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OpenStack, Now and Moving Ahead: Lessons from My Own Personal Transformation
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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.
It’s a transformative time for OpenStack.
And I know a thing or two about transformations.
Over the last two and a half years, I’ve managed to lose over 90 pounds.
(Yes, you read that right.)
It was a long and arduous effort, and it is a major personal accomplishment that I take a lot of pride in.
Lessons I’ve Learned
When you go through a major transformation like that, you learn a few things about the process, the journey, and about yourself.
With OpenStack on my mind these days – especially after being nominated for the OpenStack Foundation Board election – I can see correlations between my story and where we need to go with OpenStack.
While there are a number of lessons learned, I’d like to delve into three that are particularly pertinent for our open source cloud project.
1. Clarity on the Goal and the Motivation
It’s a very familiar story for many people. Over the years, I had gained a little bit of weight here and there as life events occurred – graduated college, first job, moved cities, etc. And I had always told myself (and others), “By the time I turned 40 years old, I will be back to my high school weight.”
The year I was to turn 40, I realized that I was running out of time to make good on my word!
And there it was – my goal and my motivation.
So let’s turn to OpenStack – what is our goal and motivation as a project?
According to wiki.OpenStack.org, the Openstack Mission is “to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable. OpenStack is open source, openly designed, openly developed by an open community.”
That’s our goal and motivation
- meet the needs of public and private clouds
- no matter the size
- simple to deploy
- very scalable
- open across all parameters
While we exist in a time where it’s very easy to be distracted by every new, shiny item that comes along, we must remember our mission, our goal, our motivation – and stay true to what we set out to accomplish.
2. Staying Focused During the “Middle” of the Journey
When I was on the path to lose 90 pounds, it was very tempting to be satisfied during the middle part of the journey.
After losing 50 pounds, needless to say, I looked and felt dramatically better than I had been before. Oftentimes, I was congratulated – as if I had reached my destination.
But I had not reached my destination.
While I had made great progress – and there were very tangible results to demonstrate that – I had not yet fully achieved my goal. And looking back, I am happy that I was not content to stop halfway through. While I had a lot to be proud of at that point, there was much more to be done.
OpenStack has come a long way in its fourteen releases:
The phenomenal Newton release focused on scalability, interoperability, and resiliency – things that many potential customers and users have been waiting for.
- The project has now been validated as 100% compliant by the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) as part of the Linux Foundation, a major milestone toward the security of OpenStack.
- Our community now offers the “Certified OpenStack Adminstrator” certification, a staple of datacenter software that much of the enterprise expects, further validating OpenStack for them.
We’ve come a long way. But there is more to go to achieve our ultimate goal. Remember our mission: open source cloud, public and private, across all size clouds, massively scalable, and simple to implement.
We are enabling an amazing number of users now, but there is more to do to achieve our goal. While we celebrate our current success, and as more and more customers are being successful with OpenStack in production, we need to keep our eyes on the prize we committed to.
3. Constantly Learning and Adapting
While losing 90 pounds was a major personal accomplishment, it could all have been in vain if I did not learn how to maintain the weight loss once it was achieved.
This meant learning what worked and what didn’t work, as well as adapting to achieve a permanent solution.
Case in point: a part of most weight loss plans is to get plenty of water daily, something I still do to this day. While providing numerous health advantages, it is also a big help with weight loss. However, I found that throughout the day, I would get consumed with daily activities and reach the end of the day without having reached my water requirement goal.
Through some experimentation with tactics – which included setting up reminders on my phone and keeping water with me at all times, among other ideas – I arrived at my personal solution: GET IT DONE EARLY.
I made it a point to get through my water goal at the beginning of the day, before my daily activities began. This way, if I did not remember to drink regularly throughout the day, it was of no consequence since I had already met my daily goal.
We live in a world where open source is getting ever more adopted by more people and open source newbies. From Linux to Hadoop to Ceph to Kubernetes, we are seeing more and more projects find success with a new breed of users. OpenStack’s role is not to shun these projects as isolationists, but rather understand how OpenStack adapts so that we get maximum attainment of our mission.
This also means that we understand how our project gets “translated” to the bevy of customers who have legitimate challenges to address that OpenStack can help with. It means that we help potential user wade through the cultural IT changes that will be required.
