# Octavia Constitution

This document defines the guiding principles that project leadership will be following in creating, improving and maintaining the Octavia project.

## Octavia is an OpenStack project

This means we try to run things the same way other “canonized” OpenStack projects operate from a procedural perspective. This is because we hope that Octavia will eventually become a standard part of any OpenStack deployment.

## Octavia is as open as OpenStack

Octavia tries to follow the same standards for openness that the OpenStack project also strives to follow: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Open We are committed to open design, development, and community.

## Octavia is “free”

We mean that both in the “beer” and in the “speech” sense. That is to say, the reference implementation for Octavia should be made up only of open source components that share the same kind of unencumbered licensing that OpenStack uses.

Note that this does not mean we are against having vendors develop products which can replace some of the components within Octavia. (For example, the Octavia VM images might be replaced by a vendor’s proprietary VM image.) Rather, it means that:

- The reference implementation should always be open source and unencumbered.

- We are typically not interested in making design compromises in order to work with a vendor’s proprietary product. If a vendor wants to develop a component for Octavia, then the vendor should bend to Octavia’s needs, not the other way around.

## Octavia is a load balancer for large operators

That’s not to say that small operators can’t use it. (In fact, we expect it to work well for small deployments, too.) But what we mean here is that if in creating, improving or maintaining Octavia we somehow make it unable to meet the needs of a typical large operator (or that operator’s users), then we have failed.

## Octavia follows the best coding and design conventions

For the most part, Octavia tries to follow the coding standards set forth for the OpenStack project in general: https://docs.openstack.org/hacking/latest More specific additional standards can be found in the HACKING.rst file in the same directory as this constitution.

Any exceptions should be well justified and documented. (Comments in or near the breach in coding standards are usually sufficient documentation.)

this page last updated: 2026-04-02 20:14:22

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