Results Of Survey After OpenStack Design Summit And Conference

In preparation for the next OpenStack Design Summit and Conference, I gave a look at the survey results of past edition. The events are a considerable investment for our team that is widely paid off by the good reviews we received from all participants. Looking into the answers it’s quite clear that the format and length were good and we should try to stick to it. We agreed that the attendance on Friday afternoon was not optimal and we’re thinking of ways to improve this aspect.  I’m very happy to see that participants to the Design Summit felt welcomed, included and encouraged to speak all the time (see table below).

Speaking of areas of improvement,  a key criteria for selecting the next venue will be high quality access to Internet or we’ll bring our own equipment (like Canonical does for the Ubuntu Design Summit). We’re also looking for more choice regarding hotel rates.

Both the unconference and lightning talks should be advertised better in order to improve attendance. Probably it’s because both were hard to find, being on a different floor. We should probably discuss how to improve them once we have fixed the venue.

On the Conference side we see a request to increase the presentation of case studies and have more sessions and choices (see table below). We’ll see how to balance this while keeping the format of the event.

Overall the responses were extremely positive and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved so far. For the next Summit and Conference, we’re targeting the week of April 16 in New Orleans. We will post more information as soon as it is confirmed: keep watching this space for announcements.

14. Please rate how you felt the Design Summit sessions were managed:
Not at all Rarely Sometimes All the time N/A Rating
Average
Response
Count
Did you feel welcomed, included, and encouraged to speak for yourself? 0.0% (0) 2.3% (1) 22.7% (10) 72.7% (32) 2.3% (1) 3.72 44
Were the sessions well-moderated, focused and productive? 4.5% (2) 4.5% (2) 56.8% (25) 34.1% (15) 0.0% (0) 3.20 44
Did session leaders go out of their way to solicit your personal feedback? 4.5% (2) 9.1% (4) 65.9% (29) 18.2% (8) 2.3% (1) 3.00 44

 

15. How would you rate the sessions during the Conference (1-4):
poor (1) fair (2) good (3) great (4) N/A Rating
Average
Response
Count
Morning keynotes 0.0% (0) 8.9% (5) 50.0% (28) 32.1% (18) 8.9% (5) 3.25 56
Technical sessions 1.8% (1) 7.1% (4) 44.6% (25) 41.1% (23) 5.4% (3) 3.32 56
Panel sessions 1.8% (1) 21.4% (12) 46.4% (26) 21.4% (12) 8.9% (5) 2.96 56
User stories 0.0% (0) 8.9% (5) 44.6% (25) 35.7% (20) 10.7% (6) 3.30 56

Read the full results of the survey.

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Community Weekly Review (Dec 2-9)

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 9, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers from Mon Nov 28 00:00:00 UTC 2011 to Sun Dec 04 00:00:00 UTC 2011 (week 48)

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OpenStack Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes

We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.

This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg Althaus and Rob Hirschfeld), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya from Rackspace, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.

We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build.  Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!).  We need Keystone support.  Anyone up for that?

Highlights

There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.

  • After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
  • The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
  • There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
  • Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level.  The Quantual Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.  
  • HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
  • We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
  • Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).

Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!

Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.  Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts!

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 26-Dec 1)

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 1, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week.
  • Top 10 monthly committers to the repositories (by number of commits)

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.

 

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Hacking on Ebooks

Gentlemen prefer PDF, according to Tim O’Reilly’s data from Rough Cuts five years ago. At OpenStack we see some preference for PDF, though there are three times as many visits to the HTML version of our Compute Admin manual. Still, the PDF version of the guide is downloaded about five times a day. I do believe that gentlemen prefer PDF or some sort of book-like reading material. When asked, readers cite portability and search scope as two benefits to the form. However, as David Cramer, our doc tools developer put it at our recent hackathon, “PDFs are like cement.” With the boom of mobile and tablet screens, a stretchy and flexible screen-reader format like epub fills a need – we need content that works well on the 200 plus devices that fit into one hand.


So on 11/11/11, in the Austin Rackspace office, we did some hacking to be able to create epub output from our DocBook source files. I blogged about it for the OpenStack Planet blog from my blog, DocBook, ePub, Hackathon, what more could you ask for? prior to the event, talking about some of our prep work.

I’m pleased to show you the results – we did get output for epub and also tested the Mobi output on a Kindle, all in one day, with a team of about seven hackers including developers, writers, and testers.

We first tested the process using built-in epub transforms that ship with Oxygen, our XML editor, who supports open source projects like OpenStack by donating licenses to documentation contributors. Thank you Oxygen! We were able to use that output to start testing. Here’s our white board with the list of bugs.

While the writers and testers were hacking on output, programmers were working on ensuring we could get the epub output through Apache Maven, our build tool. By the end of the day, we could output epub through our automatic build process also!

As happens with hackathons, there’s some cleanup work to do – for example, our neat-o dynamic SVG cover page that takes in variables like the book title doesn’t output a cover for the epub. Also, most “real” epub output workflows convert tables from text to image (I know, crazy huh, when you think about the loss of search capability), but the tables in epub output act a little funky when resizing. Also, mobi, the Kindle format, has a problem with the way lists are marked up, but these are fixable and on the bug log.

I haven’t decided yet whether the epub output is high quality enough to offer it for download for every book on the OpenStack docs site, nor do I know if there’s much demand for the output, but I’d like to offer the OpenStack Starter Guide as an epub download. The team at CSS OSS works hard on this content, and I’d like to see it get spread onto many devices. Let me know how well it works for you and if you think epub has a place as a regular output for OpenStack documentation.

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 11-18)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 11, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • A new format for the community statistics: the gallery below shows the activity on some of the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week. Let us know what else you would like to see on a weekly basis.
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.

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 4-11)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 11, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

  • New weekly graphs of commit activities on OpenStack main repositories
  • The OpenStack wiki now accepts Launchpad ID for login (thank you, Chmouel)
  • OpenStack packaging coordination effort hangs out on irc.freenode.net #openstack-packaging
  • The OpenStack devroom was accepted at FOSDEM 2012: shine your passport, meet developers in Bruxelles, Feb 4-5

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • A new format for the community statistics: the gallery below shows the activity on some of the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week. Let us know what else you would like to see on a weekly basis.
  • Contributions to swift week 44
  • Contributions to nova week 44
  • Contributions to manuals week 44
  • Contributions to keystone week 44
  • Contributions to glance week 44

 

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.

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Community Weekly Review (Oct 28-Nov 4)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 4, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

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.

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Great Turnout at the first Austin OpenStack Meetup

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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.

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Community Weekly Review (October 21-28)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 28, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

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.

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