Learning where our market is taking us, as well as adapting to the changing technology landscape, remains crucial for the success of the project.
Room for Optimism
I am personally very optimistic about where OpenStack goes from here. We have come a long way, and have much to be proud of. But much remains to be done to achieve our goal, so we must be steadfast in our resolve and focus.
And it is a mission that we can certainly accomplish. I believe in our vision, our project, and our community.
And take it from me – reaching BIG milestones are very, very rewarding.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
This Week: OpenStack Summit Barcelona!
This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.
In a few days, Stackers will congregate in beautiful Barcelona, Spain to kick off the bi-annual OpenStack Summit and User Conference, the 14th of its kind.
On the heels of the recent OpenStack Newton launch, we will see a wide variety of people, backgrounds, industries, and skill sets represented, all focused on learning about, sharing best practices on, and working on the future of OpenStack.
There are many great sessions, workshops, and evening events happening at the summit this coming week, but three in particular that I want to highlight.
OpenStack Board of Directors Meeting
Did you know that, since OpenStack is an open community, the OpenStack Foundation board meeting is open for members to attend and listen in to the discussion? It’s great for members to have this level of access , so take advantage of the openness built into the OpenStack community, and take a listen.
While there are some portions of the meeting that will be a closed session (rightly so), most of the meeting you’ll hear about progress in specific initiatives, comments on new members to the community, and hear back on future directions.
It’s a great experience that more of our members need to participate in, so I highly recommend it to members. You can check out the planned agenda and WebEx details here.
OpenStack Ops Meetup
I mentioned the OpenStack operator community in my last blog (“Renewing Focus on Bringing OpenStack to the Masses”), and how I feel strongly about championing the cause of the operators out there.
While many of us are focused on code design, quality, new projects, etc, the operators are tasked with implementing Openstack. This involves the day-to-day effort of running OpenStack clouds, which include readying IT environments for OpenStack deployments, first hand implementation of the project, the ongoing maintenance and upgrade aspects of the cluster, and being driven by a specific business goal they will be measured by.
At this Summit, the Operators will be hosting an Ops Meetup to get into the meat of OpenStack Ops. Now this stands to be an intense, down-in-the weeds discussion – not for the faint of heart! So if you are among the many tasked with getting OpenStack operational in your environment, head on over and get to know your peers in this space, swap stories of what works well, share best practices, and make connections you can stay in touch with for years to come.
Learn more about the Ops Meetup here.
Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA)
Are you aware that you can now be CERTIFIED as an OpenStack Admin?
The COA is an exam you can take to prove your ability to solve problems using both command line and graphical interfaces OpenStack, demonstrating that you have mastered a number of skills required to operate the solution.
At OpenStack Summit, there are a few COA activities occurring that you should be aware of:
- COA 101. Anne Bertucio and Heidi Bretz of the OpenStack Foundation will be hosting a 30min beginner-level session on the topic of COA, touching on the why / what / how relating to the COA exam. (More info here.)
- COA booth. The Foundation Lounge at the Summit will feature an area dedicated to learning more about the COA. A variety of OpenStack community volunteers will be pitching in to answer questions, find trainings, and even sign up for the COA. I plan on helping out on Wednesday right after the morning keynotes, so stop by and let’s chat COA.
- COA exams. If you’re ready now to take the exam, head on over to https://www.openstack.org/coa/ and get the details on when you can take the exam. The world needs Certified OpenStack Admins!
(PS – If you need help with some prep, SUSE’s happy to help there – click here to get details on COA training from SUSE.)
I’m looking forward to a great week of re-connecting with a number of you I haven’t seen in some time, so if you’re out at Barcelona, look me up – I’d love to hear what OpenStack project you’re working on, or learn about how you are implementing OpenStack, or where I can help with places OpenStack can further help you in your business objectives.
See you in Barcelona!
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Renewing Focus on Bringing OpenStack to the Masses
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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.
Happy Newton Release Week!
This 14th release of OpenStack is one we’ve all been anticipating, with its focus on scalability, resiliency, and overall user experience – important aspects that really matter to enterprise IT organizations, and that help with broader adoption of OpenStack with those users.
(More on that later.)
