Last week our featured guest was Carol Barrett, who not only works in data center planning at Intel, but is also a leader in the OpenStack Community. She’s deeply involved in the Product Working Group, the Enterprise Working Group, and the Women of OpenStack, which means she’s got a lot of insider knowledge about what is going on at this moment with OpenStack, and what’s going to be happening down the road. If you missed the live podcast, check out the recording to hear Carol’s thoughts on:
- How being a woman is her competitive advantage in the tech world
- How the OpenStack Product Working Group is speeding innovation
- Who the “hidden influencers” are and why it’s important to get them out into the open
- What the Enterprise Working Group is trying to achieve
- Why enterprises are so tight-lipped about their use of OpenStack
- Why Intel is so involved with OpenStack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxSTeyyaJDs
Have a show idea? Tweet Jeff and Niki at @openstackpod
See past episodes, subscribe, or view the upcoming schedule on the OSPod website.
To see the full transcript of this interview, click “Read more” below.
Jeff Dickey: All right, we’re live everyone. Hi, I’m Jeff Dickey from Redapt.
Niki Acosta: I’m Niki Acosta from Cisco, and we have an awesome guest, another awesome woman in tech so I’m super thrilled to have Carol Barrett with us today. Carol, introduce yourself.
Carol Barrett: Hi Niki, Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me here today. My name’s Carol Barrett, I’m with Intel Corporation and I work inside of our open source technologies center specifically on open source software for the data center, which puts OpenStack front and center for me.
Niki Acosta: Fantastic. We typically like to introduce our guests and always ask how you got into tech.
Carol Barrett: It was sort of a last minute call for me as I was getting out of high school. I’d always been really strong in math and was looking at different career options. Then my senior year in high school I needed to go ahead and fill out some electives, and they had one on, I think it was computer programming basics. It was a little Honeywell system, a 2100A, and you walk into the room and it filled the entire room. I know I’m dating myself. We actually had paper tape that we would use to go ahead and create our hello world programs on and then put it through the system to actually load it up and make it run. I thought it was just absolutely fascinating. I really appreciated the structure and the logic around it and the way it played with my math background.
Then I started looking for colleges that had computer science or computer technology or computer engineering programs, and I eventually went to Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, which was one of the ones that was sort of leading in the development of programs like that in the late ’70s, early ’80s at that point in time. I didn’t really know what I would do with that and going through the first couple of years of school, it was just all the basics. I still really didn’t know what I would do with it as a career or how it would manifest itself out in the world. Then I went and did a co-op for 6 months with General Dynamics, the electric boat division in Groton, Connecticut. I worked on weapons systems on the USS Ohio, the first trident class submarines. That really gave me a strong sense of, “Okay, there’s a big world out there of ways you can use computer technology,” and that I could start to really identify usages and application areas a lot better after I had that experience.
I continued to become more and more fascinated by it and eventually when I did graduate, I started working in embedded systems because I really found that that interaction of software and hardware that would instantaneously make something happen, was really exciting. I developed all types of different instrumentation and hardware development devices for a long time before I actually moved further down into end user type of software applications. It just amazes me as I look back now on how mainstream technology has really become. It just always, always amazes me and delights me quite honestly because I could never imagine it when I started in technology 30 plus years ago that it would get this far.
Niki Acosta: Speaking of 30 plus years ago, I can’t imagine at that time, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but that the number of men versus women in college period was much higher than it is now. Women are more dominant at this time, but I suspect that there were very, very few women in that program. What was that like?
Carol Barrett: I think it was probably even accentuated because where I went to was a school that was really primarily for engineers of all different flavors. That was going to reduce the number of women that were going to be there anyhow, besides being in just computers alone. It was interesting and at first, it was intimidating. I’d say actually through most of college it continued to be a challenge to still be willing to give my thoughts voice and speak out in classes and in small teams where I would be the only woman in there. To go ahead and say, “Well, I think we ought to do things differently.” When I got out into more of the professional world, I actually discovered that being the only woman in the world was my competitive advantage, because I thought differently than the majority of the other people in the room.
I had a different viewpoint that was unique and that if I had the courage to go ahead and speak up and express it, that people would generally be open to hearing it and it would cause them to think. Then that whole process of merging the different viewpoints so a better overall analysis or design emerged, really came to be. I would think of it that way when I would go into a session where I knew I was going to be the only woman. It’s like, “Okay, that’s my competitive advantage. How am I going to go ahead and use that to contribute something to the meeting that I was getting ready for?” That was a learning point for me, was discovering that competitive advantage piece.
Niki Acosta: That’s awesome. Taking something that could be maybe a little intimidating and turning it into something that’s advantageous. That’s really cool. Carol, you’ve been doing a lot of work with the product working group and the Enterprise working group, and just before the show you talked about how those two things dovetailed together. For those of you who are watching the live video of this, Carol wanted to share a couple slides. If you’re just listening in we’ll do our best here to kind of explain as we go through these slides since you obviously won’t be able to see them. We will make those slides available for viewing and we’ll post those through the Twitter account, through the YouTube video, and through the blog once we get the blog posted with the transcripts of this. Carol, I’ll turn it over to you to take us through the product working group overview and talk about the good work that you and many other people from many companies are doing to drive OpenStack forward.
Carol Barrett: That’s great, that’s a great topic actually. I’m going to start with the last piece, which is who are the folks that are involved. What you’re looking at here is just a representative sample. It has obviously, Intel’s involved, but we have folks from Cisco and Rackspace and Mirantis and Red Hat, and Dell, and VMware, and EMC, and just a really large group of folks have come together. The focus around the product work group is looking to actually be a place for aggregation for the different use cases, sometimes we call them, requirements sometimes we call them. It really represents the needs of different markets or users that they have for being able to go ahead and deploy OpenStack in their environment. Whether it’s Enterprise, whether it’s a high performance computing installation, whether it’s a Cloud service provider, any of those.
