I am seeking a role on the OpenStack Policy Board to further the adoption of OpenStack within and beyond the community.  As the OpenStack technology lead within Dell, I am the engineer who is most actively engaged with field deployments; consequently, I am uniquely positioned to represent our development community, hosters and enterprise user bases.  I bring substantial process experience (Agile/Lean/CI) into my decision making.  My focus will be on ensuring OpenStack is deployable and ready for use.

I am a Principal Engineer at Dell working as the lead for our OpenStack cloud initiative (http://dell.com/openstack).  My team at Dell is responsible for bringing hyper-scale cloud solutions to market and works closely with our cloud optimized hardware division (DCS).  Before working on the OpenStack project, I was involved in cloud projects for Azure, Eucalyptus, and Joyent at Dell.

My involvement with OpenStack goes back to the very earliest days before the project was launched where I was part of the evaluation team that advocated for Dell to join the project.  Since then, I have been active participant at every design conference.  It was my recommendation that Dell focus on making deployment capabilities for OpenStack and to ensure that those contributions are open sourced (Apache 2).  At this point in the project, I am Dell’s technical authority on OpenStack for community and customer interactions.

My team is responsible for the Crowbar cloud deployer (http://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar).  The purpose of this project is to ensure that OpenStack is be quickly and reliably deployed in a wide range of configurations on any hardware platform.  I believe that ease of deployability is essential for the success of OpenStack as a project because it ensure adoption by non-developers.  I also believe strongly in continuous integration and am working to adapt Crowbar as a CI platform.  I have been the primary driver to ensure that the Crowbar project is open sourced and accepting of input from the community.

My team also designs technical reference architectures (RAs) for OpenStack.  These RAs help drive adoption by providing crisp guidance on how deploy OpenStack.  I am a vocal proponent of open operations (keeping best practices public) and following a DevOps approach for ongoing cloud deployment life-cycles.

In addition to my work at Dell, I work to ensure community access and communication.  My independent blog provides technical detail and insights about the OpenStack and other cloud initiatives.  My blog also focuses on Agile and Lean practices that I believe are essential to success in technology innovation.

I have been working with cloud computing since 2001.  The company I founded with Dave McCrory (@mccrory), now owned by Quest, was the first multi-server VMware ESX deployment ouside of VMware.  We pioneered the concept of elastic vm management (look up the patents!) so I have a very deep understanding of the problems and architectures required.