The OpenStack Blog Everything in & around OpenStack in written words.

This 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. 

Kyle Mestery is a Principal Engineer in the Office of the Cloud CTO at Cisco. Kyle is the Chief Architect for Cisco’s OpenStack development, and has been actively participating in OpenStack and Open Source development for many years. Kyle has over 15 years of experience in systems software development ranging from distributed filesystems to distributed virtual switches. He is also an active speaker at Open Source conferences, and is the founder of the Minnesota OpenStack Meetup. In addition to being an active contributor to OpenStack, Kyle is also an active contributor to Open vSwitch and libvirt. His current focus in OpenStack is the Modular Layer 2 Plugin, where he is working to ensure ML2 will work successfully with the Open vSwitch and Linux Bridge agents, as well as with a new OpenDaylight Mechanism Driver under development. Kyle lives in Minnesota with his wife and 3 wonderful kids, who have all been exposed to programming through Ruby for Kids. Follow Kyle on Twitter at @mestery.

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

I think the main benefit from open, community-driven development is the fact you feel like you belong to something throughout the entire process. Participating in the development of something like OpenStack means you are working with a large number of people spanning the entire globe. And the first you’ll notice is the sense of community one feels when doing this sort of development. The learning process you go through when getting your first commit may be a little steep, but once you’ve gone through it you’ll find you’ve made new connections from the people who assisted you along the way. And once you’ve made more than a handful of commits, you’ll be able to switch around and help other people make their first commit.

In addition, open development means everything is done in the open. From the initial design of a feature, to the development of the feature, to it’s eventual inclusion into the source tree and it’s documentation, all of this is done in the open. This means anyone can comment and contribute along the way. And this is what makes Open Source development so powerful. Open development and Open Source level the playing field and allow a much broader scope of people to become involved at every step of the process.

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

When you’re just getting started with OpenStack development and you’ve never used git, gerrit, and other open source tooling technologies, the task can be somewhat daunting. Colin McNamara has put together a great presentation which covers “How To Survive Your First OpenStack Checkin”. He’s given this talk at the last two OpenStack Conferences, and it’s a great talk for someone beginning their OpenStack development journey. I highly recommend new developers to OpenStack to have a look at Colin’s slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/colinmcnamara1/open-stack-summit-surviving-your-first-checkin

Another great resource for someone just getting started with OpenStack are local User groups. One of the great things about OpenStack is the community of people who exist inside the ecosystem. There are User groups everywhere, and there is likely one close to where you live. Joining your local User group is a great way to get to know people using and developing OpenStack who live close to you. You’ll find a local community where you can share ideas and learn from others.  And if there isn’t a local User group near you, why not start your own?

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStack_User_Groups

Another critical resource for people new to OpenStack is IRC. IRC, for those new to it, stands for Internet Relay Chat, and is a way the majority of developers and users in the OpenStack community communicate with each other. There are IRC channels covering many sub topics of OpenStack, joining the appropriate one is a great way to ask questions as a user or a developer. You’ll find core developers for each of the OpenStack project are always on IRC and are willing to help.

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/IRC

3) What other open sources projects do you think work well with OpenStack, and why?

The list of Open Source projects which work well together with OpenStack is quite large. I’ll focus on a few which I’m familiar with and actively am involved with:

• Open vSwitch (http://openvswitch.org/)
• libvirt (http://libvirt.org/)
• Ryu (http://osrg.github.io/ryu/)
• OpenDaylight (http://www.opendaylight.org/)

Open vSwitch is an Open Source virtual switch, originally developed by Nicira, now VMware. Open vSwitch has a large number of contributors, and is the base virtual switch for a large number of OpenStack Neutron plugins. The fact so many Neutron plugins rely on Open vSwitch running on each host makes it a core component of most OpenStack deployments.

libvirt is a library for managing and running virtual machines. libvirt supports a large number of hypervisors, and is a critical component of most KVM-based Linux hypervisor deployments. In OpenStack, when you run with KVM hypervisors you are using libvirt to run virtual machines on compute hosts. libvirt integrates nicely with OpenStack Nova to handle this, and is a critical component of OpenStack deployments with KVM.