Really looking to be that place where we can bring all that information together, identify the commonalities across those needs, and then be able to provide that information into the technical community. Whether it’s the project team leads, or the developers, or the technical committee quite honestly, to be able to bring more information ideally in some type of a ordered format as another input into the design summits, and the specification of what will be included in the different releases of OpenStack. The goal there is to make sure that all of the development resources that are going into OpenStack have visibility and or are working on the features and function requests that are most important and will help us to increase the adoption and deployment of OpenStack throughout the community. We’ll get more feedback and we can continue to really grow and have a vibrant ecosystem.
What we’ve done today is, in preparation for the summit, we really worked on two things. One was, “How can we put together a starting point for the roadmap?” Looking to be able to publish out a multi-release roadmap that would be able to communicate outside to operators and users of what they directionally can expect in the upcoming releases of OpenStack. Then inward to the community to be able to be a tool for detailed tracking of where we are or in implementing these capabilities. I think one key point of that is, a lot of these capabilities are cross-project. I think more and more we’re seeing inside the community that the capabilities that users and operators want do indeed cross projects. That’s a complicated management and coordination process inside of OpenStack. It’s tough inside of most companies I think actually, that are building up complex software solutions like in OpenStack.
Certainly inside of our community it’s a challenge and I think that that’s an area that the product work group is really looking to provide support to the PTLs and the development teams, so that we can go ahead and have a better visibility on the cross project activities and where we stand with them, and how we keep them aligned so that the resources invested in each of the projects result in a meaningful increment in the capabilities and functionality around OpenStack. We put together three different views of the roadmap and this would be one of the things that would be really interesting to get more feedback on from folks who are either watching or listening to the podcast. The first view is really high level. We call it the 30,000 foot view and it really talks about the themes that are the focus areas for the different projects inside of OpenStack. As we looked at what was planned, this started before Kilo was out, so Kilo, Liberty, and then the end release.
Really we saw a strong grouping around scalability, resiliency, manageability, modularity, and then new functions coming into the projects. We would be able to go ahead and look at this, and I’m going to put it in presentation mode, and by looking at it we could see certain trends emerge around different releases. We could see a strong focus in scalability across Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, some of our more mature projects inside of the community. We could go ahead and see for other projects that there was a strong focus on new functionality inside of the Kilo release as well. It allows us to see at a pretty high level the trends of the different projects.
Niki Acosta: How are you finding those trends? Is it through co-contributions or is it through just anecdotal collection of data?
Carol Barrett: We sort of do a combination. We would go ahead and look at all the available data that we could find from all the different projects in there. Blueprint repositories and in-spec repositories, and then from listening in on different IRC meetings that would go on. Then we actually did a divide and conquer within the product work group to actually meet and have a conversation in whatever form, with all of the PTLs. To go ahead and confirm what we had heard, see if there was anything that we had missed, and get their thoughts also on Liberty and at that point in time because it’s hard to find a lot of information in the repositories that go that far out today. We did it in multiple ways and we got just really outstanding support from all of the PTLs in talking with us and sharing their thoughts and visions, and where they thought their teams wanted to go. Even equally important I think, is how can the product work group help them? Right? What can we do to make their jobs easier, make the work for their teams more clear, and easier for them to go ahead and move forward and coordinate with the other projects?
Jeff Dickey: It seems like this is almost a grading system for it. Has there been any push back?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, surprisingly there hasn’t been any. We all were very tentative quite honestly, when we started on the work of this work group, sort of trying to bring some type of input into the planning process that would be more structured and coordinated. We were concerned that that would be perceived as trying to be overly influential or try and dictate directions. What we’ve heard from all of the PTLs, I think I can safely say, is that they welcomed the input. Being able to get more input from end users and marketplaces in a consistent form, and from one central location actually will make it a lot easier for them to understand it, internalize it, and then map it to what they’re doing or what they may consider doing as they go through the design summits. That was really heartening and really encouraging for everybody in the work group, and really put a lot of energy behind the activities that the team was doing.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, and under manageability, is that the upgradeability piece?
Carol Barrett: Yes. I put upgrades in there as well as other types of basic capabilities interacting with the modules as well. Modularity generally is an internally focused theme, that is what we see. In the case of Neutron, it’s the modularization of Neutron, we see there’d be a similar type of thing you’d see around Nova, breaking it out into different pieces so that it becomes more manageable from a project point of view and from a reviewer point of view as well.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it looks fantastic.
Carol Barrett: [Crosstalk 00:15:23] interesting to see it all come together. Then we actually took it down another layer and where on the 30,000 foot view you can see all the projects on one slide, here we actually broke it into three different slides covering five projects per. What you start to look at here is more, instead of a trend you start to look at it more from a release by release point of view. What is Kilo shaping up for across these five projects? What is Liberty shaping up for and what is the M release shaping up for? Here we start to get a different view and a different type of takeaway from looking at this information on a slide. We found that some people thought that this would help them to figure out how they would stage their deployment or how they would go ahead and stage their application onboarding onto their OpenStack deployment by being able to look at it from this view. Then we provided one more view, which was what we called the 30 foot view which is a project by project basis providing more detail of what specifically would be implemented in that project.
I think from a developer point of view that this was one of the ones that was most important because it helped them to see the collaboration points they had across projects, and where they could get involved based upon their areas of expertise. I think maybe the other slide, just to talk a little bit about it is, as being the point of aggregation for requirements, or input, or use cases. This is a slide that actually was first drafted by Tim Bell, who leads the user committee. What we’re really trying to show is how all of the different elements of the community can come together, both from teams that are looking around specific marketplaces like Telco and Enterprise, or whether it’s working groups inside the community who are looking to build with certain capabilities like standard longing or ops tools or monitoring. How these different funnels of work can come together and allow us to be able to look across then these different requirements and be able to feed that as sort of a one voice if you will, or one set of information that’s unified into the development organization. This is the larger view from a community point of view and how we could all work together.
Niki Acosta: It sounds like you guys are just creating a really good feedback loop. Is that accurate and even diving into specific use cases and maybe verticals, to streamline development so that it’s a little more focused. That’s great for everyone I think.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I think being able to have information from the folks who are actually trying to use OpenStack and then about what they need. What are they trying to do with that full contextual information, I think that just makes it a lot easier for the developers to be able to really understand what does that mean in OpenStack? What do I really need to put in place because they have that full rich description and ideally, could even go back to that where was the source of the use case for more discussion, and maybe even being able to bounce ideas off of them. If we implemented it this way, is that going to meet your needs?
