The Big Picture

Election season opened in earnest this week. With Gazpacho at R-9 (nine weeks to the coordinated release), the Technical Committee set the stage for the combined 2026.2 PTL and TC elections and began resetting leadership models for several at-risk teams. But the standout technical conversation was strategic rather than release-bound: a serious community discussion about building an attestation service for confidential VMs, which several contributors framed as the missing keystone for OpenStack's confidential-computing story. Alongside it, Sean Mooney's effort to revitalize Cyborg showed the community's recurring pattern of one or two contributors stepping up to rescue a neglected-but-important project.

Development & Technical Decisions

Attestation is the missing piece for confidential computing. Jean-Philippe Jung opened the week's most-discussed thread (9 messages, 5 participants) asking whether any existing OpenStack project or effort covers attestation — the cryptographic proof that a workload is genuinely running inside a real Trusted Execution Environment (AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, Arm CCA). His argument: without attestation, confidential computing is meaningless, because you're trusting the provider's word rather than silicon-anchored evidence. The attestation service would gate VM decryption-key release after verifying the hardware stack is unmodified, with connections into both compute and storage. This dovetails directly with the Intel TDX work raised the prior week and is shaping up as a major 2026.2/PTG design topic.

Cyborg revitalization. Sean Mooney announced his intent to ramp up maintenance of Cyborg, explicitly modeling the approach on the Watcher revival he led roughly 18 months earlier. He laid out a concrete cleanup plan: tackling oslo.db/oslo.service compatibility, microversion-parse naming, the long-overdue eventlet removal, and a backlog of bot-proposed patches; stabilizing CI (the cyborg-tempest-plugin lacks stable-branch jobs post-2024.2 and carries EOL branch definitions, with no grenade/SLURP upgrade testing); and cleaning up release metadata and Launchpad tracking. This is the kind of focused effort that determines whether a project stays alive.

Ironic weighs a first-class physical location API. Jay Faulkner continued floating the idea of structured physical-world metadata in Ironic — datacenter, room, row, rack, slot, cabling — primarily to make nodes searchable in a performant way (today's freeform JSON fields can't do this). He tied it to in-flight bulk-node-action work ("power down every machine in DC 17, row 5, rack 9") but cautioned against overloading it: the thread already sprawled from location into serial numbers and purchase dates, and Jay flagged that targeting specific racks undercuts the failure-isolation HA model of nova-fronted Ironic. He plans to bring it to the PTG.

Scalability and stability pain points. Alfredo Moralejo Alonso reported a sharp taskflow scalability problem surfacing in Watcher: with parallelization ≥2, action plans of ~35 tasks degrade badly, and 50-task plans can take up to 45 minutes to schedule the next task (bug 2139228, with a minimal reproducer). Separately, a Blazar operator hit repeated SQLAlchemy QueuePool limit timeouts, and a Keystone/Kolla/OpenStack-Helm thread asked the Keystone team to confirm whether it's safe to run the Keystone WSGI app with multiple threads per process — a question deployment tools need answered as they tune concurrency.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• DPL liaison deadline (Feb 4): Goutham Pacha Ravi notified the Freezer, Watcher, Requirements, Release, Oslo, and Ironic teams that the TC opened "dpl-reset" reviews. Teams had until February 4 to oppose and retain the distributed-leadership model; otherwise PTL nominations would be sought for them in the 2026.2 elections.
• Verify your voting eligibility now: the election announcement (R-9) reminded contributors to confirm OIF Individual Member status (memberships auto-downgrade if you skip Governing Board elections) and to request Extra AC status by February 13 if your contributions weren't via Gerrit.
• Election officials wanted: the TC is recruiting volunteers to shadow the 2026.2 elections — neutral parties not contesting the elections themselves.
• uWSGI replacement and a new MariaDB/MySQL character-set goal remain under TC discussion; the character-set work is being shaped as a possible 2026.2 community goal.

Community & Events

Several team mid-cycles clustered around early February: Manila (Feb 3 and 5, recorded to YouTube) and Cinder (Feb 11, 1400–1600 UTC). The Public Cloud SIG held its bi-weekly meeting, and the Digital Sovereignty WG pushed its meeting-time poll. The TC also noted the OpenStack-Ansible team revived the os_watcher and os_freezer roles. A small but handy contribution: Piotr Milewski shared a Tampermonkey script that color-codes Zuul job statuses in Gerrit (green for success, red for voting failures, orange for non-voting), making patch health readable at a glance. Two newcomers introduced themselves on the list — a welcome sign of fresh operator interest.