Ryu is an Open Source component-based Software Defined Networking framework. Ryu is modular and supports a large number of protocols underneath. Since the Folsom release of OpenStack, Ryu has been an optional plugin for OpenStack Neutron. The flexibility of Ryu makes it an interesting choice for Elastic Cloud Platforms when deploying OpenStack.

OpenDaylight is an Open Source Software Defined Networking Controller sponsored by the Linux Foundation and developed by many different companies and individuals. OpenDaylight is a relatively new Open Source project, but the momentum behind it has been amazing to watch over the last 6 months. Work is currently underway to develop an OpenStack Neutron Modular Layer 2 MechanismDriver for OpenDaylight, with the hope of this becoming the reference controller MechanismDriver for ML2.

4) How would you suggest to someone that they should pick OpenStack for deployment? What is the most compelling argument for OpenStack in your mind?

OpenStack is a great deployment option if you’re looking for an Elastic Cloud Platform and you want to take advantage of the things a platform like that can provide. If you’re looking to deploy something along the lines of Amazon Web Services in your own lab or datacenter, OpenStack is a great choice. The scalability and flexibility provided by OpenStack map perfectly into this use case. And if you are already familiar with Amazon Web Services, deploying OpenStack into your own datacenter will provide you with familiar functionality for your local tenants and users.

Another great reason to pick OpenStack is if you’re looking at deploying your own Platform as a Service. Anyone looking to deploy something like OpenShift Agile or CloudFoundry should look seriously at how they can deploy those items on top of OpenStack. Someone looking to deploy Hadoop in an Elastic Cloud Platform should look at OpenStack as the underlying cloud platform for their Hadoop deployment. These are examples of strong use cases for applications deployed on top of OpenStack. And when you start to think in terms of scalability, flexibility, and manageability at the application level, OpenStack becomes a compelling option.

The most compelling argument for deploying OpenStack is the fact it allows you to unlock the power of your applications and run them in a truly elastic fashion on top. Once you start to think outside of the typical enterprise computing box, you realize how powerful this can become. And when you start to think in terms of elastic computing and computing on demand, deploying OpenStack becomes even more compelling. The simplicity and scalability of OpenStack makes it a compelling deployment option for anyone looking to deploy any type of cloud computing setup.

5) What is the most common misconception you hear about OpenStack? 

The most common misconception I hear about OpenStack currently is the fact people new to OpenStack think it’s an enterprise virtualization platform which is a replacement for vSphere. In my opinion, this is a rather limiting view of OpenStack, and doesn’t take into account what OpenStack was designed to be. OpenStack was designed to be an Elastic Cloud Platform more in line with what Amazon Web Services is. Trying to box OpenStack into being a replacement for something like vSphere limits the true power of OpenStack. This common misconception comes from enterprise users and developers who have years of experience with vSphere. It’s true that OpenStack is slowly developing features which put it more in line with an enterprise virtualization platform. But it’s more interesting to think outside of that box and imagine what you can do with a truly Elastic Cloud Platform. Once you do that, the possibilities you open are amazing. Thinking in terms of application scalability opens up new doors where you are no longer limited by hardware, but are more in tune with what the software can provide you and what you can do with the software you develop and/or run on top of OpenStack.

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

Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer in the Software Group Standards Strategy organization. In his current role, Brad leads a development team focused on contributing to and improving OpenStack.  In addition to leading a team, Brad has also personally contributed to multiple OpenStack projects including Keystone and DevStack. Prior to his current role, Brad was  IBM Distinguished Engineer, SWG Serviceability, with responsibility for driving IBM software group’s cross-product serviceability and electronic fix distribution initiatives. Over the years, Brad has been involved in advanced technology projects in the areas of product serviceability, problem determination, autonomic computing, content transcoding for mobile devices, and Web Services.  In 2000, he received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for contributions to the IBM WebSphere Transcoding Publisher product.  He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998. You can follow Brad on Twitter at @bradtopol.

