Open Mic Spotlight: Zhang Hua

 

December 12, 2013

ZhangHuaThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. 

Zhang Hua joined the OpenStack community in 2012 as a contributor from IBM. He loves coding and digging into the details of various computer technologies. You can follow him on Twitter at @zhhuabj and read his blog here. 

1. Define what “open source” means to you.

I like the open source spirit. I love working in a culture where the engineers can decide how to design and implement great products. I also enjoy the opportunity to learn from world-class engineers.

2. How did you first get involved in OpenStack? 

I joined the OpenStack community in February of 2012. I am the first contributor from IBM China’s Systems and Technology Lab, and was one of the early guys from IBM global. I love Linux technology, and my manager thought I would be an appropriate engineer to join OpenStack at that time. Looking back over the past two years, I feel very lucky to be nominated by IBM to join the Openstack journey. I read more than 24 books about networks and linux during this time, and became an expert. I also better understand the spirit of open source: top engineers develop the best platforms based on technology truths.

3. If you couldn’t be a developer, what would your dream job be?

If I couldn’t be a developer, I would become a researcher. I believe that disruptive theory is more important than practice in terms of technology improvement and society development. I would pursue investigation, prototyping and disruption to improve depth in some promising domains.

4. Why did you decide to go into computer engineering?

My undergraduate major is in Electronic Information Engineering. Although I didn’t understand computers well at that time, I was always envious of others who could set up their personal website using HTML technology — although now, it seems so simple. This sparked the interest that drove me to choose Computer Engineering for graduate school in 2004.

5. How did you learn to code ? Are you self-taught or did you learn in college? On-the-job?

I’ve always felt that I was a little different from most people. For example, I don’t like to read blogs or study word phrases, but instead adapt systematic studying by reading a lot of books. I don’t prefer e-books, but enjoy reading paperback books. I always begin to code after I have figured everything out systematically. I always know exactly what I’m doing when I code.

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It’s Summer Internship Time in the Southern Hemisphere!

 

After a brisk walk in Austin Texas in mid-30 degree Fahrenheit weather, I welcome the idea that it’s summertime somewhere. Since it’s summertime in the southern hemisphere, we can now announce our next round of Outreach Program for Women internships!

I’m excited that we have four interns and four mentors this time around. Many thanks to HP, the OpenStack Foundation, and Rackspace for funding our four. HP also stepped in this round and made it possible for more of the nine participating organizations to select interns, including OpenStack. Plus, RedHat developers are mentoring our interns. I asked each intern, what do you see when you look above your screen?

Annapoornima Koppad is known as akoppad on IRC. She lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. She’ll be working on surfacing the instance actions in the OpenStack dashboard through the Horizon project with our second-time mentor, Julie Pichon. Anna says, “It’s a wintry December in Bangalore, India. There is a gloomy, cold, and yet pleasant atmosphere. There is a small window in front of me, and I think it’s most likely to rain after sometime. I see my neighbours are scurrying up to renovate their house. I sip up my warm tea, and I have some books on my right shelf.”

Sayali Lunkad will be working on adding sparklines to the Dashboard, mentored by Ladislav Smola. Sayali goes by sayalilunkad on IRC and is located in Pune, Maharashtra, India. Sayali says, “I read this mail just as I woke up. I am in my room from where I see the sun up in the sky and parrots and crows in my terrace garden which is connected to my room. It is a pleasant morning, hope everyone has a good day!”

In Dallas Texas we find Cindy Pallares-Quezada (cpallares on IRC) She’ll be working on the Queues API Spec for the Marconi project with Flavio Percoco. Cindy says, “As for what’s above my screen, I see my window. Outside my window there’s lots of leafless branches that belong to a big tree (I’m on the second floor of a two story building). The branches are all covered in melting ice. Past the trees there’s a street and a lawn that’s full of lots of fallen trees and is covered in yellow, orange, and green leaves.”

