I’m testing out a few different tools for embedding presentations from the OpenStack Summit. Some are in PPT, others in PDF, and a few in keynote or other formats.
Here is the NSA presentation, embedded using the “Google Slides” app:
Here I am attempting to embed a PDF (of a talk by Matt Ray regarding Chef) using Google Drive (this is different than “Google Slides” inexplicably)
Once the video starts, you can click the playlist button to navigate between the different talks.
Featured in this playlist:
I’ve decided to withdraw from the 2013 OpenStack Individual Member board election for a couple of reasons:
1) When I accepted the nomination (thanks to everyone who nominated me!) there were only about 10 candidates for the 8 seats. Now we have over 20 candidates.
2) As COO, and an officer for the OpenStack Foundation, I regularly attend board meetings, so having a seat on the board is not particularly necessary for me to make a contribution to the discussions at each board meeting.
That said, I will of course continue to contribute on a full time basis to the pursuit of the Foundation’s mission.
As an aside, a few people contacted me privately to ask if it’s allowed under the bylaws for a member of the Foundation staff to run and serve on the Board. Before our first election (August 2012), our outside counsel confirmed that it is allowed. All individual members have the right to run, and I encourage anyone who’s passionate about the future of OpenStack to do so in the future!
I am happy to share the answers I gave to the candidate questionnaire here, to give y’all an idea of what I think is important in 2013. These are some of the things I plan to champion as COO this year, and look forward to working with our new board of directors to get there.
Q: What is your relationship to OpenStack, and why is its success important to you? What would you say is your biggest contribution to OpenStack’s success to date?
A: They say that failure is an orphan, and success has many fathers, and so I guess OpenStack has achieved some level of success. By that I mean, many talk about “being there from the beginning” and the “time before time” and all of that stuff. I will just say that the breadth and diversity of our community is it’s strength, so trying to single out “the list of founders” probably does more harm than good, when looking forward, as I believe we must. Personally, I believe we are years away from being able to declare any sort of victory for OpenStack, so am not interested in spending a lot of time fighting over “who started it”. Who cares? There is work to do. Now.
My passion for making OpenStack successful over the long haul has led me to the current position of Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation.
To summarize the areas where I’ve tried to add value in the OpenStack world, I will say that I’ve taken a particular interest in seeing the community grow, including the commercial ecosystem, and using that growth to establish the brand, so that we ultimately attract and retain users: the ultimate stakeholdres. I’ve had a strongly held believe that a diverse ecosystem will deliver betters sotware, for more users, over the long term. With over 1000 job openings in the OpenStack ecosystem today, it is clear that there is opportuniy. The biggest challenges are in closing that skills gap, though, through training and overall education, which I see as a Foundation priority in 2013.
So to answer the question more directly, I think that building a big ecosystem of companies that contribute, in many forms, and establishing OpenStack as a brand, are my biggest contributions to date (with the help of many many others, of course)
Q: 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?
A: For the past 4 years I have served as a Board Member at the Austin Music Foundation. I have learned a lot about the role of a Board Member, particularly in a non-profit, and I believe I can bring many best practices to the OpenStack Foundation Board.
Q: What do you see as the Board’s role in OpenStack’s success?
A: I believe the Board should focus primarily on ensuring the Foundation has adequate resources to pursue it’s mission, and to set long term goals and objectives for the Executive Director, who in turn works with his or her staff in pursuit.
Q: What do you think the top priority of the Board should be in 2013?
A: I think that the top priority for the Board in 2013 should be to provide guidance to the Executive Director on targets for user adoption, and to provide feedback on specific programs the ED presents which are devised to deliver against those. Rigorously prioritizing potential programs will be key, given the small staff and many potential competing priorities.
With respect to those programs, I believe that focusing on Education (such as through training programs, in partnership with 3rd parties in the ecosystem) will help close the skills gap and turn the substantial awareness and interest in OpenStack among users into realworld production deployments at massive scale, all over the globe.
Other areas of focus for OpenStack as a whole, which the Board can help support through empowering, protecting, and promoting, are the User Committee and the Technical Committee. Ensuring these committees have the resource and clear mandate to work are of vital importance. One concrete step the board can take is to invite each of the committees (or representatives from them) to attend board meetings (which are open to listeners worldwide), where time on the agenda can be set aside to hear their plans or any concerns that the Board might address. Ensuring a constant, open flow of communication is a key cultural value of OpenStack, and one which the Board has a critical role in promoting in practice.
If you’re an Individual Member of the OpenStack Foundation, we have a badge you can embed on your personal site to show you, too, are a proud member!
