Some of you may already know me, many of you likely do not. If you would grant me just a few minutes of your time, I'd like to introduce myself and tell you why I want to represent you as a member of the OpenStack Board of Directors. For the tl;dr version, just skip to the end.
I am originally from Miami, Florida. I moved to the San Francisco bay area with my family just 3 1/2 short years ago and have worked in the industry since 1991. I've been a proud member of the Cloudscaling team for just under two years now. Over that time I've been an active participant in the OpenStack community. I was lucky enough to be invited to work on the Architecture and Design Guide, worked with Cody Bunch and Kevin Jackson on their OpenStack book and am even in discussions to write a book of my own. In October 2014, Cloudscaling was acquired by my new employer, The EMC Corporation, and we're all looking forward to redefining a lot - both about Cloudscaling and our cloud initiatives within EMC. 2015 is going to be an exciting year.
At the time I first arrived in California, I was working in a very traditional field engineering role doing your average consulting gig selling and installing systems, network and security solutions very similar to my prior twenty years' experience. It was, honestly, a go-nowhere job working with a great group of people but I never could have known what it would really do to change my life. Everything changed for me the day I walked into the offices of Nebula hoping to sell them on a videoconferencing solution (which they did not buy). What I walked out of their offices with was a keen interest in this revolutionary new open source project called OpenStack which would eventually provide a whole new direction for my career.
I went back to my office and consulted the very raw and error-ridden documentation sources and struggled my way through a number of them. Over and over, I was able to produce non-working environments in VirtualBox until I finally found Emilien Macchi's github repo with a working set of instructions. At this point it was months later. As a total novice to linux and openstack, it had taken me nearly 3 months to produce a working 3-node openstack cloud.
This was the Diablo/Essex release timeframe. There were just a few projects to coordinate - there wasn't even any real dashboard to talk about. There was no CI testing system for the source code. It was real cowboy times. On release day a nova bug regression came into play which had major implications for people running the KVM hypervisor, which was just about everyone at that time. It was then that the continuous integration system was built, the testing and gate systems came into play and the developer community literally exploded in size.
What the continuous integration, gate and testing system really did is allow OpenStack to endure those large growth spurts and take on a number of new developers who were eager to contribute and commit code. It was a great time for OpenStack where a lot of new developers joined the various projects. At the Folsom summit, Rob Hirschfeld quoted '550 developers on my project' in his parody of ThriftShop titled OpenStack is Awesome. Today there are more than a dozen core projects to coordinate with more on the horizon. We have quite a few projects in the integration phases and quite a few additional ones in incubation with well over 2,700 developers working on that code today. It's safe to say that the development team has grown by 5 times in two years.
What these projects lack, in my opinion, is clear direction and prioritization of features and blueprints which will allow for wider, more sweeping adoption of the technology. In order for OpenStack to succeed, it's important that user stories are well represented and that features which satisfy those requirements are implemented in a timely manner. As a Foundation board member, I hope to begin the process of implementing the OpenStack Product Managers program as suggested by Randy Bias at last years SV Forum event in California.
In addition to bringing order to chaos within the various projects, I am also very interested in the coordinated efforts to bring OpenStack into the enterprise. I believe that OpenStack can overcome all of the hurdles that are preventing it from sweeping adoption in enterprise. Without the coordinated efforts of the Foundation, along with the project leads and development teams, it's unlikely to occur. The features which are most important to enterprise adoption need to be represented within the developer community. User and operator voices need to be better expressed. Those voices need to come from the community - not from the 'hidden influencers' of OpenStack.
I want to represent the individual developer, user and operator communities so that OpenStack can become the open source standard for building cloud infrastructure across all different markets in companies of all different sizes. In order to succeed in the market, I strongly believe that the various projects need more guidance and input from people who have expertise in managing products. I also believe that this same effort will help to address the concerns of enterprises looking to adopt the technology. We've come a long way over the past few years, and I would be honored to represent you so that we can continue on our path forward and push adoption to it's highest ever.
In order to cast your vote, please check the email account registered with the OpenStack Foundation for your own personal link.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Your vote is greatly appreciated!
tl;dr version:
OpenStack is growing fast, enterprises have lots of roadblocks to implementing it. I want to help address this at the Foundational level so that OpenStack can continue its forward moving momentum and become the open source standard for building public and private cloud infrastructure. Go vote for me. Thanks!
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