Miranda Zhang (MirandaZhang on IRC) is in Canberra, Australia and will work with Diane Fleming to enhance the API Complete Reference pages and create a comprehensive OpenStack API Guide. She was kind enough to send pictures of her workstation. Miranda says, “Unfortunately, I’m in a room with no window (otherwise I may be able to tell you about the cuddly rabbits running around the campus, it’s hot sunny summer in Australia now), and above the computer screen I’m looking at, there are just walls, so I look around my workstation, they say a picture is worth a thousand words:”
Workstation

While the interns are super important, I have to emphasize how much we should appreciate the mentoring and project identification work that goes into this program. Our mentors are extremely valuable to OpenStack as are the ideas for 3-month projects. Thanks to everyone who worked together to get these ideas ready and thanks in advance to the mentors and interns who make this project so worthwhile.

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OpenStack Community Pavilion at Gartner Data Center Conference

 

December 6, 2013

The Gartner Data Center Conference is coming up December 9-12 in Las Vegas, and OpenStack is proud to be a sponsor alongside 35+ companies from the OpenStack ecosystem.

We are excited to host the OpenStack Community Pavilion, showcasing OpenStack solutions and services from Cloud Cruiser, Mirantis, Nebula, Puppet Labs, Rackspace, SaltStack, Scalr, and SolidFire. You can visit these OpenStack providers, in addition to Foundation executives and staff, in booth #408 in the Venetian Resort’s Sands Expo Convention Center.

You can also speak with the 25+ additional OpenStack community exhibitors and presenters who will be at the conference. We’ll be providing a ‘community map’ showing the locations of all participating companies on the show floor.

If you are planning to be in Las Vegas for the event and have questions about OpenStack, please stop by the booth #408 or contact [email protected] to set up a meeting.

You can also visit an OpenStack user group near you; find a convenient one at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStackUsersGroup.

openstack event

 

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Nov 29 – Dec 6)

 

Wrapping up the OpenStack Travel Support Program – Icehouse

The OpenStack Foundation brought 18 people to Hong Kong thanks to the grants offered by the first edition of the Travel Support Program, sponsored by Intel. The Travel Support Program is based on the promise of Open Design and its aim is to facilitate participation of key contributors to the OpenStack Design Summit. The program aims at covering costs for travel and accommodation for key contributors to the OpenStack project to join the community at the Summits.

Adopt an operator?

Lorin Hochstein made what he calls “a modest proposal”: a program to pair up individual OpenStack developers with OpenStack operators to encourage better information flow from ops to devs. Sounds intriguing, it may be a way to try tightening the gap between developers and users of OpenStack. Another proposal trying to address the same issue was sent to the User Committee mailing list. What do you think?

Vmware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

The fine folks at Cloudbase are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for development, demos and PoCs. They have replaced their automation scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack APIs and Heat for the automation. They published the results of their work as a Nova driver on github.com.

Tips ‘n Tricks

Upcoming Events

Other News

Got Answers?

Ask OpenStack is the go-to destination for OpenStack users. Interesting questions waiting for answers:

Welcome New Reviewers and Developers

Is your affiliation correct? Check your profile in the OpenStack Foundation Members Database!

wangchy Valeriy Ponomaryov
Ed Bak Vadim Rovachev
Valeriy Ponomaryov Shalini khandelwal
Ramon Acedo Richard Lee
Rafael Folco Pavlo Shchelokovskyy
Jaroslav Henner Debasish Chowdhury
Tristan Cacqueray tshirtman
Shilla Saebi Sergey Kolekonov
Nadya Privalova Ravi Kumar Pasumarthy
Dylan Yu Guilherme Birk
Andrei Ostapenko Jay Dobies
koofoss David Ostrovsky
Sergio Cazzolato Bruce Benjamin
Ruslan Kamaldinov Vladan Popovic
Marios Andreou Scott Adkins
Ilya Tyaptin Joris Roovers
Andres Buraschi Shawhin Tech
Abhishek Chanda Abhishek Chanda
Juan Manuel Ollé

Latest Activity In Projects

Do you want to see at a glance the bugs filed and solved this week? Latest patches submitted for review? Check out the individual project pages on OpenStack Activity Board – Insights.

OpenStack Reactions

When my patch gets positive reviews

When my patch gets positive reviews

The 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.

 

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Open Mic Spotlight: Sean M. Collins

 

December 5, 2013

seancollinsThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. 

