Individual Member Profile
Mohammed Naser
Provide and Build New Public Cloud Services Based on OpenStack
Over the past 10 years, I’m happy to have watched the hosting industry transform and be part of the transformation process as it evolved from traditional physical hardware to cloud-native infrastructure, powered by OpenStack. Since the creation of VEXXHOST, I have had the chance to work with different sorts of customers, ranging from growing small businesses to helping architect solutions for large Fortune 500 companies, based on OpenStack. I've helped integrate other open infrastructure projects into our commercial offering.
By fostering OpenStack at it’s early days in 2011, it has helped improve the project and our service as a whole. I’ve been a contributor to the project since and I have contributed code to almost every release of OpenStack since then. I've also served as PTL for Puppet OpenStack, continue to serve as a PTL for OpenStack-Ansible and serve on the technical commitee, chairing tthe commitee for a term.
- VEXXHOST, Inc. - From 2006-07-19 (Current)
- Key to Stack City - Sydney 2017
I'm involved in the following OpenStack projects: Compute Service (Nova),Networking (Neutron),Block Storage (Cinder),Image Service (Glance),Puppet Modules for OpenStack (Puppet OpenStack)
- How should we do billing for OpenStack deployments?
- Bring your crazy idea
- Superuser Awards
- Deployment tools: define common capabilities
- OpenStack-Ansible - Project Update
- Kubernetes Bedtime Stories: Taking the "scary" out of production workloads
- Getting Operators' bugfixes upstreamed
- Deployment tools feedback
- OpenStack for AI: decoding and transforming the world, from Tim Bell to Barack Obama
- OpenStack: Bare Metal Clouds & Beyond
- OpenStack Ansible - Project Update
- OpenStack Ansible - Project Onboarding
- Kubernetes in the Real World
- Integration testing on an OpenStack public cloud
- How to Install Zuul and Configure Your First Jobs
Mohammed 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?
I've personally been involved in OpenStack in many different ways over the past years. I've started my involvement early on back in May of 2012 with my first merged change inside OpenStack:
https://review.opendev.org/#/c/7464/
I've started my OpenStack journey doing small bug fixes, growing into helping the development of the Puppet OpenStack modules and eventually becoming PTL of that project. I've started to be involved in OpenStack-Ansible afterwards, eventually becoming the current PTL of the project today. I personally believe there is huge value in delivering simple ways of deploying OpenStack. It is undoubtedly a difficult project to deploy but provides a huge amount of value once it is deployed.
Throughout that time, I have served being on the OpenStack technical commitee (and continue to), also chairing the commitee for a period of time. I've also attended many of the past PTGs and summits to be present and help drive the OpenStack community forwards. I've historically always did my best to provide value for the OpenStack community by providing teams with first-hand deployer feedback (and at times, actual fixes for production issues).
While I fully intend to serve the OSF board representing the best interests of the OpenStack community and other Open Infrastructure projects, I would like to highlight that my organization donates infrastructure to the OpenStack community, sponsored many summits and provided assistance to the executive staff of the OSF in helping driving the foundation forwards. As a founder of my organization, I consider those indirect contributions to the OSF overall to help the success of the foundation.
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?
I've been attending the OpenStack board meetings for quite sometime, observing from the sidelines and watching the progress of the foundation as it adopts Open Infrastructure, the addition of new Open Infrastructure projects and the confirmation of them. I've hand first hand experience in seeing the entire process of the confirmation guidelines being created, the implementation of the 4 strategic areas for the OSF and much more.
Personally, I've always reached out to the board during these meetings (in almost near time) through an individual representative board member and I intend to continue to bring up my concerns directly to the board, as well as be a voice that represents the community inside our board.
I've also served as chair for the technical commitee and worked directly with the chair at the time Alan Clark to coordinate with the board for their needs from the OpenStack technical commitee.
What do you see as the Board's role in OpenStack's success?
There is a big shift in application delivery in these days that was caused by Kubernetes. I think it's a very positive change which has created a shift in how developers think of infrastructure problems.
In the past, developers have long thought about their applications being delivered as services running inside physical machines. With time, that has grown to virtual machines which is where OpenStack saw huge growth. However, with the implementation of containers, we are seeing a shift where developers are more interested in deploying containers.
However, these containers need to live somewhere. The interest in OpenStack was shifted a few layers down to the operators and the individuals/organizations that are interested in providing that core infrastructure (to host these applications).
The focus towards open infrastructure therefore should continue, with projects like Kata containers to help deliver stronger security building blocks, Airship for easier deployments of clouds (or applications), Zuul for an innovative CI/CD platform. I think we should continue to push the boundaries and help bring new open infrastructure projects that compliment OpenStack to strength the community of open source technology that follows the 4 opens which we built our community on top of.
What do you think the top priority of the Board should be over the next year?
I believe that it's important for the board to continue to work with the executive staff to help the growth of our community. The work towards looking at other potential open infrastructure projects should be something to explore in order to help foster a community of projects that work well together around OpenStack as an ecosystem with focus on the 4 opens, the very foundation that helped the growth of OpenStack in the first place.
Mohammed has already been nominated by:
- Monty Taylor
- Sean McGinnis
- Jonathan Bryce
- Egle Sigler
- Mark Collier
- Allison Randal
- ChangBo Guo
- Shamsul Hassan
- James Penick
- Cheng Yong Zhao
