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Last Thursday, a number of us Austin OpenStack fans decided to get together and talk OpenStack, Diablo, Crowbar, and more.
We had a fantastic turnout of almost SEVENTY people who came out that night – almost at near capacity for our venue, Tech Ranch Austin. A number of startups where represented, as well as a number of notable OpenStack partners like Rackspace, Canonical, and Dell (the company I work for), who sponsored this first OpenStack meet up in Austin.
This meetup coincided with the Rackspace Cloud Builders OpenStack training, being held at the Dell campus that entire week, so a number of OpenStack students from that class, many who had flown in for class from out of town / state, were able to make it as well.
It was a great pleasure for us here at Dell to sponsor the first Austin meetup for OpenStack, and I look forward to our community growing as other partners help us sponsor future meet ups.
You can get more details on what was discussed at the meetup at Rob’s blog – www.RobHirschfeld.com.
If you’re in the Austin area, and are interested in joining the OpenStack Austin meetup group, join us at www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin.
OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 28, 2011
HIGHLIGHTS
EVENTS
DEVELOPER COMMUNITY
GENERAL COMMUNITY
COMMUNITY STATISTICS
- OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
- OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
- OpenStack Image Registry (GLANCE) Data
- Bugs Stats for Week: 875 Tracked Bugs; 193 New Bugs; 113 In-progress Bugs; 23 Critical Bugs; 116 High Importance Bugs;
- Blueprints Stats for Week: 288 Blueprints; 13 Essential, 42 High, 68 Medium, 25 Low
- OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 19,315 Visits, 45,687 Pageviews, 54.16 % New Visits
- Top 5 Pages: Home 41.54%; Compute 15.72%; /projects 14.47%; Storage 10.52%; Glance 5.38%
This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.
With so many people interested in OpenStack that new user groups start regularly. A list on the community page mentions groups in Egypt, Japan, China, and more but we know it’s partial. There are more OpenStack groups and more people are interested in forming one. We’ve established a new OpenStack team, the International Community team on Launchpad with the objective: To help user groups around the world to advertise their existence, to share best practices, announce local events and coordinate activities. And have fun meanwhile.
If you run an OpenStack user group, a meetup, want to host an hackaton join the OpenStack International Community team and subscribe to the mailing list.
OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 21, 2011
HIGHLIGHTS
EVENTS
- OpenStorage Summit, Oct 26 – 27, 2011 – San Jose, CA http://www.openstoragesummit.org/
- Ubuntu Developer Summit, Oct 30 – Nov 4, Orlando, FL http://uds.ubuntu.com/
- Xen Summit Asia Nov 02 – 03, 2011 – Seoul, Korea http://xen.org/community/xensummit.html
- Cloud Computing Expo, Nov 7-10 – Santa Clara, CA http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/
- LinuxCon Brazil Nov 17 – Oct 18, 2011 – Sao Paulo, Brazil https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-brazil
DEVELOPER COMMUNITY
- zns to set “Maintainer” of keystone (identity) project
- swift will be continuing the previous path of releasing as needed and not necessarily following the nova milestones
- Thierry calls for completing blueprints to communicate your goals and completion targets outside your project, like https://blueprints.launchpad.net/keystone/essex
- Untriaged bugs decreased after last week’s call for help. Thank you http://webnumbr.com/untouched-nova-bugs
GENERAL COMMUNITY
COMMUNITY STATISTICS
- OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
- OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
- OpenStack Image Registry (GLANCE) Data
- Bugs Stats for Week: 819 Tracked Bugs; 165 New Bugs; 114 In-progress Bugs; 21 Critical Bugs; 110 High Importance Bugs;
- Blueprints Stats for Week: 359 Blueprints; 14 Essential, 39 High, 43 Medium, 21 Low
- OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 20,139 Visits, 48,402 Pageviews, 52.35 % New Visits
- Top 5 Pages: Home 40.96%; Compute 15.69%; /projects 14.03%; Storage 10.59%; Community 5.40%
This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.
Last week, we got together for the OpenStack Conference in Boston and started things off talking about plans to create an OpenStack Foundation. Thursday afternoon, we had a great session as a community talking about initial goals for the foundation and how to keep the discussion going after the conference. Ryan Lane had a nice post on the session, and we’ll also be posting the video of the session to vimeo soon. Scott Sanchez was also kind enough to take notes.