Sean is a developer at Comcast working on OpenStack. He is 26 years old, and lives in South Philadelphia with his partner, Caroline. You can follow him on Twitter @sc68cal.

1. What are the essentials for someone just getting started with OpenStack? Sites? Books? Conferences? People?

Devstack. The fact that you can clone a git repository, execute a shell script, and get a fully built OpenStack install on your personal machine to start hacking makes a huge difference.

2. What was your first commit or contribution and why did you make it?

My first contribution of substance was to add better hooks into the Security Group API events in Nova-Network. I was working on a way to take Security Group API calls from OpenStack for something like allowing port 80 open for a web server, to also have those requests propagate into other internal systems inside Comcast. This way, firewalls upstream would honor the request to allow port 80 through.

3. What other OpenStack developers deserve a shout out for the work they’re doing in the community? Who are our unsung heroes? Your own? 

For me personally, the community around Neutron has been a big help. People like Aaron Rosen, Nachi Ueno, Mark McClain, and Kyle Mestery have helped me whenever I’ve gotten stuck or had a question.

4. Are there any skills that you think are critical for OpenStack developers in the next 5 years? What specialties will be most useful? Valuable?

I’d say the most important skill is an open mind. OpenStack has a huge userbase, and thousands of different use-cases. You need to remember that not everyone is going to be using OpenStack the way you do, and that’s OK! The community and the codebase is flexible enough that everyone should be able to get what they want out of it. It doesn’t have to be a winner-take-all proposition.

5. What do you think are the benefits of the open, community-driven approach to development?

More things can get done in shorter periods of time. Just look at the amount of features that each release of OpenStack has added. It’s incredible.

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Wrapping up the OpenStack Travel Support Program – Icehouse

 

December 3, 2013

travel

The OpenStack Foundation brought 18 people to Hong Kong thanks to the grants offered by the first edition of the Travel Support Program, sponsored by Intel. The Travel Support Program is based on the promise of Open Design and its aim is to facilitate participation of key contributors to the OpenStack Design Summit. The program aims at covering costs for travel and accommodation for key contributors to the OpenStack project to join the community at the Summits.

We had 18 people accepted in the program from 11 countries and all continents (except Antarctica)! Four people travelled from India, two from south-east Asia, three from Europe, three from North America, four from Oceania and the rest from Africa and South America. Of the 26 total applicants, four were fully paid by their employers and didn’t need the grants, four couldn’t be accepted due to paperwork problems because of local political turmoil.

The Foundation spent a total of US$16,742 for accommodations and US$11,795.61 for flights, with a total cost for the Foundation of over US$30,000 including the costs of the 11 access passes granted to the non-ATCs (Active Technical Contributors). Luckily most people were able to share the rooms, which cost US$1,522 each allowing more people to be able to participate in the program.

This was the first time the OpenStack Foundation ran the program and we would like to continue running and expanding it in 2014. As one of the recipients of the travel grant, Terri Yu told us:

As great as it is to work with people on IRC, you’re not getting the full OpenStack experience by sitting in front of your computer.  You have to meet people.  If there is an important contributor who can’t get to the Summit, I’d like to see them funded by the Travel Support Program.

We’ll soon start working on the “J” edition of the Travel Support Program, to help people get to Atlanta (Georgia) in the USA in May 2014. Watch this space for announcements.

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Nov 22 – 29)

 

November 29, 2013

Friday Dec 20th – Doc Bug Day

This month, docs reaches 500 bugs, making it the 2nd-largest project by bug count in all of OpenStack. Yes, it beats Cinder, Horizon, Swift, Keystone and Glance, and will soon surpass Neutron. In order to start the new year in a slightly better state, we have arranged a bug squash day. Save the date: Friday, December 20th https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/BugDay.

Tips ‘n Tricks

Upcoming Events

Security Advisories

Other News

Got Answers?