If you’re not, Join Today! (it’s free)
Here’s the embed code:
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/markcollier/8007980663/” title=”proudmember by MarkWCollier, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8033/8007980663_c5f5f39a44_o.png” width=”98″ height=”94″ alt=”proudmember”></a>
I really enjoyed the foundation meetup, which Yahoo! was kind enough to host, held on February 15th 2012. Everyone was very engaged, and yet we managed to make it through the whole presentation. Thanks to everyone who participated! Here is the video we captured via ustream:
Don’t forget to review the mission and the structure and get involved in determining the future of OpenStack!
As many know, I have spent the last year and a half trying to get the OpenStack open source cloud operating system off the ground, after convincing Rackspace to embrace this model almost 2 years ago. We had our OpenStack conference last week in Boston, and announced the big next step: creating the OpenStack Foundation. Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical and very wise woman, was kind enough to suggest I join a community discussion list dedicated to discussing foundations. Learning from those with experience in such things is going to be vital as we sort through the many options as a community. Her only recommendation was to write a brief bio to kick things off, which somehow morphed into this insanely long post.
Like most of you, I started hacking in elementary school because girls were scary. In middle school we moved to Austin and I got my first computer, a Coleco Adam, because my parents were both public school teachers and we couldn’t afford an Apple. SmartLogo ftw! In High School I learned Pascal, and like most young nerds was obnoxious enough to try and teach my teachers a few things. I competed in (and won) quite a few programming contests, to offset my time riding the bench for the basketball team with something I could actually achieve.
My first (and only non-tech) job was a 3 day stint washing dishes over memorial weekend at a local restaurant overlooking Lake Travis in a small community called Briarcliff (which Willie calls home). This netted me a whopping $100, and I spent it all on a microsoft mouse to see what the apple zealots were buzzing about. It had two buttons, Apple suckers! This should help me get girls for sure.
When I turned 16 I started working at a local mom and pop computer shop (remember those?) in Austin and probably assembled over 1000 PCs over the years with these summer jobs. I also did sales and training, so I’d sell the PCs up front, go back and assemble them, then train the customers on how to use these magic machines. This was like 1987. I had bad hair and no style. Still scared of girls.
I tried Computer Science at Trinity University for a semester but decided I didn’t want to be a career programmer (also, I kinda sucked) so ended up studying economics. Not because I wanted to become an economist (eww!) but because I found it interesting and my parents were paying for that paper so I had to study something. Finally met a girl (we are now married).
After I (barely) graduated I started at Dell working in a performance lab (thanks to my friend Todd Brannon) doing benchmark testing on new hardware that hadn’t reached the market yet. This was a geek’s dream come true, playing with the latest stuff before anyone else. Also, benchmarks can take hours, so what is a geek going to do? Play games. Anyone remember Command & Conquer? It destroyed my friend Rigo’s legal career because he dropped out of law school to play it every day. Now he’s a successful entrepreneur. Play games, people.
Eventually I went to the dark side (business! money! greed!) and tried product marketing, because playing games all day does eventually get old. This led me to realize that what I really loved was forging partnerships in the tech industry and taking risks on behalf of my company, because what the hell. It’s not my company! As an example, we once picked a graphics chip for a new gaming PC we were building from an unknown, unproven graphics start up with only 30 employees. They called themselves “Nvidia”. Now they all drive Porsches. Worked out.
I did a brief stint at a web start up (it was 2000, duh) and another tour of duty at Dell (first biz dev job, working with broadband companies a.k.a. big Telcos) eventually ended up at Musicmatch, a cool music app company you would remember, had Apple not erased those memories. I loved escaping the big company environment (Dell had lost the magic after becoming #1, but that’s for another post), working with passionate entrepreneurs who cared about their users and wanted to build a sustainable company. Just what I was looking for! We were acquired by Yahoo 3 weeks and 1 day later. Drat.
Turns out, Yahoo was full of incredibly bright people, and I worked in the music group in L.A. for 5 years forging partnerships and learning how to dress. I started learning about the dynamics of platforms, which fascinating me from my economics roots. I worked with a team that built the first Yahoo! music app for Facebook and had a million users in a month. This opened a few eyes at Yahoo! and got me thinking about the future of “business development” in the age of APIs, but mostly we were focused on building a business within the constraints of the music industry. The economics of music licensing and the insistence on DRM by the major labels were (and continue to be) major impediments to innovation in music, and we had the added burden of trying to educate the world on the concept of subscription music in the face of Apple’s simpler approach.
After years of lobbying we finally got the labels to agree to let us sell music in MP3 format, but it was too little too late. Our subscription music service was still bogged down by MSFT DRM by the music labels, and Apple was garnering all the users anyway. We eventually sold off the subscription business to Rhapsody (a deal I worked on, but didn’t particularly enjoy, as I like building things!). Now we see Spotify getting lots of press and traction, which fills me with both pride and dread since we had the same damn thing 5 years ago… but as they say, there’s little difference between being early and being wrong. We also had the #1 personalized radio station called LaunchCast. Didn’t Pandora just have an IPO? Could certainly do a whole series of posts on Yahoo.