The first action we all agreed on was to create a mailing list to continue the conversation, which is now live and you can subscribe here.
Based on last week’s discussion, I think it makes sense to start at a high level by talking about the Mission of the foundation as well as the Scope of OpenStack for the foreseeable future before getting too bogged down in potential structures and funding etc. We should also talk about the need for any additional communication tools beyond the list itself.
Ada Lovelace day, October 7th, is a day for bloggers to write a story about an inspirational influence in their life in technology.
For me, there were two influential woman in my life as an undergraduate chemistry student in the early 90s at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. One was my first college chemistry professor, Anne McCowan, and the other was Butler’s scientific librarian, Mrs. Howes. Both influenced me through words, and bringing the importance of words to my attention. Professor McCowan stated on the first day of class:
“Chemistry is a study of nomenclature. Once you understand the naming and vocabulary, the world of chemistry is opened to you.”
It was such a simplification of an intimidating subject that it crystallized the learning process for me. If I studied the vocabulary, the rest would follow. And here I am, combining the wonder of worlds and technology every day.
So on today, Ada Lovelace day, I want to ask, how can OpenStack be a welcoming community for women in technology? I have ideas and want to share them with the community. These are both small ideas and large ideas.
- Inspire girls when they’re young. I have volunteered with an organization called GirlStart here in Austin, Texas, and I think they’ve got the right idea, influence girls to enter technology in middle school and elementary and encourage them to go to college. A few years ago I went to lunch once a month with middle school girls where we talked about simple ideas such as “what does it mean to be smart?” That group of girls will be in high school now, and I hope they find technology a good path for them.
- Invite women specifically. I spoke with Noirin Plunkett at OSCon this summer, and she said that women don’t necessarily have the confidence (or is it ego) to understand they are being specifically invited to participate in a tech initiative or open source project. You can specifically say to a group of female collage students for example, by saying “our project needs you specifically, not just your male colleagues.”
- Start in your neighborhood, at your company. Since Rackspace is a huge supporter and founder of OpenStack, we want to ensure that we bring our women to the project and make them feel like Stackers are their kind of people. Stackers are professional, mature, and respectful of each other. We certainly have heated discussions but all input is valuable. I want to start locally by inviting women to Austin Cloud User Group meetings, by recruiting women for Rackspace jobs, and putting myself out there constantly, which is not always comfortable but it is rewarding.
How about your perspective here? Where will you start and when? Let’s take these first steps towards inviting more women to join our open source cloud computing efforts.
Tomorrow at the OpenStack Conference in Boston, Lew Moorman will discuss Rackspace’s intention to form an OpenStack Foundation in 2012, which will be responsible for Project Governance and ownership of the OpenStack trademark. This marks a major milestone in the evolution of OpenStack as a movement to establish the industry standard for cloud software.
Rackspace, NASA, and over 20 other companies launched OpenStack in July of 2010 with the goal of building the ubiquitous open source cloud operating system. In just over a year, the community has grown to over 100 organizations all over the globe, producing 4 software releases in a short period of time. A founding goal was to grow the community well beyond Rackspace, both in terms of code contributions, and users. As we approach 2012, those goals are within reach. Some recent highlights:
- Code contributions are coming from a broad group. For example, in a recent Diablo milestone 12 features were contributed by developers from 8 different companies.
- The number of companies and organizations backing OpenStack is now well over 110, including industry giants such as Cisco, HP, and Dell.
- OpenStack start ups are also being funded at an amazing rate, including Piston and Nebula, both founded by ex-NASA folks who helped create OpenStack and are now leading companies around it, and Techstars recently announced an incubator program for Cloud start ups focused on OpenStack.
- User adoption is really taking off, and we’ll be hearing from MercardoLibre, CERN, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Fidelity, Disney, and NeCTAR tomorrow during the OpenStack Conference in Boston.
Rackspace will be gathering feedback from others in the community on the best structure and processes to adopt as the OpenStack Foundation is established in 2012, starting with a Town Hall session tomorrow during the OpenStack Conference in Boston. You can also share your thoughts by sending an email to foundation@openstack.org
OpenStack is poised for an even bigger year in 2012, with so much passion from an amazing group of people across the globe and an independent OpenStack foundation. The promise of a vendor-neutral, truly open cloud standard is within reach. By doing this important work together, as a community, we can achieve something much bigger with a lasting impact on the future of computing.