Maybe they’re some of the things that didn’t come in in the use case that are other requirements that wouldn’t get met from that approach. Being able to bring that information in, I think allows the developers to make better decisions and to have a better design. I think all of that just leads to faster innovation, more capabilities coming out to the market that are more usable just right out of the gate by the developers. I think it’s going to be a collaboration of taking that input and figuring out how do we capture it in a way that it’s actionable by the developers? How do we provide more input to that process so that they can have a sense of relative priorities ideally around these capabilities.
Niki Acosta: I really think this is the right approach and I say that because you have feedback from developers, you have feedback from users, you have feedback from operators, and you’re getting end user feedback ultimately back through the loop because I think, every company out there who’s running or offering OpenStack as a vendor definitely feels the demand coming from their customers in terms of what they need or what they want to see, depending on their use case. This seems like a really good way to organize all of that and provide direction. I commend you and all the great folks working on the product working group. It’s really cool that Intel lets you have the freedom to go and do this, to better OpenStack. I think that’s really awesome.
Carol Barrett: Thanks. There’s a lot of great people who are really backing and causing the product work group to move forward. I think that notable mentions on that are really around Sean Roberts, and Rob Hirschfield, and Alison from HP who started the original conversation about the hidden influencers. The product managers inside of most of the companies that contribute to OpenStack who are defining priorities and have strategies and roadmaps for their teams. The conversation of how do we get those to be more visible and how do we drive some type of alignment around those so that the community can actually work more collaboratively and more in the open?
A large part of the folks who are participating inside of the product work group are those type of folks like me, who go ahead and define road maps for Intel developers who are contributing to OpenStack around priorities. Our priorities for Intel as well as the other product managers, come from the customers we’re looking to serve. By going ahead and all of us talking about that in the open, I think that the real advantages to the project technical leads, which is being able to align development resources to a capability for a release, so that there’s more confidence that the implementation’s going to happen in the time frame that the PTL is expecting it to happen, because the resources are really committed to it.
Niki Acosta: If someone out there is listening and they want to get involved in the product work group or follow along what’s happening, what is the best way for them to do that?
Carol Barrett: Go up to OpenStack.org and go ahead and search for product work group and you’ll find our Wiki page. You can go ahead and sign up to our mail list from there as well where we go ahead and post all about the meetings as well as some of our different work items through the mail group. We meet every other week, it’s on Wednesdays at 4:00 Pacific and it’s IRC pound OpenStack meeting. Come on in and join us there. You can also go ahead and find the link to all the previous meeting logs and information as well off the Wiki site.
Niki Acosta: You all met in Vancouver as well, correct? Were any of those sessions recorded?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I think two of them were. There was one that was a glimpse of the OpenStack road map and then the other one was the state of product management. I think both of those were recorded and should be available off of OpenStack.org.
Niki Acosta: Then there are off cycle meetings maybe? I heard of a meeting that took place in California, some kind of product summit if you will.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, we did have basically a mid cycle meet up during the Kilo development cycle. That was hosted at VMware site. We’re talking about and trying to figure out when we want to do a mid cycle during the Liberty development. Because we’ve continued to learn more and more, we’re now thinking that we want to try and co-locate our mid cycle meet up potentially with the ops mid cycle meet up, so that we can continue the cycle with the feedback and use case development, and aligning on priorities. Potentially be able to go ahead and align it with some of the other working groups, whether it’s the Enterprise work group or the Telco work group’s going to have a mid cycle meet up. See if there’s an opportunity to try and align with some of those folks who really are collaborators in the community for bringing about use cases and creating a road map for OpenStack.
Niki Acosta: Aside from having an excuse to going to California, I’m tempted to show up. It sounds like a really cool thing, especially if you can co-locate with operators and with the product managers and other folks doing the work. It’s interesting to note too, because I had a panel with some of the folks on the product working group, [Shamel 00:25:01], and Jim [Hasselmeier 00:25:01], and some folks from EMC, and Andre from Blue Box. It’s amazing to see the different perspectives that come through and hear about the different use cases, and also hear about customer requirements. It varies so widely and to be able to have the ability to focus on something that will have the most impact, I think is only going to accelerate OpenStack as a whole, which is good for everybody.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I agree with you. I think by accelerating the capabilities inside of OpenStack it allows us to accelerate the deployments, which accelerates the ecosystem, and all of that really just becomes a reinforcing cycle for innovation across all of the products and all of the markets for everybody inside of the community.
Niki Acosta: That was the product working group. Did you want to talk a little bit about the Enterprise working group and the work that’s happening there?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I’d like to. The Enterprise work group was formed I guess, coming up on about 2 years ago now. It was really focused on identifying and removing the barriers for Enterprise IT managers to deploy OpenStack today. Not what they would need in 6 months or 12 months, but why couldn’t they drive it and deploy it today? A large group of folks from across the community came together and focused on this area. We went ahead and broke into a series of sub teams where we focused on where we could just segment and start to get bite-sized pieces that we could understand, put action plans around, and then go ahead and execute to. It’s really been great to see everybody come together and really make progress. At this point in time I think we’ve got 4 teams that are formed, and it’s sort of morphed. After each summit we would look at, “Okay, we made this progress, we have more Enterprises deploying. What are the barriers today to the folks who are not deploying?” Then we would align the work group to those different types of challenges.
Today we focus around deployment, so what are the challenges to onboarding traditional Enterprise work loads into the Cloud, into OpenStack specifically? We have a business and marketing team that’s been doing a lot of work around the perceptual barriers or the awareness barriers to Enterprise IT deployment. Then we’ve just combined a couple of teams to create a top 5 ISV team. What we hear from Enterprise is, “I have a series of current applications that I use to manage or interact with my current IT installation in the Enterprise. I want to be able to continue to use those as I stand up an OpenStack cloud next to that, but there’s some issue somewhere with it.” Maybe they just don’t know how to do it, maybe there’s actually some gaps in the inter-operability with those applications.