Ask OpenStack is the go-to destination for OpenStack users. Interesting questions waiting for answers:

Welcome New Reviewers and Developers

Is your affiliation correct? Check your profile in the OpenStack Foundation Members Database!

chenhaiq Ilya Tyaptin
berlin Verónica Musso
Tianpeng Wang Matthew Oliver
Miguel Angel Ajo Konstantin Permyakov
Daisuke Morita Charles V Bock
钱林 Abhijeet Malawade
Yanis Guenane jichencom
Lars Kellogg-Stedman eaglezpf
Richard Hawkins Steven Westonhttp://www.openstack.org/software/openstack-shared-services/
alejandro emanuel paredes Sam Harwell
Nicholas Shobe xiayu
Xinyuan Huang
Nikolay Starodubtsev
Matthew Gilliard
LiShaokai
Jaime Gil de Sagredo
Ivar Lazzaro
Yathiraj Udupi
yogesh-mehra
Thomas Leaman
Miguel Angel Ajo
Maksym Iarmak
Gonéri Le Bouder
Gonéri Le Bouder
Gerry Drudy
Gastón

Latest Activity In Projects

Do you want to see at a glance the bugs filed and solved this week? Latest patches submitted for review? Check out the individual project pages on OpenStack Activity Board – Insights.

OpenStack Reactions

group-cry

Developers on IRC when the gate is broken

The 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.

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Nov 15 – 22)

 

November 22, 2013

Spinning up OpenStack “DefCore” Committee by spotting elephants

This week, Joshua McKenty, Rob Hirschfeld and a handful of interested individuals (board member Eileen Evans included) met to start organizing the DefCore* Committee. This standing committee was established by an OpenStack Foundation resolution just before the Hong Kong Summit. This action was an immediate result of the unanimous passage of the 10 Principles that Rob was driving in the DefCore “Spider” cycle. Read the summary of the outcomes of the first meeting.

How to get new questions on Ask OpenStack via email

Email is still one of the best mechanism to get push notifications, so getting automatic nudges via email from Ask OpenStack is useful. I took some time to document how to get an email message every time a new question is asked on Ask OpenStack.

Who Wrote OpenStack Havana Docs?

Indulging with our own Anne Gentl in the glorious beauty of numbers and metrics, following up on a similar post about previous release, Who Wrote OpenStack Grizzly Docs? At the time Grizzly had 79 docs contributors overall, with 3 of them writing half of the changes for Grizzly. This time the team grew to 130 docs contributors with 7 of them writing just over half the changes in overarching install/config/deploy/operations guides. Progress! We also had at least three supporting companies hire writers dedicated to OpenStack upstream docs.

Tips ‘n Tricks

Upcoming Events

Other News

Welcome New Reviewers and Developers

Is your affiliation correct? Check your profile in the OpenStack Foundation Members Database!

Yidan Zhang Miguel Angel Ajo
jiangang Yaroslav Lobankov
Takashi NATSUME Sergio Cazzolato
Leandro Ignacio Costantino Radoslav Gerganov
Max Lobur Leandro Ignacio Costantino
Jon-Paul Sullivan John Wood
Gonéri Le Bouder Jarret Raim
Ana Krivokapić Cristian A Sanchez
Steven Lang alejandro emanuel paredes
vlowther Sean Winn
Ken Giusti Peter Lomakin
Pablo Andres Fuente
Nathan Kinder
Marc Solanas
Ma Wen Cheng
Denis Egorenko
ChrisBuccella
Andres Buraschi
Yair Fried
Steven Lang
Shilla Saebi
Rossella Sblendido
Nadya Privalova
Bob Melander
Tristan Cacqueray
Jiri Tomasek
Daisuke Morita

Latest Activity In Projects

Do you want to see at a glance the bugs filed and solved this week? Latest patches submitted for review? Check out the individual project pages on OpenStack Activity Board – Insights.

OpenStack Reactions

jenkins fails, sending a review update, jenkins fails, sending a review update…

The 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.

 

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Open Mic Spotlight: Sean Chen

 

November 21, 2013

sean_openmicThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. 

Sean worked at VMware, where his last project was hybrid cloud service. He is currently working on a converged storage project at a small startup. He lives near Stanford, California. You can follow him on Twitter @opencomp. 

1. Where is your happy place? Favorite place to visit, vacation, decompress?

I visited Banff National Park with my kids and family this past summer. Emerald Lake, Lake Louise and Moraine Lake were breathtakingly beautiful.