Yearning to get back to my geekier roots and actually be part of building a platform ecosystem (and escape the unfolding drama at yahoo) I hooked up with the good folks at Rackspace, who I knew from my days working with Jim Curry at Dell. They were building a cloud by developers for developers, because a lot of them were the slicehost team we acquired (Jason Seats is the man, if you don’t know him you should), who really got it. My title was “biz dev” but the role was more about convincing developers at cloud companies to adopt our platform APIs. We launched a program called “Cloud Tools” to promote their work, which was great fun. Shining the spotlight on other people’s work feels good, and it turns out it’s great business too.
I quickly started pitching to Lew Moorman (president of the cloud group and chief strategy officer for Rackspace) the idea of open sourcing some or all of our cloud (amplifying others ideas, including Jason Seats and Jim Curry to be precise. Credit where it’s due and all that. These days OpenStack has 1000 fathers it seems. Jonathan Bryce tells me they were talking about it as early as 2007, so I can’t take too much credit). This got the first sign of real traction in December of 2009, when Jason Seats started pitching the idea. People (read: Lew) listened to Jason, as they should. By January Lew asked me to start pulling a plan together to evaluate, and by spring of 2010, Jim Curry and I we were pitching the board and Bret Piatt and I were lining up companies to join the mission. The fuse was lit.
Boy did we light a fire! We had no idea how much pent up demand there was for an open cloud standard. The excitement immediately exceeded the readiness of the code, but the brilliant thing about open source (done right) is that there is no barrier to contribution. The more eyes were on it, the more payoff for contributors who didn’t want to fall short of the crazy high expectations. Everyone could feel the potential.
After convincing Rackspace to pursue an open source development strategy, my role in the community has been in many ways to create those insanely high expectations, by growing the community of commercial backers and code contributors and marketing the successes. These two roles are very complimentary, especially in the first year, where one of the best pieces of news we could share to generate excitement was that a new tech giant was getting behind the movement. Within the first year we had Dell, Citrix, Cisco, Canonical, even Microsoft on board.
Did we hype OpenStack? Hell yes. There is a powerful self fulfilling prophecy at work in a community driven initiative with no barrier to contribution except drive and the will to do it. One of the best decisions we’ve made IMHO is recruiting incredibly talented marketing folks like Lauren Sell and Todd Morey, who have been the unsung heroes of the first year in an world where code trumps all. (Also want to hat tip Anne Gentle who has proven that documentation is where the user meets the product and is vitally important).
I know that many developers question the value of marketing, and that in open source in particular it’s looked at as irrelevant or, at best, a distraction. I also know that there is a rich history of open source projects, foundations, and lessons learned. We truly do stand on the shoulders of giants. But we also haven’t been afraid to do things “the openstack way”, to borrow a phrase from Apache, including making marketing and other “non code contributions” a priority.
I think every new community needs to respect and learn from other communities, while also nurturing their own unique characteristics and taking some risks along the way. My gut tells me that as we take the next step to establish an OpenStack Foundation, we, as a community, will again need to balance a reliance on proven models and the voice of those with far more experience, with the emerging “openstack way”. If I could be so bold as to define the “openstack way” just a little bit, I think it would be this: think big, everyone’s welcome, and all contributions matter.
Update: Josh Mckenty, who did as much to make OpenStack a reality as anyone (having led the creation of Nova at Nasa Nebula which became OpenStack Compute, and now CEO of Piston) pointed out an important part of the OpenStack Way. This principle was established on the eve of the first OpenStack Design Summit in Austin over drinks at Star Bar, just days before the public announcement. Tensions were running high, as he was still jumping through legal hoops at NASA to make the launch happen, and we needed a guiding principle (and a bit of comic relief).
Free as in Speech, Love, and Beer.
I had the privilege of attending what I think will end up being a historic moment in the technology industry. The event was Facebook’s Open Compute launch, in which they opened up two technology domains known more for their secrecy than knowledge sharing and, in the process, broke down the walls between the domains themselves. I captured this video of Mark Zuckerberg introducing the concept at their headquarters in Palo Alto April 7th, 2011:
Mark Zuckerberg introduces Open Compute April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.
The two domains, historically considered separate, are Data Center Design and Server Design. In the old world, it made sense to look at a server as a single unit, because applications typically lived on a single server (or, at most, a cluster of servers). In the new world, an application can span tens of thousands of servers (as I believe Facebook does), or hundreds of thousands of servers, as I believe Google does. No one knows for sure how many they have, but it’s a lot!