This last team has identified what are the top 5 apps in about 6 different categories, and then are starting to work through the engagement with those ISVs so that they can have inter-operable solutions within OpenStack Cloud, and we can have all the information and documentation for Enterprise IT so that they could stand it up and [inaudible 00:28:30]. Really just trying to knock those barriers down. I think that the Enterprise work group is going to start to dovetail and flow more information into the product work group as we define use cases around each of these different … Whether it’s the inter-operability of an ISV, or whether from a deployment team point of view, it’s rolling upgrades with zero down time, then feed those into the product work group so we can identify those commonality of requirements across other segments like HPC, or Cloud service providers so that as the development community implements these capabilities, that we do it in a way that it serves all of the markets. We can get a capability that allows us to advance the OpenStack deployment much more broadly than just Enterprise.
Niki Acosta: One thing that I’ve been battling, and I’ve certainly felt this at the OpenStack Summit a little bit because one of my panelists was from Sprint. We couldn’t talk about what they were doing other than Rob Lindross from Sprint was on my panel. Why is the Enterprise so reluctant to talk about what they’re doing? I know for a fact that there are many Enterprises that are using OpenStack but we’re not hearing about them. Why do you think that is?
Carol Barrett: I think there’s a couple of reasons, but one of the ones that I hear most frequently is they really are very protective of the resources that they have assembled that are experts in both OpenStack and their infrastructure and their architecture. If they’re too loud and public about what they’re doing, people will come and poach their resources because there’s a need in the marketplace for people who are OpenStack experts. That’s actually one of the top reasons I hear that Enterprises are not willing to be so public about things.
Niki Acosta: I have not heard that, but that makes complete logical sense. Hey, if you want a job just put OpenStack on your LinkedIn right? You will get offers.
Carol Barrett: I don’t know if there was any booth at the OpenStack Summit in the marketplace that did not have a we’re hiring sign up, right? Everybody was.
Niki Acosta: Yeah, the recruiters were definitely there in full force, no doubt.
Carol Barrett: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: Interesting. You said there were two reasons? Did you say there were two reasons?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, well I think there’s multiple. I think that that’s a large one, I think the other one is that competitive advantage or business advantage. I think the way that the companies are deploying it, are providing them some advantages that they don’t necessarily want to signal out to the market yet. Right? It allows them to either deploy things more quickly or to manage more effectively, which is going to allow them to deliver new value out to their customers, and they’re just not really ready to give their competitors more information about how they’re doing it so that they can copy them as well. I think competitive advantage is another big reason that we hear it as well.
Jeff Dickey: We have a hard time getting end users on the show, and most end users want to and they do really want to talk about what they’re doing, but it’s kind of a PR issue. They say, “Yes, I want to do it, let me check,” and then it’s a, “No, I can’t.”
Niki Acosta: Yeah, they get stopped somewhere with their marketing people or their PR people or their legal people more often than not, depending on the size of the customer. We did have Ebay on at the OpenStack summit, which if you guys haven’t gone and looked at that list of podcasts from the OpenStack summit, I recommend checking them out. They’re about 20 to 25 minutes each. Ebay was so awesome and forthcoming about what they were doing. We had another user, Cern, Tim Bell from Cern …
Jeff Dickey: Tim Bell.
Niki Acosta: Was there too and talking about really cool things they’re doing at Cern and upgrades to the Hadron collider and how it’s the coldest place on earth, which is so geeky. Everyone knows that I have love for Tim Bell.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: He’s warned his wife about me since she joined Twitter.
Jeff Dickey: We had Getty Images on too, on those little mini-casts.
Niki Acosta: You had what?
Jeff Dickey: Getty Images.
Niki Acosta: Oh, sweet. Awesome.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, so check that out too.
Niki Acosta: I missed that day. I was riding a bike, sorry.
Jeff Dickey: That’s okay. Scott did a great job, filled in. That was good, and I just listened to the Tim Bell episode yesterday morning on the way to work, because I wasn’t on that one.
Niki Acosta: It’s always a little different without you Jeff. Carol’s laughing at us. Tangent. Go ahead.
Jeff Dickey: Okay. We were just talking a little bit about the conference. Carol, how was the conference for you? Was it good? Was there things that were missed out on? What was our overall impression of the Summit?
Carol Barrett: I thought it was dynamite. Really, it was great to be able to connect with so many folks and to be able to sit down face-to-face and have real hands-on working sessions. Then at the same time, it was great to meet new people who are interested in … Either working on the product work group or in the Enterprise area, and being able to sit down and talk with them as well. I thought all of that went really well. It was interesting, the venue was fabulous right? Love Vancouver, the convention center and all of that was just absolutely a great host spot for everybody. I think one of the challenges, especially coming from Paris, was we had so much room that there were so many parallel sessions that went on in Vancouver that it was really hard to choose where to go. It was neat to see the dynamic in the working groups, where the folks would come together and we would actually figure out a divide and conquer strategy. Especially for the product work group where they wanted to be in a lot of the user committee sessions and the up summit, and then some of the other work groups.
We could go ahead and say, “Okay, you two cover this and you cover this, and we’ll cover that,” and then come back together either through the mail list or on a working session to share what we learned and where we think that there might be some good collaboration and commonality for us. That was one of the challenges, was to deal with all the parallels that was going on there, but the venue and the session and just, I thought the caliber of attendees was really strong. I think that if I think back to Atlanta, where there were a lot of folks who were still there for the first time but were also really trying to get a foundation of understanding of OpenStack, and then you look at Vancouver where there was still lots of first time people but they knew a lot more. The level of knowledge of the people who are coming into the community is much higher than it was in Atlanta. I think that that’s just a great sign for where we’re going. It’s not just people who are considering, it’s people who are seeing that this is a direction for them and they need to really start to get more information and dig in so that they can plan their deployment or the next phase of their deployment. That level of knowledge and engagement was much, much higher.
Jeff Dickey: It was. I was at the booth a little bit. The folks that would come by were actively implementing OpenStack and had it either ready for production or in production. I haven’t been to a summit since Portland, so it was crazy to see like you said, just the maturity and everything. I think what overwhelmed me the most was just the keynote, the size of that space and the people. I came in late so I was in the very back, and just looking at this, you couldn’t even see the stage. It was so huge. It was huge, the [crosstalk 00:36:40].
