James: Setting up the Test Lab has been an order of magnitude more painful that it needed to been. 
James: Our supplier is not very competent at Linux system administration and needed a lot of hand-holding. 
James: AllNet have also been playing with the life system – even though we asked them not to -  and broke it twice leading to loss of service. 
James: I am very frustrated on the drain of Ian Jackson's time and we cannot afford this level of impact on Ian's time.

Lars: IanJ is one of our committers in an area where we have a bottlenecks, so I agree.  

*RESOLUTION: Is it OK for us to look at additional options and/or suppliers?
*All agreed*

Paul: asked whether we need recommendations?
Lars: Would also be happy to take recommendations
Lars: But as the COLO is in the greater Boston area, we are constrained (exact location: EarthLink, 313 Boston Post Road West Suite 190, 01752 Marlborough, Massachusetts, USA)

Konrad: Ian sent a detailed list of what's needed in terms of skills and task. I will also act as an interviewer for filtering and may 

ACTION: if you do know of any competent sysadmins in the greater Boston area, we would be grateful for a recommendation

From choosing an additional supplier, to looking at a single supplier who can handle the above as well as the test lab. In any case, it would be prudent to evaluate how effective AllNet was in setting up the infrastructure for the Test Lab. I will be looking for input on how much freedom you are willing to give me and the Test Framework WG in driving this forward. 

C) Next steps:
Lars: It would be good to get some visibility on what Hardware, we expect to buy in 2015 and how much COLO space this would require. 
Lars: To some degree, this will depend on HW roadmaps. Maybe we can create a straw-man of a plan (or identify the stake-holders that I will work with)

Larry: later this quarter we should be able to provide more details. We should aim to target an install in Q3
Philippe: will discuss within ARM and back to the board later and will connect Lars to the ARM team

ACTION: Philippe get back to Lars/the board with more information
ACTION: to talk about x86 with later Intel chips at the Hackathon – also follow up with AMD who were not on the call

Dev Summit

Reminder: Xen Project Developer Summit Cfp and sponsorships

Lars: so far we have sponsorships from ARM ands Citrix – this puts us at $20,500 – we originally assumed we would get 
Lars: so far 6 submissions in the system – this is in line with what we expect and on based experience we will get around 25-30 talk submissions (most people submit last minute)

ACTION: please consider submitting talks as appropriate

Hot Patching

Rackspace indicated that they want to invest in hot patching – see http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/AB_Meeting/March_2015_Minutes#Collaboration_around_a_hot_patching_solution_for_the_projec
Unfortunately we had no other cloud providers on the call last time: so I wanted to re-visit this question

Lars: Unfortunately AWS was not on the call thius time
Lars: Paul, you mentioned that you were spinning up a small team
Paul: have some developers in place and will make an introduction (done)

Lars: are any of them at theOpenStack summit? 
Paul: not sure, will reach out off-line
Konrad: not going to be at the OpenStack event, but will be in Shanghai and later on in Seattle
Paul: will send team to Seattle (the key developer is based there)

Konrad: will talk to Jan about Hypercalls and top level design of hot patching; can broadcast the outcome to xen-devel and CC people who need to know
Konrad: I will also propose a talk for the Xen Developer summit depending on the discussion 
Lars: Alibaba has some live patching - they will have some representatives at the Hackathon
Konrad: will include Alibaba and then we can start a conversation. Hopefully we will have some prototype code before 

Lars: is interested in avoiding too much fragmentation – this is not good for anyone.

Antony: can we dial in some people remotely?
Lars: yes, technically this should be possible. We would need to know roughly when staff are available. I can set up an IRC channel and/or conf call
Lars: the challenge will be time-zone differences

ACTION: Paul to make some intros (done)
ACTION: Lars share the schedule grid and put west coast times in it to see whether we can find a common slot that works for remote participation (done)

ACTION: other stake-holders that may be interested participating remotely, please get in touch with Lars

AOB

* Security series on Linux.com
ACTION: Lars and Sarah will publish these for review on the AB mailing list, when we have it

* Next meeting clashes with OpenStack summit - should we re-schedule?
Lars: who will be at the summit?
Larry: is OpenStack summit
Lars: is at the summit  
Paul: is at summit
Lars: suggested to NOT move the meeting as this always causes issues with attendance. But it does mean that some of us have to dial in early. Is this OK?

*Agreement: OK to dial in into the existing call in the morning *

ACTION: Lars to arrange a lunch/dinner/meetup between Lars/Paul/Larry
ACTION: others who are there, and interested in meeting, please do get in touch

* OPW/Outreachy & GSoC
We do have 2 OPW applicants, but only one which we want to chose this year
We had 3 other mentoring organisations with 5 Xen related projects, including Ganeti. So my gut feel is that we will get 2-3 GSoC students working on Xen related projects and 1 OPW/Outreachy intern.

Guido: have 2 applicants for Xen related projects, but may just go for 1 applicant