The OpenStack design summit in review

Tuesday after the OSCON cloud summit I sat down with Rick Clark over a well deserved beer.  Rick is the chief architect and project lead for the OpenStack compute project that was announced on Monday.

Recently I interviewed Rick on the first day of the inaugural OpenStack design summit and I wanted to catch up with him and get his thoughts on how it had gone.  This is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

  • How it went engaging a very large technical group (100+) in an open design discussion patterned after an Ubuntu Developer Summit.
  • Some of the decisions he thought would be no brainers, turned out differently e.g. OVF (open virtualization format) and keeping the storage and compute groups separated.
  • Since the summit involved representatives from over 20 companies, some of them competitors, how good were people at putting away their business biases/agendas?
  • How far they got (hint they got requirements from everyone for the first release).
  • They’ve already gotten their first code contributions.
  • How they plan to build a community: actively looking to hire a community manager.   In the meantime its actively growing and in a week they’ve gone from 10 people in the IRC channel to 150 on Tuesday.

Extra-credit reading:

But wait there’s more…

I got back from OSCON last night with a fist full of videos.  In addition to the above, coming soon to a browser near you are the following interviews:

  • Brett Piatt with more OpenStack goodness
  • J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
  • Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock
  • Neil Levine, VP at Canonical about what’s in store for Ubuntu.

Pau for now…

About the Author: Barton George