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I agree. I know there were 6,000 plus people there, is when you walked into the keynote venue.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: I don’t know if it was the weather and the venue or what, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there was a level of excitement and energy that has been missing from the last few summits. Paris was kind of dreary, Hong Kong was kind of dreary, Atlanta was just rainy and muggy and kind of miserable, and hot and sticky. No offense to the Foundation, but it seemed like there was just a lot more happening and like you said, kind of the sense that everyone’s stepped it up a level. It’s always good to see almost a mini-revival after you feel like you’re maybe not moving upward, to refresh and say, “Okay, cool, it’s back on the upward swing.” I think a lot of that just has to do with maturity. I think there were a lot of doubters and a lot of haters and it’s always good to prove those folks wrong considering I’ve invested multiple years into this.
Carol Barrett: Great. I think there was a lot more of that. A lot less doubting and a lot more around inevitability. Yeah, it’s inevitable that these companies are each going to have some degree of an OpenStack cloud setup, and trying to figure out what does that look like? What do I put in it? How do I manage it as part of my overall setup? Yeah, I think that’s a major change.
Niki Acosta: Jeff, do you want to ask a question? I’ve been hogging the mic a little, maybe.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, I just want to hear more. Carol, we were talking before the show, I think you’re our fourth guest from Intel actually, which is kind of surprising. We were talking about Intel’s this very much not a well-known I don’t think, entity as much as you guys contribute. You guys are quietly contributing a lot to OpenStack. Do you want to share some stuff about what you guys are doing or around SAA or any of the pieces? Feel free to talk about anything.
Carol Barrett: Sure. It’s been very much a conscious effort inside of Intel over the last 18 months to 2 years to increase our contributions and the broad base of developers that we have that we can bring to the community. Because it just fits in with out overall strategy of being port of choice, and what that really means in non-Intel speak, is whatever software solution our customers want to run on our products, we want to make sure that it’s available to them and that it provides the best possible experience for them. As our customers started to talk more and more about OpenStack and how that was part of their strategy in the data center, that became more and more important to Intel that we make sure that OpenStack had the capabilities to be able to meet those different market needs, and that it also provided the best benefits on the Intel platforms as well.
It really is a strategy that you see Intel use on everything from laptops or handheld tablet devices, whether it’s Android or working with Microsoft on the Windows platforms, all types of Linux contributions. OpenStack is clearly a big part of our data center strategies and what our customers are telling us they’re going to deploy. Where I am is inside of the software and services group inside of Intel. We’re almost a service organization to the people who actually build the products, what we call platforms, that will ship in the market. In working with our data center group who is the customer for our OpenStack work, understanding exactly what market segments, whether it’s HPC or Enterprise, they see adopting the Cloud and OpenStack more rapidly than others.
What is that drive for requirements around solution stacks, and then specific features? Some care more about scalability like in the Telco space. Some care more about security, when we start to get into the FSI space, making sure that those capabilities are inside of OpenStack so that they can go ahead and deploy it and do what we need to do to go ahead and support them as they do that as well. It’s a really interesting place to be as you look at the community and all the different products that are coming out based upon the OpenStack community development efforts, is that we really want all of them to be successful and we want to make sure that they really take full advantage of our platforms and they have the features and functions needed by the markets to deploy.
Niki Acosta: You supported a lot of the Women in Tech stuff going on at the Summit as well right?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, diversity is a large priority here at Intel. BK, our CEO, made a couple of big announcements earlier in the year at CES about Intel’s investment both within the company to drive a well diversified population at all of the different levels through the company, recognizing that different points of view and conversation around those points of views and experiences are going to yield better solutions, better strategies, better designs, whatever it is. It’s always going to yield a better result, and that we inside of Intel had work that we could do and that we needed to do in order to really get to the level that we want to for diversity. The high tech community in general has work that needs to happen there, and certainly when you look at open source software, there’s some pretty strong data that shows us that our environment or our community is not as diverse as we would want to be.
I was in the OpenStack board meeting on the Sunday before the start of the summit, and I think they were saying of the roughly 6,500 attendees that are coming to the summit, it was just under 10% that were women. That’s a pretty small segment of that community and realizing that we all think differently and together we can do things that are better, we need to figure out how do we beef that section up? How do we enlist more women to come and be active in the community and contribute their technology, their thoughts, their knowledge from markets and solution architecture, so that OpenStack can really be as strong and robust and capable as all the markets that we want to serve need it to be? Intel really took, I thought, a strong step forward to trying to bring together the women in the community and try and figure out, what can we do to change the dynamics? How can we get more women in? What are the barriers? What are the challenges? I think that we’re going to continue to work in that area and I thought it was fabulous that Comcast as the Superuser award winner, donated their 2 all-paid passes and accommodations and all of that, to the Women of OpenStack. I just can’t say enough about what a great thing that was for them to do for the community.
Niki Acosta: Total class act.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, really job well done. I’m sure that they’ll go to women who can help to make a real impact and difference in OpenStack.
Jeff Dickey: We had, was it Murali Sundar
Carol Barrett: Oh yeah, Murali Sundar.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, we’ve had her on the show from Intel. We’ve had a couple folks from Intel. She was great too, but yeah. I didn’t notice it, especially in the sessions that there weren’t very many women at the show.
Carol Barrett: I think it’s an area for us to grow. Honestly, I think it can even start in the entire thinking of how the Foundation stages the conference. We’re still looking for the first woman to do a keynote. Right? That still has not happened yet at an OpenStack summit.
Niki Acosta: I’m crossing my fingers for childcare, so when I go to these fantastic cities I can stay a couple of days and hang out. Just saying, just throwing that out there.
Carol Barrett: I’m sure you’re not the only one that would find that really useful.
Jeff Dickey: I would use that Niki.
Niki Acosta: Would you?
Jeff Dickey: Yes I would.
Niki Acosta: I would too, and I would also appreciate some healthier food options during the booth crawls. Pizza and burgers all the time gets a little old. Just saying.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I thought the Vancouver booth crawl was really just amazing, how just jam packed it was.