Six years of Community, Collaboration, and Growth
I was fortunate enough to have been at the very first OpenStack “meeting of the minds” at the Omni hotel in Austin, back in 2010, when just the IDEA of OpenStack was in preliminary discussions. Just a room full of regular everyday people, across numerous industries, who saw the need for a radical new open source cloud platform, and had a passion to make something happen.
And over the years, we’ve seen progress: the creation of the OpenStack Foundation, thousands of contributors to the project, scores of companies throwing their support and resources behind OpenStack, the first steps beyond North America to Europe and Asia (especially with all the OpenStack excitement in India, China, and Japan), numerous customers adopting our revolutionary cloud project, and on and on.
Power to the People
But this project is also about our people.
And we, as a community of individuals, have grown and evolved over the years as well – as have the developers, customers and end users we hope to serve with the project. What started out with a few visionary souls has now blossomed into a community of 62,000+ members from 629 supporting companies across 186 countries.
As a member of the community, I’ve seen positive growth in my own life since then as well. I’ve been fortunate to have been part of some great companies – like Dell, HPE, and now SUSE. And I’ve been able to help enterprise customers solve real problems with impactful open source solutions in big data, storage, HPC, and of course, cloud with OpenStack.
And there might have been one other minor area of self-transformation since those days as well, as the graphic illustrates…
Clearly we – the OpenStack project and the OpenStack people – are evolving for the better.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
In 2013, I was able to serve the community by being a Director on the OpenStack Foundation Board. Granted, things were still fairly new – new project ideas emerging, new companies wanting to sponsor, developers being added by the day, etc – but there was a personal focus I wanted to drive among our community.
“Bringing OpenStack to the masses.”
And today, my hope for the community remains the same.
While we celebrate all the progress we have made, here are some of my thoughts on what we, as a community, should continue to focus on to bring OpenStack to the masses.
Adoption with the Enterprise by Speaking their Language
Take a look at the most recent OpenStack User Survey. It provides a great snapshot into the areas that users need help.
- “OpenStack is great to recommend, however there’s a fair amount of complexity that needs to be tackled if one wishes to use it.”
- “OpenStack lacks far too many core components for anything other than very specialized deployments.”
- “Technology is good, but no synergies between the sub-projects.”
2016 data suggests that enterprise customers are looking for these sorts of issues to be addressed, as well as security and management practices keeping pace with new features. And, with all the very visible security breaches in recent months, the enterprise is looking for open source projects to put more emphasis on security. In fact, many of the customers I engage with love the idea of OpenStack, but still need help with these fundamental requirements they have to deal with.
Designing / Positioning OpenStack to Address Business Challenges
Have you ever wondered why so many tall office buildings have revolving doors? Isn’t a regular door simpler, less complex, and easier to use? Why do we see so many revolving doors, when access can be achieved so much simpler with other means?
Because revolving doors don’t exist to solve access problems – they solve a heated-air loss problem.
When a door in a tall building is opened, cold air from outside forces it’s way inside when doors are open, pushing warmer / lighter air up – which is then lost through vents at the top of the building. Revolving doors limit that loss incredibly by sealing off portions of outside access when rotating.
Think of our project in the same way.
- What business challenges can be addressed today / near-term by implementing an OpenStack-based solution?
- Beyond the customer set looking to build a hosted cloud to resell, what further applications can OpenStack be applied to?
- How can OpenStack provide an industry-specific competitive advantage to the financial sector? To healthcare? To HPC? To the energy sector? How about retail or media?
Address the Cultural IT Changes that Need to Happen
I recently read a piece where Jonathan Bryce spoke to the “cultural IT changes that need to occur” – and I love that line of thinking.
Jonathan specifically said “What you do with Windows and Linux administrators is the bigger challenge for a lot of companies. Once you prove the technology, you need policies and training to push people.”
That is spot on.
What we are all working on with OpenStack will fundamentally shift how IT organizations will operate in the future. Let’s take the extra step, and provide guidance to our audiences on how they can evolve and adapt to the coming changes with training, tools, community support, and collaboration. A good example of this is the Certified OpenStack Administrator certification being offered by the Foundation, and training for the COA offered by the OpenStack partner ecosystem.