1. What do you do when you’re not obsessing over and working with OpenStack?

When not working on OpenStack,  I am typically either working out at the gym, helping kids with homework, or taking the kids to softball practice, baseball practice, soccer practice, and flute lessons.

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

The first commit that I made was to fix a Glance registry documentation paste.ini sample that was missing a configuration section for using an authtoken filter. I made this change because I wanted to fix a simple bug that would enable me to learn the OpenStack process for making contributions via Git and Gerrit.

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

A key critical skill for an OpenStack developer is to have an extremely strong understanding of the Python programming language and its advanced features. So many of its advanced features are used throughout the OpenStack projects and I’m sure this will continue as Python evolves. The most important skill for an OpenStack developer, however, is to not get complacent once they become an expert on one portion of OpenStack. For example, someone may become an expert in Nova and then their job becomes easy. They know how to perform quality reviews quickly and can make contributions quickly and can go on cruise control a little. When a developer hits this point I strongly recommend that they force themselves to get out of their comfort zone and spend some time learning a different portion of OpenStack. This will be hard, and they may hate being the rookie “dumb” guy in the new project. Nonetheless, the result of them pushing themselves to learn something new will ensure that they continue to improve their skills, enable them to drive greater innovation, and will accelerate their career growth and development.

4. What is the most important contribution you’ve made that will make OpenStack users happy?

The most important contribution that I have made to OpenStack that will make OpenStack users happy was adding Transport Layer Security (TLS) support to Keystone’s LDAP identity backend. This enabled Keystone to have an optional secure connection when using LDAP or Active Directory as its backend identity store. What was great about this contribution was that I have been on customer calls where the customer explicitly asked if Keystone had TLS support and it was really cool being able to tell them that yes it does and also that I personally implemented it!

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

There are so many benefits of the open, community-driven approach to development. First, the diversity of having developers from companies all over the world results in solutions to problems being identified quickly and best of breed continuous integration development practices being utilized. As a result, development in an open, community-driven approach occurs at lightning speed. Furthermore, the peer review process utilized for every code commit results in a very high quality code base. I know many times I would think to myself that my patch was “good enough” but then my peers would review it and convince me it most certainly could be better.   This peer pressure motivated me to deliver higher quality code than what I would have normally delivered had I not been subjected to peer review. Another benefit is that when you run into a problem that you can’t resolve on your own you can then go ask the community. Most of the time there will be someone in the community that has already encountered the same problem and you will be able to solve the problem much faster than just working on the issue in a vacuum. A final benefit of the open, community-driven approach to development is that open communities breed strong ecosystems.  These strong ecosystems increase the longevity of the community and this improves the confidence the user base has with the the community software.

This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. 

Dirk is a Senior Engineer on OpenStack at SUSE, where he gets in touch with all aspects of OpenStack.

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

That was roughly half a year ago, when I uploaded the first review (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/19830/) immediately after my CLA application was approved, and two days after I started on OpenStack. My main reason was to test how easy it is to contribute on OpenStack. I learn while doing things, so contributing was my way to learn how to contribute, and I was positively surprised that it was quite easy. And I appreciate the hard work of that “mysterious” Mr. Jenkins when he gives a +1.

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

The three areas I had most contact with are those who work on the online documentation (which is continuously improving, and already tremendously helpful!), the countless volunteers that review code changes and almost always suggest a way to improve the patch even further and last but not least Stefano (and whoever helps him) for the Community Newsletter, which is great for busy people like myself to have at least a glimpse of understanding on what is going on. I can only barely anticipate the amount of work that is put in each of those, and who ever contributes to any of those is up for my applause.