Niki Acosta: Oh yeah, you couldn’t walk and I got a little warm in there. I was like, “Man,” people were literally shoulder to shoulder. It was happening.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, it was just amazing what was going on there, to see everybody talking and then seeing the different demos and somebody would go ahead and say, “Well, what about this scenario?” And people would actually try to respond to that by changing the demo or changing some of the configuration and being able to respond to it right there. That was really neat to watch happen.
Niki Acosta: You know what I’m bummed about, is the fact that now that there is such a large number of attendees, that fewer people are giving away good t-shirts. Did anyone else notice that? I was so bummed, so so bummed, and the giveaway this year was a really cool windbreaker and by the time I went to get mine they didn’t have smalls or mediums left, which was a bummer. They were unisex sized so I didn’t actually get something that I think I’ll be able to wear unless I want it hanging down to my knees. That’s all right, there’s always Tokyo.
Carol Barrett: That was a great giveaway though.
Jeff Dickey: A nice jacket, yeah.
Niki Acosta: It was.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, and what it said inside of it when you actually opened it up, there was a sentiment of community and working together. I thought that was just fabulous, really fabulous.
Jeff Dickey: My favorite swag was the Intel sweatshirt. Inside the sweatshirt it said, Intel inside.
Niki Acosta: No way.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it’s a super comfy sweatshirt. It said OpenStack on it.
Carol Barrett: I thought that HP’s, their sweatshirt, the jacket that they did and then all of the badges for each of the different projects. I thought those were great, yeah.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Carol Barrett: Such a great [sat 00:48:22] and they were just so colorful and just really cute too. I thought that was a great giveaway.
Niki Acosta: Always fun going to these, you never know what to expect until you get there. It seems like they just keep getting better because everyone’s trying to outdo each other. HP’s party was so ridiculous, they had stunt people and you could go and get yourself recorded with a stunt man doing some crazy stunt. It was pretty neat, they had food trucks with hand made ice creams and all kinds of different foods, and HP sure knows how to throw a party that’s for sure.
Carol Barrett: It will be interesting to see how everything transforms as we go to Tokyo, right?
Niki Acosta: Oh, most definitely, most definitely. What are you looking forward to in Tokyo?
Carol Barrett: I think first off, it will be seeing new segments of the OpenStack community show up at the summit. Just like when we saw in Paris, the North America and US percentage went way down and we had a lot more folks from Europe who were there. I’m sure as we go to Japan we’ll go ahead and see the same North America numbers drop down and the Asian numbers climb. I think that that’s going to be great because that will provide us the opportunity to sit down and have face-to-face conversations with folks who we haven’t been able to do that before. All types of new things are going to come out of that. I think we’ll get a different set of end users and operators, and they’re going to have different requirements and different environments that they’re trying to stand up clouds in. That’s going to be really great information for us to get. I love Tokyo, it’s just such a great city and the ways that all the venues and opportunities for being able to throw parties to bring folks together, are really going to be creative I’m sure. Those are the main ones for me.
Niki Acosta: I’m definitely looking forward to it and maybe Jeff and I will not go into this Summit booking 12 podcasts in a row over the course of 6 hours for 2 days. I don’t know what we were thinking. I was pretty waxed after 12 podcasts in a row, but we still had a good time.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it was a rough end of the show for me. I think we did 10 podcasts and then I had to drive home, I was worn out. [crosstalk 00:50:46]
Niki Acosta: You did all the hard work bringing all the equipment into that, so thanks for that Jeff. What’s next for you Carol? What’s going to be going on for you? Any last closing words you want to talk about?
Carol Barrett: Right now it’s all around planning and execution for Tokyo. Whether it’s the product work group who’s looking to go ahead and create the updated roadmap, which will go ahead and take us out through the end release and incorporate all the information from the Liberty design summit. Then starting to put together the use cases to feed into the M design summit, and having conversations with everybody across the community. Then from the Enterprise point of view, executing on the things that we know that we need to deliver from code contributions like rolling upgrade. We have some experiments we’re doing around graffiti and the metadata tagging to support onboarding traditional IT work loads into the Cloud, and being able to prove out those solutions for capabilities that are already inside of OpenStack. Then continuing to develop more reference architectures and white papers and how-to guides with end users and ISVs. Lots to get done between here and Tokyo. As usual it will go by in a blink of an eye, these next 5 or 6 months. These cycles are just incredibly quick.
Niki Acosta: I know, I feel like call for papers is about to open or something already. Growing and it’s like, “Man, is it time to write another abstract? Good night. What am I going to talk about this time?”
Carol Barrett: Yeah, but there’s always lots to talk about. That is the good news here.
Niki Acosta: We look forward to seeing you for sure, and sorry I didn’t get to meet you in real life. Hopefully I’ll get to catch up with you in Tokyo. You’ve been an absolute pleasure to have on the show, just so knowledgeable and we really appreciate the work you’re doing with the product working group and Enterprise working group and all the good stuff that Intel’s doing with women in tech and all that stuff. We typically like to end the podcast by asking what two guests you would like to see on the show.
Carol Barrett: I think the two that come to mind are first, it would be John Garbutt because I’m really interested as the new Nova PTL, to understand what his vision is around Nova and what does he see being a direction for modularity, and how do you either rework some of the elements around Nova like the number of reviewers and how many folks can really commit time to that, versus breaking Nova into smaller pieces so that the rate of innovation continues to be as high as we need. Nova is such an important project for almost every service to grow and become more capable, that I’d like to know his view coming into that role. How do you go ahead and allow Nova to become really the thing that fuels the innovation across all of the services?
Then I think the other one would be Kyle Mestery to understand, what’s the path between Neutron and Nova networks? How do we get to one solution inside of a community that everybody can be confident in and really start to deploy widely, and be able to get all of our developers so that we’re developing just one capability instead of splitting some of our development resources across a couple of capabilities that are somewhat similar. Those would be the two that I’d be most interested in, thinking about it from my Enterprise point of view or from a product work group point of view.
Niki Acosta: Great recommendations.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: We need to get on that, Jeff.
Jeff Dickey: I will.