Given that Rackspace (my employer) operates datacenters globally and has tens of thousands of servers as well, our datacenter teams have been collaborating with Facebook for many months on next generation designs. When they asked our chairman Graham Weston to attend the event, I immediately saw an opportunity to jump on his coat tails with an openstack flag hidden in my back pocket. I just had a hunch there was more to this movement than just hardware… and here was my chance to sneak in and represent for all my OpenStack peeps out there…
Much has been written about cloud computing (commonly thought of as a large collection of servers running such apps “in the cloud”), but much of the discussion centers around distributed software systems to handle this new shape of problems (HADOOP, Cassandra, OpenStack) or the services implementing such software designs (Amazon, Rackspace).
At that software layer, clearly a wave of innovation is being unleashed by the open source software development model, in which like minded individuals are free to collaborate, regardless of company affiliation, to solve interesting problems. From my vantage point as one of the founders of OpenStack, I can tell you first hand that this model is unbelievable powerful as it attracts the brightest minds on the planet to come together to solve problems. It’s also redefining what it means to do “business development” in this era, as the mortal enemies of the past become the collaborators of the future, but that’s best left to a future post.
Now, Facebook is doing the same for two previously distinct domains: Data Centers and Servers. Jonathan Heiliger’s team presented some great background:
Facebook’s VP discusses Open Compute at Facebook, April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.
Facebook’s Open Compute Launch, April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.
The key word, in my mind, is previously. When viewed as a system — one giant supercomputer (for lack of a better word) with a hundred thousand processor cores being powered and cooled by massive fans, air ducts, and even higher voltages than normal all the way to the motherboard, it hits you: the building is the chassis for this computer! The open software platforms that enable apps to run on a computer the size of an airport are, then, in a sense the new operating system (OpenStack, Cassandra, Cloud Foundry, etc). Scoble has some great photos of the facility here (one stolen below).
By looking at the datacenter as one giant computer, Facebook was able to discard components that previously seemed essential, like the front “face plate” of each server (now just one of thousands of nodes in side a giant computer). They call this “vanity free” design, and I love it. Here’s a picture of Graham Weston in front of a “triplet” which is a 3 rack design with tons of these vanity free servers inside:
Amir Michael explains the history and goals in this video I captured at the event. Love the enthusiasm!!:
Facebook’s Open Compute Launch, April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.
In my mind, the next wave of innovation comes from looking at the software and hardware (datacenter included) as one complete system. At the risk of invoking a technology cliche and inviting a fan boy war: The Apple Way. Putting aside the obvious not-very-open approach to innovation Apple is known for, my point is this: By looking at the problem from the software application level all the way down to the strands of electrical wire running into individual servers and even the physical location of the “giant computer” itself (near plentiful electricity, low risk of natural disasters etc), a whole new wave of innovation has yet to be realized.
Although data center folks like to use something called “PUE” to measure the efficiency of their designs, it really just measures the waste at the physical level (i.e. electricity that did NOT go to something “useful” like making the processor run), this does not measure the waste of bad software. I use the term “bad software” for simplicity, but what I mean in practical terms is that a lot of the “work” being done by those processors — even in the Open Computer “hyper efficient” design, is wasted and we may not even know it. The biggest reason we’re in the dark when trying to look at this problem holistically is the closed, proprietary nature of the players building so many of the technology pieces of the stack – until now.
Starting today, communities like Open Compute can combined forces with other open communities like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry to get real world data on how a given workload (say, serving up TMZ.com to 10M users or something less critical, like storing images from Mars) actually consumes power to find the waste and come up with innovative solutions across domains. To prove that collaboration is about action and not talk, Jesse Andrews, Jim Curry and myself approached the Facebook team after the event and said “hey! lend us some of these servers and we’ll take them to our office in San Francisco and have OpenStack running on them tonight!”. Something that might have taken months to arrange was now in motion in a matter of hours! A couple of videos of our secret plan in action:
OpenStack running on OpenCompute — on launch day!
Going back to the Apple comparison for a moment – there is a reason the iPad gets 10+ hours of battery life, and it is not purely about the capacity of the battery (hardware design & decisions) or the lightweight iOS operating system (software design) or the custom ARM processor (chip design), or the well understood nature of the applications and the resources they use (software platform design), it’s about all of these things taken as a whole. While there may be one company on the planet capable of taking this approach in consumer electronics you can hold in your hand, IMHO there are ZERO companies on the planet who can do it at the “datacenter computer” level. This is why it is more essential than ever that we embrace openness at every level of the stack, and get to work on this critical problem: together!
While I applaud all of the smart minds working on alternative energy sources, which will no doubt be essential to the future of our planet (and economy!), I’m equally excited to see the walls coming down amongst the practitioners that will be putting a massive amount of that energy to work (via cloud computing) in dramatically more efficient ways through open source and open design in the years to come.