2. What is your go-to beverage or snack while coding?

Chocolate, intense dark. Mochi green tea ice cream. Pearl (Boba) milk tea.

3.  Have you organized an OpenStack meet-up/event or spoken about OpenStack at an event? What did you learn? What was the best part?

I talked about how to manage VMware ESX and Virtual Center with OpenStack at the 2012 Summit. The best part was that it made OpenStackers aware of VMware’s plans with OpenStack and the software defined data center, as well as VMware’s efforts around expanding Nicira’s contributions to Quantum and Open vSwitch.

4. Why did you decide to go into computer engineering?

Apple IIe, which made me immensely happy, and got me interested in computing.

5. How did you first get involved in OpenStack?

I was doing research on open source cloud initiatives and decided to improve VMware Compute Driver in OpenStack and bring many key features to the community.

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Nov 1 – Nov 15)

 

November 15, 2013

Our first OpenStack Ambassadors

Following on from our earlier discussions about the OpenStack Ambassador Program, it is with great excitement that the Foundation introduced the first OpenStack Ambassadors. In this initial stage, we were only looking for a small number but were very honoured to have applications from many more excellent candidates and will aim to introduce more ambassadors in the next 6 months. The ambassadors are currently working to scope out the program and are keen to start making an impact in our community. Follow the discussion on the community mailing list.

Welcome new Gold Members Aptira, Hitachi, and Huawei!

The OpenStack Board of Directors approved Aptira, Hitachi and Huawei as Gold Members of the OpenStack Foundation. The companies are based in Australia/India, Japan and China respectively, and range from a startup to established, multinational corporations.

OpenStack User Survey Statistics November 2013

The OpenStack User Committee and Foundation staff conducted a survey of OpenStack cloud operators and end users, and are sharing the results with the community this week during the OpenStack Summit Hong Kong. The goal of the survey is to give users a strong voice in the community to share their technical requirements, feedback and best practices with the developers building OpenStack, as well as other cloud operators.

The survey generated 822 responses and catalogued 387 OpenStack cloud deployments across 56 countries.  A few key highlights on the detailed blog post and infographic.

Expect the Minus One

We want your patches for OpenStack, Keystone. Just don’t be surprised when it gets a minus one rating. A patch that gets a minus one from a core developer is probably on the right track, it just needs adjustment to fit in with the rest of Keystone. In other words, don’t be afraid, says Adam Young.

DNSaaS with Designate, PowerDNS and NSD4

Designate is a DNS as-a-service project, it is intended to provide a DNS service for creating, updating, maintaining and deleting DNS data using its API, as well as providing DNS resolution for users

Reports from OpenStack Hong Kong Summit

Podcast Series From Hong Kong

Tips ‘n Tricks

Upcoming Events

Security Advisories

Other News

Welcome New Reviewers and Developers

Is your affiliation correct? Check your profile in the OpenStack Foundation Members Database!

ling-yun Jon Bernard
Yolanda Robla Gauvain Pocentek
Ondra Machacek Francois Deppierraz
Evgeniy L Dmitry Pyzhov
Mike BRIGHT David Lapsley
Charles Crouch Ondergetekende
ramesh Liusheng
li,chen Jordan OMara
Vladimir Kozhukalov Hoisaleshwara Madan V S
Vladan Popovic Drew Thorstensen
Alexander Chudnovets Tiago Everton Ferraz Martins
Sajid Akhtar Ryan Brady
Miranda Zhang Erik-Martijn Kasimier
Liusheng Arx Cruz
Lana Romain Hardouin
Juan J. Martínez Shaun McCance
George Peristerakis Nikita Konovalov
Samuel de Medeiros Queiroz Mike BRIGHT
Ilya Pekelny Julia Varlamova
Kapil Thangavelu andersonvom
Jon Bernard Marcos Lobo
ChrisBuccella Ruslan Kamaldinov
Paul Czarkowski Rick Hull
Mark Dunnett Marek Denis

Security Advisories

Latest Activity In Projects

Do you want to see at a glance the bugs filed and solved this week? Latest patches submitted for review? Check out the individual project pages on OpenStack Activity Board – Insights.

OpenStack Reactions

Agreeing on a feature to implement at the OpenStack summit

The 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.

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