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 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/

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. 

Brian is a software developer at Rackspace, working in the cloud servers group.  Brian’s work focuses on reliability and performance of the Rackspace public cloud.  He is also a member of the OpenStack Nova core team, a managing partner of Sparkle Software, LLC and formerly a technical lead at Orbitz.com.  He has a B.A. in Computer Science from Cornell University.  Follow him on Twitter @briandelliott. 

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

I spend a lot of time with my two weimaraners, Zelda and Otto.  I participate in K9 Nose Work with Zelda and am getting started in agility with Otto.  I’m also a genealogy enthusiast and have been researching my family tree for the past 10 years.

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

This is technology that is advancing rapidly, so just dive in.  Install it, read the code, and seek out likeminded folks.  There are a lot of written resources around OpenStack, but honestly the code is well-maintained and very readable overall.  Python code is designed to be “read much more often than it is written,” so don’t be afraid to poke around behind the curtain.

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

Nothing sexy!  I committed a small change to Nova after fixing a bug in the pep8 library.  It was a good learning experience and an easy way to get my feet wet on the project.

commit 549616d12270a64548a907213c8e486bf0265dc8
Author: Brian Elliott
Date:   Mon Apr 9 19:01:43 2012
bug 968452
Update test-requires to use pep8>=1.0.  Removed PEP8 warning suppression around 3-arg raises.
Change-Id: Ib4ed42adc167aa1e8078619a36b409b76b9f5d73

4. If you could start your career over again, where would you want to begin? Advice for someone just getting started?

If I had to start over, I’d get involved with open source right away, working on projects “that matter.”  Money is nice, but doing something with your life that is valuable is very satisfying.  At some point you have to look back and ask yourself whether you made a difference.  It’s great to see your work get used by more than a single company.  For someone getting started, I’d just advise them to follow their passion.  Work on something they’d be tempted to do for free anyway!

5. If you could only have one album as your hacking playlist for the rest of time — what album would it be and why?

Probably Beethoven’s 9th symphony.  I have a version from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that is often my go-to music for solving hard problems.  Simply put, it’s just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written and it really puts me in the right frame of mind to focus and get work done.

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.

Chuck has been a software developer for over 6 years at Rackspace working on the Cloud Files and Cloud Block Storage products, and Founding contributor to Openstack Swift.  Follow him on Twitter at @creiht. 

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

My first “official” commit was the original commit of the Rackspace Cloud Files code as Openstack Swift.  I thought I was going to have a couple of months to clean things up and write documentation, but then Jim Curry came in and told me we had 2 weeks so that it could be released during the announcement at OSCON.

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

I think the most critical feature isn’t so much a feature as it is the applications built for the cloud.  As more applications are built to take advantage of the cloud (including Openstack) the more movement there will be to it.

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

Every time that I hear about or assist with other deployments of Openstack Swift (Wikimedia, Mercardo Libre and many others), that makes me the most proud.

4. Describe an interesting OpenStack deployment that you were part of, and why others ought to know about it. What made that project work? Tick?

I’ve been involved with the OpenStack Swift deployments at Rackspace since before it was Openstack. Besides Swift being a great platform to build object storage off of, I think the fact that we have a great team makes a huge difference.

 5. How do you describe OpenStack to your parents?

I think they have had a basic idea of what it is, but I think it really made a little more sense for them when I showed them the “One Very Proud Dad” cartoon that Rackspace had made.

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. 

Pádraig works for Red Hat and concentrates on OpenStack packaging. Upstream, he concentrates on system level performance, in Nova especially, and is a member of the Nova core team. He works remotely in rural Ireland, is a long time open source contributor, and a GNU coreutils maintainer. Follow him on Twitter at @pixelbeat_.

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

In November 2011 in Nova I refactored the file injection code used to modify VM images before booting, and then added libguestfs as a more sophisticated and secure mechanism to do that injection.