Niki Acosta: Yes. Anything else, Jeff?
Jeff Dickey: No. Carol, thank you so much for being on the show and thanks for everything you’ve done for OpenStack and the Foundation, and all the stuff that you’ve done. It’s been great work.
Carol Barrett: I appreciate that, and thanks for having me on here today. It was just great to meet you guys and get a chance to hopefully meet some other folks in the community as a result of talking more about the product work group and the Enterprise work group too.
Niki Acosta: Carol’s going to send us the latest version of the deck, yes? Or a link to it on slide show and we’ll make sure to post that when we post the video here on YouTube. We’ll drop it in the comments there, we’ll get transcripts and drop it in a blog as well. Stay tuned for that and Carol, thank you so much.
Carol Barrett: Thank you.
Jeff Dickey: Thank you, so next week we’re not doing a show. Niki and I are both probably on a plane, so just listen to the last … There’s 20 new mini podcasts in your feed, sorry for cluttering everyone’s podcast feed. Josh McKenty is going to be on in the next week or so, which will be interesting to hear his point of view. Stay tuned to that and keep the comments coming.
Niki Acosta: If you’re a user, we’d love to hear from you. Just ping Jeff or me on Twitter or find us somehow. We would love to have more users on the show. All right, everybody say bye.
Jeff Dickey: Bye, everyone.
Carol Barrett: Bye-bye.
Jeff Dickey: All right, we’re live everyone. Hi, I’m Jeff Dickey from Redapt.
Niki Acosta: I’m Niki Acosta from Cisco, and we have an awesome guest, another awesome woman in tech so I’m super thrilled to have Carol Barrett with us today. Carol, introduce yourself.
Carol Barrett: Hi Niki, Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me here today. My name’s Carol Barrett, I’m with Intel Corporation and I work inside of our open source technologies center specifically on open source software for the data center, which puts OpenStack front and center for me.
Niki Acosta: Fantastic. We typically like to introduce our guests and always ask how you got into tech.
Carol Barrett: It was sort of a last minute call for me as I was getting out of high school. I’d always been really strong in math and was looking at different career options. Then my senior year in high school I needed to go ahead and fill out some electives, and they had one on, I think it was computer programming basics. It was a little Honeywell system, a 2100A, and you walk into the room and it filled the entire room. I know I’m dating myself. We actually had paper tape that we would use to go ahead and create our hello world programs on and then put it through the system to actually load it up and make it run. I thought it was just absolutely fascinating. I really appreciated the structure and the logic around it and the way it played with my math background.
Then I started looking for colleges that had computer science or computer technology or computer engineering programs, and I eventually went to Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, which was one of the ones that was sort of leading in the development of programs like that in the late ’70s, early ’80s at that point in time. I didn’t really know what I would do with that and going through the first couple of years of school, it was just all the basics. I still really didn’t know what I would do with it as a career or how it would manifest itself out in the world. Then I went and did a co-op for 6 months with General Dynamics, the electric boat division in Groton, Connecticut. I worked on weapons systems on the USS Ohio, the first trident class submarines. That really gave me a strong sense of, “Okay, there’s a big world out there of ways you can use computer technology,” and that I could start to really identify usages and application areas a lot better after I had that experience.
I continued to become more and more fascinated by it and eventually when I did graduate, I started working in embedded systems because I really found that that interaction of software and hardware that would instantaneously make something happen, was really exciting. I developed all types of different instrumentation and hardware development devices for a long time before I actually moved further down into end user type of software applications. It just amazes me as I look back now on how mainstream technology has really become. It just always, always amazes me and delights me quite honestly because I could never imagine it when I started in technology 30 plus years ago that it would get this far.
Niki Acosta: Speaking of 30 plus years ago, I can’t imagine at that time, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but that the number of men versus women in college period was much higher than it is now. Women are more dominant at this time, but I suspect that there were very, very few women in that program. What was that like?
Carol Barrett: I think it was probably even accentuated because where I went to was a school that was really primarily for engineers of all different flavors. That was going to reduce the number of women that were going to be there anyhow, besides being in just computers alone. It was interesting and at first, it was intimidating. I’d say actually through most of college it continued to be a challenge to still be willing to give my thoughts voice and speak out in classes and in small teams where I would be the only woman in there. To go ahead and say, “Well, I think we ought to do things differently.” When I got out into more of the professional world, I actually discovered that being the only woman in the world was my competitive advantage, because I thought differently than the majority of the other people in the room.
I had a different viewpoint that was unique and that if I had the courage to go ahead and speak up and express it, that people would generally be open to hearing it and it would cause them to think. Then that whole process of merging the different viewpoints so a better overall analysis or design emerged, really came to be. I would think of it that way when I would go into a session where I knew I was going to be the only woman. It’s like, “Okay, that’s my competitive advantage. How am I going to go ahead and use that to contribute something to the meeting that I was getting ready for?” That was a learning point for me, was discovering that competitive advantage piece.
Niki Acosta: That’s awesome. Taking something that could be maybe a little intimidating and turning it into something that’s advantageous. That’s really cool. Carol, you’ve been doing a lot of work with the product working group and the Enterprise working group, and just before the show you talked about how those two things dovetailed together. For those of you who are watching the live video of this, Carol wanted to share a couple slides. If you’re just listening in we’ll do our best here to kind of explain as we go through these slides since you obviously won’t be able to see them. We will make those slides available for viewing and we’ll post those through the Twitter account, through the YouTube video, and through the blog once we get the blog posted with the transcripts of this. Carol, I’ll turn it over to you to take us through the product working group overview and talk about the good work that you and many other people from many companies are doing to drive OpenStack forward.
Carol Barrett: That’s great, that’s a great topic actually. I’m going to start with the last piece, which is who are the folks that are involved. What you’re looking at here is just a representative sample. It has obviously, Intel’s involved, but we have folks from Cisco and Rackspace and Mirantis and Red Hat, and Dell, and VMware, and EMC, and just a really large group of folks have come together. The focus around the product work group is looking to actually be a place for aggregation for the different use cases, sometimes we call them, requirements sometimes we call them. It really represents the needs of different markets or users that they have for being able to go ahead and deploy OpenStack in their environment. Whether it’s Enterprise, whether it’s a high performance computing installation, whether it’s a Cloud service provider, any of those.
