Tag Archives: Summit

More Signal & Less Noise: my OpenStack Tokyo Restrospective

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We’re building real business on OpenStack. This seems especially true in Asia where the focus is on using the core not expanding it. At the same time, we’ve entered the “big tent” era where non-core projects are proliferating.

Let’s explore what’s signal and what’s noise … but before we start, here are quick links to my summit videos:

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OpenStack summits are really family reunions. While aunt and uncles (Vendors) are busying showing off, all the cousins (Projects) are getting re-acquainted. Like any family it’s fun, competitive, friendly and sometimes dysfunctional.

Signal: Global Users and Providers

There are real deployments of OpenStack and real companies building businesses around the code base. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of people quietly making OpenStack work. Why quietly? It’s still more of a struggle than it should be.

Signal: Demand for Heterogeneous and Interop Environments

There’s no such thing as a mono-lithic cloud. Even within the community, Monty’s Shade API normalizer, is drawing attention. More broadly, everyone is using multiple cloud platforms and the trend accelerates due to container portability.

Signal: Container Workloads

Containers are dominating the cloud discussion for good reasons. They are pushing into OpenStack at the top (Platform), bottom (Deployment) and side (Scheduler). While OpenStack must respond architecturally, it’s not clear yet if it can pivot from virtualization focused to something broader fast enough (Mesos?).

Signal: Ansible

The lightweight DevOps tool seems to be winning the popularity contest. It may not be the answer to all problems, but it’s clearly part of helping solve a lot of them. Warning: Ansible complexity explodes on multi-tiered, scale and upgrade orchestration.

Signal: DefCore and Product Working Group (PWG)

Both efforts have crossed from a concept into decision-making bodies within the community. The work is far from over. DefCore needs users to demand compliance from vendors. Product WG needs developers to demand their management sign on to PWG roadmaps.

Noise: Distro vs Service Argument

There are a lot of ways to consume OpenStack. None of them are wrong but some are more aligned with individual vendor strategies than others. Saying one way to run OpenStack is more right is undermining our overall operability and usability objectives.

Noise: Contributor Metrics

We’ve created a very commit economy and summits are vendors favorite time to brag about their dedication to community via upstreaming. These metrics are incomplete at best and potentially destructive to the health of the project as vendors compete to win the commit race instead of the quality and ecosystem race.

Noise: Big Tent

We’ve officially entered the “big tent” era of OpenStack. This governance change was lead by the Technical Committee to address how we manage projects; however, there are broader user, operator, vendor and ecosystem implications. Unfortunately, even within the community, the platform implications of a loosely governed, highly inclusive community not completely understood.

Overall, I left Tokyo enthusiastic about OpenStack’s future as a platform and community; however, I also see that we have not structured how we mingle platform, community and ecosystem. This is especially true because OpenStack is just a part in the much broader cloud market and work outside OpenStack is continue to disrupt our plans. As a Board member, I’ll hoping to start a discussion about this and want to hear your opinions.

OpenStack DefCore Community Review – TWO Sessions April 21 (agenda)

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During the DefCore process, we’ve had regular community check points to review and discuss the latest materials from the committee.  With the latest work on the official process and flurry of Guidelines, we’ve got a lot of concrete material to show.

To accommodate global participants, we’ll have TWO sessions (and record both):

  1. April 21 8 am Central (1 pm UTC) https://join.me/874-029-687 
  2. April 21 8 pm Central (9 am Hong Kong) https://join.me/903-179-768 

Eye on OpenStackConsult the call etherpad for call in details and other material.

Planned Agenda:

  • Background on DefCore – very short 10 minutes
    • short description
    • why board process- where community
  •  Interop AND Trademark – why it’s both – 5 minutes
  •  Vendors AND Community – balancing the needs – 5 minutes
  •  Mechanics
    • testing & capabilities – 5 minutes
    • self testing & certification – 5 minutes
    • platform & components & trademark – 5 minutes
  • Quick overview of the the Process (to help w/ reviewers) – 15 minutes
  • How to get involved (Gerrit) – 5 minute

My OpenStack Vancouver Session Promotion Dilemma – please, vote outside your block

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We need people to promote their OpenStack Sessions, but how much is too much?

Megaphone!Semi-annually, I choose to be part of the growing dog pile of OpenStack summit submissions.  Looking at the list, I see some truly amazing sessions by committed and smart community members.  There are also a fair share of vendor promotions.

