Cruise Control Project Sustainability and Governance

[kyguy]

I’d like to express my appreciation for all the time and effort that has been gone into developing and maintaining the Cruise Control project. It’s proven to be a huge asset to the Kafka ecosystem and has benefitted a wide range of organizations and other Kafka-related projects, including our Strimzi Kafka Operator project.

It was recently shared that two of the core Cruise Control maintainers, Hao (@CCisGG ) and Efe (@efeg ), are leaving LinkedIn and will be stepping away from active maintenance. [1] Given that most of our upstream contributions and interactions over the years have been in collaboration with them, this naturally raises some questions for us about the project’s future governance and sustainability.

We plan to continue contributing to Cruise Control and will reach out for PR reviews, approvals, and releases as needed. However, we would like to better understand how maintenance and decision-making will work going forward, especially if the responsibility is becoming more concentrated.

• Is there an established path for external contributors to become more involved in maintenance (e.g., PR reviews, releases, issue triage, and general stewardship)?
• Are there expectations or criteria for becoming a committer or maintainer, and would expanding that group be considered to help ensure the project’s long-term sustainability?

We (and others in the community) have contributed PRs, reviews, and design input over the years. We believe Cruise Control has strong potential to evolve further as a broader community-driven project, and we would be interested in helping in a more active and ongoing role if there is a clear governance and contribution model to do so!

CC @mhratson

[1] #2338 (comment)

[kyguy]

CC'ing some community members that may be interested in this

@mimaison @egyedt @viktorsomogyi @danielgospodinow @JvD-Ericsson @tomncooper @ppatierno @akatona84 @fvaleri @ShubhamRwt

[tomncooper]

+1 for this proposal. CC has a wide user-base and there are clearly many developers willing to contribute code, it would be good to clarify if they could also move towards contributing towards managing the admin load as well.

[viktorsomogyi]

I have been thinking lately that what would be a good outcome for Cruise Control and I absolutely share your concerns. I feel that recently there is less effort to keep it maintained, however I see that there is still interest from the community as a whole. I would be definitely interested in participating the future maintenance and doing reviews if an established way is set by LinkedIn.

I also think that this project has been pivotal in the success of Kafka as many companies have adopted it, so much so that I think that Cruise Control could live as part of the Kafka project itself or as a separate Apache project if there is will from LinkedIn to help in this. That would mean much better level of support and also a well established path to committership. It would also mean that potentially more maintainers would be interested in the project. I think it would be a valuable conversation to have (even in this thread).

[kyguy]

CC @bgrishinko

[mhratson]

Hi,

We're discussing the next steps internally.
Don't have much to share yet, but the goal is to do the right thing OSS friendly way.

[bgrishinko]

+1 to @mhratson, we are working on the internal conversations. I'll keep this thread updated when we have news to share.

[bgrishinko]

Happy New Years folks, Just wanted to touch base here and let you know I'm making positive progress on this conversation internally currently. Nothing new to report, but I hope to get alignment within the next few weeks.

[viktorsomogyi]

@bgrishinko just wanted to check in if you have any news to share perhaps or still nothing? 🙂