3. What’s the most critical feature you think cloud software needs to be widely adopted over the next year?

The most crucial feature is not a single blueprint, it is everything that moves towards ease of installation, configuration and consistency in use. OpenStack did well in splitting out components that are managed in individual projects, but for the full feature experience all of those components need to be combined again by the Administrator (“user”), and when going through those steps from the beginning for the first time, there are many things that one can stumble upon. For example things that are slightly inconsistent between the various projects, like configuration options doing the same but named differently, or defaults being different between projects, or the command line of the clients being slightly different. A lot of work is going on into that already, but in order to really succeed, OpenStack as a whole needs to work together on that. I believe that consistency doesn’t mean there is a “right way” of doing things. Even a “wrong way” is still slightly better if it is at least consistent between all projects and can be changed at one glimpse in one single place.

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

The main benefit I think is that it puts decisions about code and features on the shoulders of those who do the work. Those who do not actively review or actively contribute code have lesser impact on the project’s direction and on individual implementation details. That just feels natural and motivating and also keeps a healthy level of pragmatism in the project. The only downside is that one probably only values openness when having experienced the downsides of non-openness before, where steering happens without being affected by the decision.

5. What is your favorite productivity hack? Secret trick? Shortcut you’re slightly embarrassed to admit?

I use F10 as a hotkey in the editor that executes a throw-away “doit.sh”, which automates the boring steps of building, redeploying and executing the steps needed to reproduce the original problem,  e.g. simply running the one testcase again that I’m aiming for at the moment.

In general the main productivity “hack” that I aim for is that as soon as I do something again for the 3rd time, I go writing a script or at least a scripted check instead, and automate that one as well as possible. It requires quite a bit of self-control though, but by remembering that executing repetitive tasks flawlessly is not a human strength, it has always paid off so far.

6. What is the most common misconception you hear about OpenStack?

That is probably the perception that OpenStack is just another way of managing virtualisation, without realizing the different philosophy behind Cloud solutions in general and OpenStack in particular. Cloud offers self-service, self-management, usage metering, as well as being designed around the idea of failure being a feature.

 7. What is your biggest hope for the OpenStack community in the next 5 years? What would be really, really amazing?

You mean what will be after the “O” release (and I’ll vote that one being called “OpenStack release” then, which would make Triple-O being Quad-O finally)? Well, my biggest hope is that there is a next release with “P” in the name then, which also includes platform services. Or we’re already way beyond that and have a “S” release?! Let’s together find it out!

This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.

Melanie Witt is a software engineer working on OpenStack at Yahoo!. She has been having fun contributing to the V3 API effort and squashing bugs in Nova.

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

One of my first commits was a fix for a bug I uncovered while I was working on integrating OpenStack with internal services at Yahoo!. The bug prevented admin users from seeing a backtrace when showing a VM in error state. This was significant because we have a lot of users, and the more efficient it is for ops to examine errors, the better. I immediately wanted to share the fix with other OpenStack users, and the community makes it very easy to do.

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

I think the infrastructure team deserves a lot of recognition. The continuous integration system is impressive. It ensures high quality of the code base by thoroughly testing every submitted patch and merging the code. It has been a pleasure to use.

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

I think gathering different perspectives is a great benefit of the open, community-driven approach to development. Each developer comes to the project from a different context and brings ideas from her point of view. We have a lot to learn from each other and, by working together, we can build something even better.

 4. How do you describe OpenStack to your parents?

I describe it as a set of building blocks anyone can use to assemble a computing cloud.

5. How do you think the OpenStack community will need to evolve over the next few years in light of the fast growth and maturing user needs?

I think the community will focus more on performance, scalability, and reliability as user needs mature. I see users building bigger clusters, provisioning resources in larger volume and demanding faster performance. The community is already moving in this direction, and I think there will be many exciting improvements to come.

This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.  