Further Champion the OpenStack Operator
Operators are on the front lines of implementing OpenStack, and “making things work.” There is no truer test of the validity of our OpenStack efforts than when more and more operators can easily and simply deploy / run / maintain OpenStack instances.
I am encouraged by the increased focus on documentation, connecting developers and operators more, and the growth of a community of operators sharing stories on what works best in practical implementation of OpenStack. And we will see this grow even more at the Operator Summit in Barcelona at OpenStack Summit (details here).
We are making progress here but there’s so much more we can do to better enable a key part of our OpenStack family – the operators.
The Future is Bright
Since we’re celebrating the Newton release, the quote from Isaac Newton on looking ahead is seems fitting…
“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”
When it comes to where OpenStack is heading, I’m greatly optimistic. As it has always been, it will not be easy. But we are making a difference.
And with continued and increased focus on enterprise adoption, addressing business challenges, aiding in the cultural IT change, and an increased focus on the operator, we can go to the next level.
We can bring OpenStack to the masses.
See you in Barcelona in a few weeks.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Address Your Company’s Data Explosion with Storage That Scales
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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.
Experts predict that our world will generate 44 ZETTABYTES of digital data by 2020.
How about some context?
Now, you may think that these are all teenage selfies and funny cat videos – in actuality, much of it is legitimate data your company will need to stay competitive and to serve your customers.
The Data Explosion Happening in YOUR Industry
Some interesting factoids:
- An automated manufacturing facility can generate many terabytes of data in a single hour.
- In the airline industry, a commercial airplane can generate upwards of 40 TB of data per hour.
- Mining and drilling companies can gather multiple terabytes of data per minute in their day-to-day operations.
- In the retail world, a single store can collect many TB of customer data, financial data, and inventory data.
- Hospitals quickly generate terabytes of data on patient health, medical equipment data, and patient x-rays.
The list goes on and on. Service providers, telecommunications, digital media, law enforcement, energy companies, HPC research groups, governments, the financial world, and many other industries (including yours) are experiencing this data deluge now.
And with terabytes of data being generated by single products by the hour or by the minute, the next stop is coming up quick: PETABYTES OF DATA.
Status Quo Doesn’t Cut It
I know what you’re thinking: “What’s the problem? I‘ve had a storage solution in place for years. It should be fine.”
Not quite.
- You are going to need to deal with a LOT more data than you are storing today in order to maintain your competitive edge.
- The storage solutions you’ve been using for years have likely not been designed to handle this unfathomable amount of data.
- The costs of merely “adding more” of your current storage solutions to deal with this amount of data can be extremely expensive.
The good news is that there is a way to store data at this scale with better performance at a much better price point.
Open Source Scale Out Storage
Why is this route better?
- It was designed from the ground up for scale.
Much like how mobile devices changed the way we communicate / interact / take pictures / trade stock, scale out storage is different design for storage. Instead of all-in-one storage boxes, it uses a “distributed model” – farming out the storage to as many servers / hard drives as it has access to, making it very scalable and very performant. (Cloud environments leverage a very similar model for computing.) - It’s cost is primarily commodity servers with hard drives and software.
Traditional storage solutions are expensive to scale in capacity or performance. Instead of expensive engineered black boxes, we are looking at commodity servers and a bit of software that sits on each server – you then just add a “software + server” combo as you need to scale. - When you go open source, the software benefits get even better.
Much like other open source technologies, like Linux operating systems, open source scale out storage allows users to take advantage of rapid innovation from the developer communities, as well as cost benefits which are primarily support or services, as opposed to software license fees.
Ready. Set. Go.
At SUSE, we’ve put this together in an offering called SUSE Enterprise Storage, an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by the open source Ceph project.
It delivers what we’ve talked about: open source scale out storage. It scales, it performs, and it’s open source – a great solution to manage all that data that’s coming your way, that will scale as your data needs grow.
And with SUSE behind you, you’ll get full services and support to any level you need.
OK, enough talk – it’s time for you to get started.
And here’s a great way to kick this off: Go get your FREE TRIAL of SUSE Enterprise Storage. Just click this link, and you’ll be directed to the site (note you’ll be prompted to do a quick registration.) It will give you quick access to the scale out storage tech we’ve talked about, and you can begin your transition over to the new evolution of storage technology.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge