Individual Member Profile
Julia Kreger
To learn, leverage, and help evolve.
I started my working career in technology close to twenty years ago. It has surely not been an average career, but a career where I've continually learned and evolved to fulfill the need. In a sense, it all started with Linux and answering some questions about installing Linux. This started a journey into computer networking and eventually shifted to a systems engineering focus with a stop-over in data center operations.
The DevOps movement lead me more into software development and the operationalization of software due to the need to automate large scale systems deployments. This required bringing an operational perspective while bridging to the requirements, and often required digging deep into the underlying code to solve the problem of the day.
In a sense, I found a home in OpenStack in 2014 and the Ironic project in 2015 because of many years spent working with physical hardware in data centers.
I presently work for Red Hat as a Principal Software Engineer, where my upstream focus has been Ironic for the past few years, and my downstream focus has been on helping lead adoption and use of Ironic.
- Red Hat - From 2017-12-04 (Current)
- IBM - From 2016-09-20 To 2017-12-01
- HPE - From 2015-11-01 To 2016-09-19
- HP Cloud - From 2014-05-21 To 2015-10-31
- I Fight for the Users Cup - Berlin 2018
I'm involved in the following OpenStack projects: Bare Metal Provisioning Service (Ironic)
- Ironic - Snapshots?
- Ironic Operator Feedback
- Ironically Reeling in Large-scale Bare Metal Deployment Without PXE
- Quick, Solid, and Automatic - OpenStack Bare-metal Orchestration
- OpenStack Ironic and Bare Metal Infrastructure: All Abstractions Start Somewhere
- Ironic - Project Onboarding
- Ironic - Project Update
- Ironic - Project Onboarding
- Ironic - Project Update
- OpenStack: Bare Metal Clouds & Beyond
- Ironic Operator Feedback
- SmartNics, Ironic, and Neutron
- Community outreach when culture, time zones, and language differ
- Technical Committee Vision Retrospective
Julia is a candidate in the January 2020 Board Election .
What is your relationship to OpenStack Foundation (OSF), and why is its success important to you? What would you say is your biggest contribution to the OSF and the success of its projects to date?
My primary relationship to OpenStack is as a contributor.
But I am a believer in the community's mission and goals. I believe this because I've personally experienced how infrastucture automation can improve the quality of one's life, which makes success of the community a personal priority.
Since joining the OpenStack community in 2014, I have progressed from individual contributor, to core reviewer, to Technical Comittee (TC) member, to Project Team Leader (PTL) for the Ironic project. A large part of these roles have been to listen, provide insight, and ultimately feedback into processes to help discussions move forward and ultimately help ensure problems are solved.
But my career extends further back into the physical world of Data Centers, Storage, and early virtualization. This experience helps ground me in the context of the past so I can understand where we have come from, as we chart our path to where we wish to go.
Describe your experience with other non-profits or serving as a board member. How does your experience prepare you for the role of a board member?
Most recently I served as on the Board of Directors for a local community area non-profit focused on LGBTQ+ community outreach, visibility, and development. Due to a major unforseeable life event that occured after joining, I ultimately chose to step down from that board five months later such that someone could join the board with more free time than I could devote to that board at that time.
While not directly serving on a board or even as a formal volunteer much less any sort of leader, I have also helped another local community non-profit with some volunteering for fundraising effort preparation and trying to help them do the needful as things have come up. Looking back, I seem to have a history of joining groups to help those around me. I've served as a trusted community leader to multiple different community circles. In all of these cases I ultimately had the same basic goals of serving those around me and improving the world in which we live.
What do you see as the Board's role in OpenStack's success?
The board's serves the role of both the point in which we ground cross-company and cross-community discussions in business, and balance the needs of the communities we have fostered and developed such as OpenStack, Zuul, Kata Containers, and Airship. And we as a community shall create more communities, and more software as time progresses. It is only the natural progression of time that software and technology evolves.
The approach changes, and not every approach can or will solve every problem. But it is up to the board to try and navigate those business waters, and work with the Foundation as a mechanism to help fulfill the wishes of the board while still serving the needs of the community.
Only the board can help us speak in one uniform cross-community cross-company voice. And we must use that voice to help ensure our future success as time progresses.
What do you think the top priority of the Board should be over the next year?
I believe it must be a priority for the board to consider and execute how might we encourage our community to be more inclusive and bring about more adjacent and related projects to be part of our community. While we should never sacrafice our work or our principles of the four opens, we also need to be mindful that we need to encourage and be the change that we wish for our community. This is not only in trying to grow our mission, contributors, and impact, but also to help improve our efficency and remind ourselves that there may always be a better or more effective way.
Julia has already been nominated by:
- Egle Sigler
- Matias A. Castro.
- Mark Collier
- Sean McGinnis
- Allison Randal
- Aeva van der Veen
- ChangBo Guo
- MARIA JOSE TORRES MALDONADO
- Eric Fried
- Graham Hayes