The nature of the crowded OpenStack vendor community is that everyone needs to pick up their social media megaphones (and encourage some internal block voting) to promote their talks.   Consequently, please I need to ask you to consider voting for my list:

  1. DefCore 2015 
  2. The DefCore Show: “is it core or not” feud episode
  3. Mayflies: Improve Cloud Utilization by Forcing Rapid Server Death [Research Analysis] (xref)
  4. It’s all about the Base. If you want stability, start with the underlay [Crowbar] 
  5. State of OpenStack Product Management

Why am I so reluctant to promote these excellent talks?  Because I’m concerned about fanning the “PROMOTE MY TALKS” inferno.

For the community to function, we need for users and operators to be heard.  The challenge is that the twin Conference/Summit venue serves a lot of different audiences.

In my experience, that leads to a lot of contributor navel gazing and vendor-on-vendor celebrations.  That in turn drowns out voices from the critical, but non-block-enabled users and operators.

Yes, please vote those sessions of mine that interest you; however, please take time to vote more broadly too.  The system randomized which talks you see to help distribute voting too.

Thanks.

Anyone else find picking OpenStack summit sessions overwhelming?!

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Choices!The scope and diversity of sessions for the upcoming OpenStack conference in Atlanta are simply overwhelming.   As a board member, that’s a positive sign of our success as a community; however, it’s also a challenge as we attempt to pick topics.  That’s why we turn to you, the OpenStack community, to help sift and select the content.

Even if you are not attending, we need your help in selection!  Content from the summits is archived and has a much larger outside of the two conference days.  You’re voice matters for the community.

While it’s a simple matter to ask you to vote for my DefCore presentation and some excellent ones from my peers at Dell, I’d also like share some of my thoughts about general trends I saw illustrated by the offerings:

  • Swift has a strong following as a solution outside of other products
  • Ceph seems to emerging as a critical component with Cinder
  • Neutron has breath but not depth in practice
  • HA and Upgrades remain challenges
  • We are starting to see specializations emerge (like NFV)
  • OpenStack case studies!  There are many – some of uncertain utility as references
  • Some community members and companies are super prolific in submitting sessions.  Perhaps these sessions are all great but on first pass it seems out of balance.
  • Vendor pitch or conference session?  You often get both in the same session.  We’re still not certain how to balance this.

The number and diversity of sessions is staggering – we need your help on voting.

We also need you to be part of the dialog about the conference and summits to make sure they are meeting the community needs.  My review of the sessions indicates that we are trying to serve many different audiences in a very limited time window.  I’m interested in hearing yours!  Review some sessions and let me know.

Taking OpenStack Core discussions to community

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core flowTHIS POST IS #9 IN A SERIES ABOUT “WHAT IS CORE.”

We’ve been building up to a broad discussion about the OpenStack Core and I’d like to invite everyone in the OpenStack community to participate (review latest).

Alan Clark (Board Chairman) officially kicked off this open discussion with his post on the OpenStack blog last week.  And we’re trying to have face-to-face events for dialog like the Core meetup tonight in San Francisco.  Look for more to come!

Of course, this will also be a topic at the summit (Alan and I submitted two sessions about this).  The Board needs to move this forward in the November meeting, so NOW is the time to review and give us input.

Thanks! I’m enjoying my conversation with you

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I write because I love to tell stories and to think about how actions we take today will impact tomorrow.  Ultimately, everything here is about a dialog with you because you are my sounding board and my critic.  I appreciate when people engage me about posts here and extend the conversation into other dimensions.  Feel free to call me on points and question my position – that’s what this is all about.

Thank you for being at part of my blog and joining in.  I’m looking forward to hearing more from you.

During the OpenStack Summit, I got to lead and participate in some excellent presentations and panels.  While my theme for this summit was interoperability, there are many other items discussed.

I hope you enjoy them.

Did one of these topics stand out?  Is there something I missed?  Please let me know!

“Stack Shop” cover of Macklemore’s Thrift Shop

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Sometimes a meme glitters too strongly for me to resist getting pulled in… that happened to great effect that just before the OpenStack Havana summit. When my code-addled mind kept swapping “poppin’ tags” for “OpenStack” on the radio edit, I stopped fighting and rewrote the Thrift Shop lyrics for OpenStack (see below the split).

With a lot of help from summit attendees (many of them are OpenStack celebrities, CEOs, VPs and members OpenStack Foundation board), I was able to create a freaking awesome cover of Macklemore’s second hand confection (NSFW).

Frankly, I don’t know everyone in the video (what, what?)!

