Influencing the Roadmap

OpenStack truly welcomes your ideas (and contributions) and highly values feedback from real-world users of the software. By learning a little about the process that drives feature development, you can participate and perhaps get the additions you desire.

Feature requests typically start their life in Etherpad, a collaborative editing tool, which is used to take coordinating notes at a design summit session specific to the feature. This then leads to the creation of a blueprint on the Launchpad site for the particular project, which is used to describe the feature more formally. Blueprints are then approved by project team members, and development can begin.

Therefore, the fastest way to get your feature request up for consideration is to create an Etherpad with your ideas and propose a session to the design summit. If the design summit has already passed, you may also create a blueprint directly. Read this blog post about how to work with blueprints the perspective of Victoria Martínez, a developer intern.

The roadmap for the next release as it is developed can be seen at Releases.

To determine the potential features going in to future releases, or to look at features implemented previously, take a look at the existing blueprints such as OpenStack Compute (nova) Blueprints, OpenStack Identity (keystone) Blueprints, and release notes.

Aside from the direct-to-blueprint pathway, there is another very well-regarded mechanism to influence the development roadmap: the user survey. Found at http://openstack.org/user-survey, it allows you to provide details of your deployments and needs, anonymously by default. Each cycle, the user committee analyzes the results and produces a report, including providing specific information to the technical committee and technical leads of the projects.

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