EUAG 2018-03-28

EUAG Meeting, ONS-NA 3/28/18

Attendees

Attending from the Linux Foundation were:

Heather Kirksey <hkirksey@linuxfoundation.org>, 

Brandon Wick <bwick@linuxfoundation.org>,

Phil Robb <probb@linuxfoundation.org>, 

Casey Cain <ccain@linuxfoundation.org>,

Trishan de Lanerolle <tdelanerolle@linuxfoundation.org>,

Ray Paik <rpaik@linuxfoundation.org>,

Kenny Paul <kpaul@linuxfoundation.org>

Heather kicked off the call with a round of introductions and then shared slides prepared by Randy Levensalor and Tetsuya Nakamura providing background on the OPNFV EUAG and OpenDaylight Advisory Groups and the goals for this meeting.

The main challenges of the groups can be summarized as:

• Balancing an end user only space with timely/focused feedback to the technical community
• Balancing cross-project discussion with specific subject matter area deep dives
• Enabling x-project end user discussions
• Getting more feedback from operations personnel
• Increasing enterprise, cloud end user participation
• Getting group members to engage
• Finding call times that worked for all geos

Chris Luke (Comcast) then shared a history of the OpenDaylight User group from his perspective. Primarily, this group has been focused on:

• End users or potential end users that see obstacles to deployment
• Collecting data from the development community & sharing with UAG
• Began inviting TSC members to UAG calls (UAG set the agenda, but asked the dev community for their feedback).

The first few years, this worked well via advanced planning/posting of an agenda and getting End Users to submit agenda topics. The UAG was also used for helping to solve disputes in the technical community (based on what’s more useful to them).  Time zone issues impacted some participation.

Randy Levensalor (CableLabs) and Steven Wright (AT&T) shared a history of the OPNFV EUAG. The group has used surveys in the past to help determine desired key areas of focus.

After abut 1.5 years, the calls began to alternate between addressing strategic issues (how can we help you) and very specific tech challenges (top end user pain points, e.g. VNF onboarding).  Currently having 2 meetings a month, one of each.

Randy – Pain-point Meetings

• Ensuring the correct participation (skill set) on calls is a focus and concern
• Specific agendas are set will ahead of time to bring in the correct dev teams
• looking for an active partnership from attendees on specific issues

Steven – Strategy Meetings

Education- lots of time effort explaining what the euag means

startigic direction 

Management of time-zone for participation was a key issue

Reliant on the wiki, lists and occasional f2f meetings

Open Discussion:

Heather opened the floor with three fundemental questions:

From an operator perspective what is NOT being addressed that we should be considering?

What are the things you would you like to get out of a group like this?

How do we tap in to the operations teams?

Chris Luke (Comcast): Operations needs to be understood. Wondering how we advance under LFN? Other, smaller projects such as FD.io included?

Beth Cohen (Verizion): Many providers using bits and pieces of the projects. I think you want to see how we are consuming this stuff and what issues are we hitting (OSS/BSS, tools gaps). Makes sense to engage at a higher level. What would be logical “meet-me” point for project TSCs, developers and users?

Comment: different set of issues for in production projects and ramp up projects

Steven (AT&T): Product management function. What needs to be done, feature roadmapping, backward compatibility measuring progress, etc. – Looking for a way to balance each community of a project from LFN 

Nithia Ruff (Comcast): At the end of the day, we can’t tell the tech community (it’s not a mandate) but the devs do take UAG feedback seriously.

Neela Jacques (ODL EM): Sometimes when the ODL tech community didn’t move quickly enough, AT&T would initiate something and then eventually turn that back over to the community.

Heather summarized what we were hearing from the group and started laying out what we could do going forward. 

We propose launching an LFN EUAG that will cover the technical projects in the Linux Foundation. Working groups will be formed that focus on specific areas of interest that cross the different technical projects, such as what is what’s blocking deployment, or causing pain, rather than a focus specific on projects. Examples of this are:

• VNF onboarding
• Compliance
• Edge
• Security

Question: will individual EUAGs continue to exist?

Heather- We do not see viability in continuing along those line of individual project participation in an LFN context. Also that model does not scale as more projects join. This is why we are recommending pain-point or focus areas.

John Zannos (Inocybe): Would this include use cases? May be value in targeting a few use cases that are important.

Phil Robb: Let’s think about how we spread the conversation across the service provider organizations, e.g. finding the person in charge of deployment. Reaching them is one thing, getting them to come forward may be tricky.

Phil Robb: Suggest we continually solicit topics on a monthly basis and put out the agenda well in advance. Project specific meetings can be more ad hoc after the fact (unconference style an option).

While the focus of the group will be on solving end user problems, from time to time, other members of the technical community will be invited to come in and engage with the group. Any EUAG wiki will be open (not-private). 

Question: Will non-operators be able to participate?

As passive listeners yes, unless a non-member is specifically asked to speak. Membership does not extend to vendors, suppliers or consulting houses, etc.

Tetsuya Nakamura (CableLabs) The value is in communication to the developers - need to share the operators experience with the developers. Approves of Heather’s proposal of high level, not project based. Also recommends that service providers from non-LFN members continue to come and provide their experience and inputs as is done now. These could be:

1. High-level user scenario (solicit wider experience)
2. Deeper detail (can get project specific)

There was a suggestion to use a poll to determine desired focus areas and agenda topics.

Other suggestion for new group success:

• Polling to determine industry needs (e.g. we talked to 50 users, they indicated XYZ as what they need to reach the next stage of deployment).
• Eventual migration from qualitative discussion to quantitative outputs
• Build relationships between members (make it easier to talk at events)
• Facilitate critical peer to peer conversations
• Leverage the ability to share “tips and tricks”
• Explore use cases/case studies
• Keep LFN-wide UAG participation agreements with individuals (not companies).

In a simple show of hands, the majority of the room expressed an interest in participating in such a model.

Existing ODL UAG and OPNFV EUAG Members wishing to stay on will need to transfer/sign new agreements with LFN.

While participation in group activities is open to non-end users, the End Users must own must own agenda development, set the topics, and set the tone. Other can be invited to call but the discussions should remain end user focused discussion. In the event that non-member participation becomes disruptive the calls would be closed to the general community.

Next Steps:

• Start preparing an LFN UAG space on LFN wiki (non-private)
• Prepare a new EUAG participation agreement for the new LFN entity and send out to current ODL UAG & OPNFV EUAG members to sign.
• Schedule an LFN UAG kick-off call for the last week of April