But here’s a list of those that I do know.  I’m happy to update so the victims actors get credit.  Singers (in order):

Rob Hirschfeld (me) & Monty Taylor, Peter Poulliot, Judd Maltin, Forrest Norrod, Josh Kleinpeter, Tristan Goode, Dan Bode, Jay Pipes, Prabhakar Gopalan, Peter Chadwick, Simon Andersen, Vish Ishaya, Wayne Walls, Alex Freedland, Niki Acosta, Ops Track Monday Session 1, Ben Cherian, Eric Windisch, Brandon Draeger, Joseph B George,  Mark Collier, Joseph Heck, Tim Bell,  Chris Kemp, Kyle McDonald & Joshua McKenty,

Continue reading →

OpenStack’s next hurdle: Interoperability. Why should you care?

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SXSW life size Newton's Cradle

SXSW life size Newton’s Cradle

The OpenStack Board spent several hours (yes, hours) discussing interoperability related topics at the last board meeting.  Fundamentally, the community benefits when uses can operate easily across multiple OpenStack deployments (their own and/or public clouds).

Cloud interoperability: the ability to transfer workloads between systems without changes to the deployment operations management infrastructure.

This is NOT hybrid (which I defined as a workload transparently operating in multiple systems); however it is a prereq to achieve scalable hybrid operation.

Interoperability matters because the OpenStack value proposition is all about creating a common platform.  IT World does a good job laying out the problem (note, I work for Dell).  To create sites that can interoperate, we have to some serious lifting:

At the OpenStack Summit, there are multiple chances to engage on this.   I’m moderating a panel about Interop and also sharing a session about the highly related topic of Reference Architectures with Monty Tayor.

The Interop Panel (topic description here) is Tuesday @ 5:20pm.  If you join, you’ll get to see me try to stump our awesome panelists

  • Jonathan LaCour, DreamHost
  • Troy Toman, Rackspace
  • Bernard Golden,  Enstratius
  • Monty Taylor, OpenStack Board (and HP)
  • Peter Pouliot, Microsoft

PS: Oh, and I’m also talking about DevOps Upgrades Patterns during the very first session (see a preview).

Impressions from OpenStack Foundation board meeting 10/15

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20121018-115319.jpgI spent the first day of the OpenStack summit doing my service as a Foundation board member. While you need to wait for a summary by Jonathan Bryce, the Foundation Executive Director, and/or the official minutes to get the details of our actions, I think that it’s reasonable to share my impressions.

In some ways, the chemistry of the board is as important as our actions at this point. We are still working thorough start up issues and, more importantly, learning how to work together. The board is not only big, 24 members, it is also has many companies that often compete (power of we).

Here are my top 5 impressions:

    1. Transparency. The bylaws are crafted to ensure a openness and our meetings are broadcast to the maximum extent possible. Even with that background, there is a consistent self-check and discussion about increasing transparency so that the community is included.
    2. Humor. It’s a great sign of progress that we are laughing together because it shows that we trust and respect each other.
    3. Frustration. Recognition that we have important decisions to make and a degree of impatience to make them. Boards are subtle: we spend a lot of time setting up the right structures that allow us to make hard decisions quickly. Also, grumbling that we’d overlapped the board meeting and the summit.
    4. Consensus. This something I committed to help build. I feel that our actions reflect both healthy discussion as individuals and desire to work together as a board.
    5. Leadership. Looking back from our first meeting, it is clear that Jonathan and Alan have fully assumed their roles. I’m also seeing how the Foundation team (Mark, Lauren, Stephano) are smoothly supporting operations even though we’re really just weeks from the Foundation launch.

I hope that gives you some insights into the board meeting and that more of you can join the broadcast for the next ones (2012 schedule TBD) including a joint tech and foundation meeting

Wednesday morning at the summit was “breakfast with the board.” Look for some notes from that too soon.

OpenStack Summit: Let’s talk DevOps, Fog, Upgrades, Crowbar & Dell

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If you are coming to the OpenStack summit in San Diego next week then please find me at the show! I want to hear from you about the Foundation, community, OpenStack deployments, Crowbar and anything else.  Oh, and I just ordered a handful of Crowbar stickers if you wanted some CB bling.

Matt Ray (Opscode), Jason Cannavale (Rackspace) and I were Ops track co-chairs. If you have suggestions, we want to hear. We managed to get great speakers and also some interesting sessions like DevOps panel and up streaming deploy working sessions. It’s only on Monday and Tuesday, so don’t snooze or you’ll miss it.

My team from Dell has a lot going on, so there are lots of chances to connect with us:

At the Dell booth, Randy Perryman will be sharing field experience about hardware choices. We’ve got a lot of OpenStack battle experience and we want to compare notes with you.

I’m on the board meeting on Monday so likely occupied until the Mirantis party.

See you in San Diego!

PS: My team is hiring for Dev, QA and Marketing. Let me know if you want details.