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

The free flow of ideas and code greatly facilitates what can be constructed, while the emphasis on the ideas and code rather than on people extract the most value possible. I.E. people run hot and cold, but the community does not.

3. How do you describe OpenStack to your parents?

It’s software to allow people to not worry about hardware. That division of labor brings large benefits through economies of scale from the cloud service providers to the consumers.

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

One of the most impressive things I found about OpenStack is how much of the Linux ecosystem it leverages. This is immediately apparent to me being a packager, and having plotted all the direct and indirect dependencies of the OpenStack packages. If I had to pick one project that fits best with OpenStack, it would be libvirt as it abstracts hypervisor details away from OpenStack very well, while allowing OpenStack to deal with the higher level “cloud” functionality.

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

There are no shortcuts! This industry is fantastic in that the effort you put into learning something well, almost invariably pays back immensely. So my tip is to never get into technical debt by skimming something. Better to know a few things well.

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.  

Devananda is currently leading the development of the OpenStack Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) program and helping to drive the OpenStack-on-OpenStack (TripleO) program. Before joining HP Cloud Services and diving into OpenStack, he was a MySQL scalability and performance consultant with Percona. Follow him on Twitter at @devananda.

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

Have a strong opinion about something related to OpenStack, and be willing to change either one (your opinion, or OpenStack).

I came from nearly a decade working with MySQL, focused on the scaling and performance problems that web properties run into as they grow. Like a man with a hammer, OpenStack’s database looked like a nail that needed some rearranging. While working on that, many of my views about project management and community organization have changed substantially, and I’ve gained a whole lot of knowledge and experience with things I never expected to work with, like OpenVZ and IPMI.

The most useful thing for me early on was to experiment with devstack, try changing some bits, and see what I could break and what I could do differently. When I went to my first summit (Folsom), I didn’t really have a lot to talk with the developers about, but I had a framework with which to understand many of the sessions. In the following months, I found a small project (adding OpenVZ driver support to devstack) to get involved with. This approach – start from what you know and branch out – has worked really well for me with other projects in the past as well.

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

Ease of installation.

There is already massive adoption of cloud APIs — everyone uses clouds — but the barrier to running your own cloud is still quite high. I think TripleO is a pretty awesome solution to this challenge: use the same API to install, manage, and then use your cloud. I’m hopeful that we’ll get all of the automation & tooling in place over the next year to make this a reality.

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

Driving the installation of infrastructure using PXE and IPMI isn’t, by itself, anything new. Lots of folks have been doing that for the last, oh, 20 years or so. At the Grizzly summit, a small group of folks — Monty Taylor, Robert Collins, myself, and a few others — did a lot of hallway-talking about the idea that we could treat the cloud as just another PaaS deployment by leveraging the Baremetal driver. Just a few months later, after making some headway demonstrating that it actually was possible, Robert Collins and I were talking about this at linux.conf.au. Josh McKenty came up to me after my miniconf session and said, “You know, I think you’re all bat-shit crazy,” with a great big smile on his face! His enthusiasm and sarcasm captured my feelings about the project very well. We *are* crazy – in a very good way. Inspiration is like that.

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

This is for anyone testing image builds or frequently building VMs/instances locally, who also has a slow internet connection or frequently works from a cafe, conference, or airplane. My advice is to set up a squid proxy on your laptop, and let that cache image and package downloads. (You’ll have to tune squid to cache large files.) Also set up a local git repo and mirror all of github.com/openstack (and maybe github.com/stackforge too), then in your dev environment, point github.com to your local mirror. This will make each initial run of devstack much faster, and if you’re using diskimage-builder, it’ll help a lot. This should also help if you live far away from where most of these servers are hosted (e.g., if you’re in Australia).

 5. What is the one thing you wish you did differently in your career?

I really have no regrets about choices I made early on in my career, and I’m in a great place now, so there’s nothing I’d change. I made some critical choices along the way, like getting heavily involved with MySQL and NDB cluster in 2004, and passing up several other opportunities to take a job at Percona in 2008. I was very fortunate to meet some amazing folks all throughout my career. Switching to OpenStack was another strategic choice for me – there’s still a lucrative career for expert MySQL DBAs, but I chose to break out of my comfort zone when the opportunity presented itself.

