Speaker Details

In late 2013, one of the networking vendors I supported became involved with OpenStack, particularly the virtual networking aspects, and asked me to develop training, demonstrations, and lab environments for their customers. While attempting to install OpenStack with Networking (neutron) for the first time, I ran into significant hurdles from issues with the installation guide. After determining the source of the main problem, I filed my first documentation bug with a suggested patch. Several patches later, I realized that the networking chapter needed rewriting from the ground up. Working with several people on the documentation team, I completely rewrote the content for the Icehouse release and have continued to improve it along with other portions of the installation guide and other community documentation.

I became very familiar with OpenStack during this journey, particularly the Networking service, and have assisted a large number of people with architecture, deployment, operation, and troubleshooting. You can almost always find me on IRC in the #openstack channel. Between support, bug triage, and general observations, the Networking component seems to cause the most frustration because most people learning OpenStack come from virtualization platforms with only basic networking features or from network infrastructures using physical equipment rather than Linux. The lack of practical documentation, arguably less than any other service, only increases frustration.

During the Icehouse development cycle, people from various parts of the OpenStack community including myself from the core documentation team decided that we needed to develop a networking guide. Content development began during the Juno development cycle and continues today. Since the beginning of the networking guide project, I developed, tested, and contributed documentation for several practical scenarios for deploying the Networking service.

I currently work for IBM as a software developer and contribute to several OpenStack projects including core documentation, Networking, and Open Virtual Network (OVN).