How to get involved in the OpenStack community

OpenStack Community

Community - OpenStack is open source software for creating private and public clouds.

The first thing to learn about the OpenStack Community is to visit the above link which is the official OpenStack Community website. It has everything you need to know and learn about the OpenStack as a community.

You can pick and choose a project you would like to contribute to through this website. For example, if you are interested in the “Compute” project group, you can select compute within the “Code & Documentation” panel and you will see some projects such as Nova, Glance, Ironic, Zun etc.

New to OpenStack

OpenStack Docs: OpenStack Upstream Institute Class Details

This is the official OpenStack upstream institute class details website. Usually, the OpenStack upstream institute class holds two days before the OpenStack Summit. But, in case you cannot make to the OpenStack summit, this website contains the class details and It is a great way to learn about OpenStack.

For example, how often is the OpenStack release cycle; what does it mean by “Big Tent”; how to connect to the OpenStack IRC.

P.S. The class overview website is here: OpenStack Docs: OpenStack Upstream Institute

The OpenStack Contributor Guide

OpenStack Docs: The OpenStack Contributor Guide

This is the official OpenStack Contributor Guide website. From here, you can learn about how to setup IRC on your machine, setup OpenStack Foundation account, setup Git/Gerrit account and etc.

It is also important to take a look at this website since you can learn about “Individual Contributor License Agreement” of OpenStack. Mass Open Cloud (MOC) has a similar version of this agreement and you need to sign it before you start working as either an employee or an intern at MOC.

There are two concepts of the community: Technical vs. Non-technical

OpenStack treats the non-code contribution as the technical contribution as well. So, no matter how you want to contribute to the OpenStack community, you can find out a way that suits you best.

Technical Contribution

OpenStack Docs: Developer’s Guide

This guide is all you need before you start contributing your code to the OpenStack community.

In short, you need to create an account at https://review.openstack.org/ so that you can review the patches uploaded by you and other people. If you have a question, you should ask on the specific IRC channel.

For example, if you have a Horizon (OpenStack Dashboard Project), you should ask on the #openstack-horizon channel.

Usually, each project will hold a weekly project meeting on the IRC channel. You will find more information here at OpenStack IRC meetings