Victoria Martínez de la Cruz is a Licenciate Computer Science student and one of the former interns of GNOME OPW for OpenStack. During her internship she mainly contributed to bug fixing, bug triaging and feature development on the OpenStack Dashboard, Horizon. Currently she is a volunteer contributor on Horizon and in other OpenStack projects. She is eager to learn about new technologies, to contribute to different open-source projects and to get new people involved with open-source philosophy. Follow her on Twitter at @vkmc. 

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

Even though I’m still a newbie, I enjoy helping people getting started with OpenStack, so there are some ideas I could share about
this. I believe that you always have to enjoy what you are doing to make sure you fully understand and you can apply it and share your knowledge afterwards. For this I would recommend trying out OpenStack on an already set up cloud like TryStack, or deploying a small cloud with DevStack in your own computer. Launch instances, add images, create some volumes… after some playing around your own needs for doing different actions will make you get into OpenStack. Once you are in this stage, you can start learning about specific topics from the official docs (which in my opinion are the best source of information), checking out OpenStack contributors blogs and enjoying conferences which may make you more familiar with the community’s ideas. Also, sharing with the OpenStack community is really important. Everyone is willing to help and will guide you in your initial steps. You can join the mailing lists, ask questions at ask.openstack.org and chat with other users and devs on IRC. There is a channel at irc.freenode.org, #openstack-101, which is aimed at helping new users and contributors to get involved with this awesome project.

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

My first commit was part of my application for the GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women and it was a fix for values representation in the Horizon’s quotas overview. I heard about the chance of applying for OpenStack with very short notice before the deadline for the internship, so I had to rush setting everything up and submitting the fix. Fortunately my mentor, Julie Pichon, was around helping me clear every doubt I could come up with. The most difficult part in my first commit? Writing a suitable test. Oh yeah, Mox was not my friend. Here is the bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1084976.

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

To me the incredible OpenStack growth in these last 3 years is due to the community-driven development approach. Developers, testers, designers, documenters, translators and tons of talented people join the list of contributors everyday, and each of them enjoy working on OpenStack. This enjoyment leads to high quality contributions, cool ideas to enhance the different OpenStack components and the creation of new projects to make OpenStack even better. Also, having contributors worldwide causes contributions being submitted to OpenStack at all times. The feeling of contributing to such a large project makes everyone give their best.

4. What comment(s) have you received from users that made your proud of your work? When have you felt best about your work?

I’m a rookie developer and I’ve a lot to learn so, for now, my code contributions have not been anything crazy. But, since I started contributing to OpenStack, I have been writing in my personal blog about the entire learning process: my feelings about contributing to a FOSS organization, some advices for people willing to contribute to OpenStack and many other stuff I found useful for myself and I wanted to share.

The effort turned out to be valuable for many people and I received a lot of great comments and encouraging words. I’ve also been tweeted by some really well-known people in the cloud computing community, and invited to participate in other cool blogs and forums. That interest made me feel really proud about my work, and it also incentivized me to keep sharing my little discoveries with the OpenStack world.

5. What is your biggest hope for the OpenStack community in the next 5 years? What would be really, really amazing?

Globalization and more volunteer contributors! Currently the OpenStack community is going through a lot of changes and people all over the world are working on OpenStack and/or choosing OpenStack for their needs. Mantaining the translation (t10n) and internationalization (i18n) up to date for every project in OpenStack is a really hard work and, although the t10n and i18n OpenStack team is doing a great effort, this is just the beginning.

It would also be awesome for the community to have more volunteer contributors working on OpenStack. Having more volunteer contributions means having a diversity of ideas from different points of view, and this is an important quality for a project [1]. OpenStack is so dynamic that it makes really hard for volunteers to keep track of every change and make contributions. It would be amazing if we could find a way to facilitate even more the integration of volunteers to the current development process.

[1] https://fossbazaar.org/content/differences-between-paid-and-volunteer-foss-contributors/