The OpenStack community is filled with many of the brightest, most creative, and most enthusiastic folks I’ve ever known. We’re being paid to develop awesome open source software that, I believe, really will change the world. What could be more amazing than that? We’re working for enterprise companies like HP, Dell, IBM, etc — and we’re all collaborating!

I think the best advice I could give to the next generation of engineers is two-fold: get out there and get involved, and create balance. Social skills don’t come easily for some of us – they certainly didn’t for me –  but they are just as important as tech chops. Go to conferences, user groups, meetups, etc, every chance you get, and don’t be afraid to organize one if there’s not one near you. And then, create balance in your life. It could be home brewing, or playing in a band, or salsa dancing, or burning man, or whatever stimulates the other half of your brain and brings you closer to people in ways that matter to you.

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.

Edgar Magana is currently a Sr. Member of the Technical Staff at PLUMgrid. He is in charge of the integration efforts between OpenStack Neutron and PLUMgrid Platform. Edgar worked over five years for the Chief Technology Office (CTO) of Cisco Systems as a Technical Leader and Researcher. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universitat Politecnica of Catalunya, Spain.

Currently, Edgar is a core member of the Neutron development team in OpenStack. He has an extensive experience on Cloud and Grid Computing, Policy-based Management Systems, Monitoring and Scheduling of networking and computational resources on distributed networks. His research interest is related to Cloud Computing, Software Defined Networks (SDN), IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Follow him at Twitter at @emaganap. 

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

I have been involved in many OpenStack deployments, since the Diablo release all the way to the current Grizzly one. The most complicated concept to understand and deploy is probably the networking part. Neutron team has done an amazing job in terms of extending the networking functionalities for OpenStack but there is still a need for new technologies to be included that could offer scalable and distributed virtual networking functions for tenants, not just distributed network bridges but also firewalls, load balancers, nat services and all others. We have a very stable and well known set of virtual compute solutions already, so this is the right time for virtual networking platforms!

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

The main benefit is the support and testing of the solution itself. There are so many hands using, testing and improving an open, community-driven solution that you will always find an answer for your problem. It could be as simple as a blog explaining how to use that specific feature or as complex as technical documentation with illustrations and examples that will make your life much more easier.

3. Describe an interesting OpenStack deployment that you were part of, and why others ought to know about it. What made that project work? Tick?

In my current position, I help PLUMgrid customers to understand how OpenStack Networking works and how it is possible to create both Public and Private Cloud Systems with OpenStack. It is so great to see how amazed they are when they see the system working, how easy is to instantiate Virtual Machines interconnected within complex technologies that in the past was taking ages for their IT team to do.

During my time at Cisco, I was part of the team helping Service Providers deploying OpenStack with orchestration languages such as puppet. It was very interesting to experience how a very complex deployment model can be simplified with a list of flexible instructions.

4. How do you describe OpenStack to your parents?

This is a great question because I have been in that position before, I like to explain them with simple examples so that they can correlate with their everyday activities, for instance my father loves to fix almost everything and he waste a lot of time looking for the right tool for the job that he is trying to do, so one day I told him that the Cloud was a toolbox always reachable that will give him the right tool at the moment that he needs it, after a couple of minutes later, he smiled to me and said “When can I have it?”  I just smiled back to him!

5. What other open source projects do you think work well with OpenStack, and why?

Monitoring tools are essential for a successful deployment in OpenStack. I like to see “Glanglia” integrated, for instance, because a lot of OpenStack users are familiar with the way all metrics are presented there. I am also looking forward to seeing an application-driven open source project. Let’s give the power to the application not just the users, if you are an application developer and you have a platform that will let you deploy and test your application with a simple click, what else can I ask for?