Really looking to be that place where we can bring all that information together, identify the commonalities across those needs, and then be able to provide that information into the technical community. Whether it’s the project team leads, or the developers, or the technical committee quite honestly, to be able to bring more information ideally in some type of a ordered format as another input into the design summits, and the specification of what will be included in the different releases of OpenStack. The goal there is to make sure that all of the development resources that are going into OpenStack have visibility and or are working on the features and function requests that are most important and will help us to increase the adoption and deployment of OpenStack throughout the community. We’ll get more feedback and we can continue to really grow and have a vibrant ecosystem.
What we’ve done today is, in preparation for the summit, we really worked on two things. One was, “How can we put together a starting point for the roadmap?” Looking to be able to publish out a multi-release roadmap that would be able to communicate outside to operators and users of what they directionally can expect in the upcoming releases of OpenStack. Then inward to the community to be able to be a tool for detailed tracking of where we are or in implementing these capabilities. I think one key point of that is, a lot of these capabilities are cross-project. I think more and more we’re seeing inside the community that the capabilities that users and operators want do indeed cross projects. That’s a complicated management and coordination process inside of OpenStack. It’s tough inside of most companies I think actually, that are building up complex software solutions like in OpenStack.
Certainly inside of our community it’s a challenge and I think that that’s an area that the product work group is really looking to provide support to the PTLs and the development teams, so that we can go ahead and have a better visibility on the cross project activities and where we stand with them, and how we keep them aligned so that the resources invested in each of the projects result in a meaningful increment in the capabilities and functionality around OpenStack. We put together three different views of the roadmap and this would be one of the things that would be really interesting to get more feedback on from folks who are either watching or listening to the podcast. The first view is really high level. We call it the 30,000 foot view and it really talks about the themes that are the focus areas for the different projects inside of OpenStack. As we looked at what was planned, this started before Kilo was out, so Kilo, Liberty, and then the end release.
Really we saw a strong grouping around scalability, resiliency, manageability, modularity, and then new functions coming into the projects. We would be able to go ahead and look at this, and I’m going to put it in presentation mode, and by looking at it we could see certain trends emerge around different releases. We could see a strong focus in scalability across Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, some of our more mature projects inside of the community. We could go ahead and see for other projects that there was a strong focus on new functionality inside of the Kilo release as well. It allows us to see at a pretty high level the trends of the different projects.
Niki Acosta: How are you finding those trends? Is it through co-contributions or is it through just anecdotal collection of data?
Carol Barrett: We sort of do a combination. We would go ahead and look at all the available data that we could find from all the different projects in there. Blueprint repositories and in-spec repositories, and then from listening in on different IRC meetings that would go on. Then we actually did a divide and conquer within the product work group to actually meet and have a conversation in whatever form, with all of the PTLs. To go ahead and confirm what we had heard, see if there was anything that we had missed, and get their thoughts also on Liberty and at that point in time because it’s hard to find a lot of information in the repositories that go that far out today. We did it in multiple ways and we got just really outstanding support from all of the PTLs in talking with us and sharing their thoughts and visions, and where they thought their teams wanted to go. Even equally important I think, is how can the product work group help them? Right? What can we do to make their jobs easier, make the work for their teams more clear, and easier for them to go ahead and move forward and coordinate with the other projects?
Jeff Dickey: It seems like this is almost a grading system for it. Has there been any push back?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, surprisingly there hasn’t been any. We all were very tentative quite honestly, when we started on the work of this work group, sort of trying to bring some type of input into the planning process that would be more structured and coordinated. We were concerned that that would be perceived as trying to be overly influential or try and dictate directions. What we’ve heard from all of the PTLs, I think I can safely say, is that they welcomed the input. Being able to get more input from end users and marketplaces in a consistent form, and from one central location actually will make it a lot easier for them to understand it, internalize it, and then map it to what they’re doing or what they may consider doing as they go through the design summits. That was really heartening and really encouraging for everybody in the work group, and really put a lot of energy behind the activities that the team was doing.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, and under manageability, is that the upgradeability piece?
Carol Barrett: Yes. I put upgrades in there as well as other types of basic capabilities interacting with the modules as well. Modularity generally is an internally focused theme, that is what we see. In the case of Neutron, it’s the modularization of Neutron, we see there’d be a similar type of thing you’d see around Nova, breaking it out into different pieces so that it becomes more manageable from a project point of view and from a reviewer point of view as well.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it looks fantastic.
Carol Barrett: [Crosstalk 00:15:23] interesting to see it all come together. Then we actually took it down another layer and where on the 30,000 foot view you can see all the projects on one slide, here we actually broke it into three different slides covering five projects per. What you start to look at here is more, instead of a trend you start to look at it more from a release by release point of view. What is Kilo shaping up for across these five projects? What is Liberty shaping up for and what is the M release shaping up for? Here we start to get a different view and a different type of takeaway from looking at this information on a slide. We found that some people thought that this would help them to figure out how they would stage their deployment or how they would go ahead and stage their application onboarding onto their OpenStack deployment by being able to look at it from this view. Then we provided one more view, which was what we called the 30 foot view which is a project by project basis providing more detail of what specifically would be implemented in that project.
I think from a developer point of view that this was one of the ones that was most important because it helped them to see the collaboration points they had across projects, and where they could get involved based upon their areas of expertise. I think maybe the other slide, just to talk a little bit about it is, as being the point of aggregation for requirements, or input, or use cases. This is a slide that actually was first drafted by Tim Bell, who leads the user committee. What we’re really trying to show is how all of the different elements of the community can come together, both from teams that are looking around specific marketplaces like Telco and Enterprise, or whether it’s working groups inside the community who are looking to build with certain capabilities like standard longing or ops tools or monitoring. How these different funnels of work can come together and allow us to be able to look across then these different requirements and be able to feed that as sort of a one voice if you will, or one set of information that’s unified into the development organization. This is the larger view from a community point of view and how we could all work together.
Niki Acosta: It sounds like you guys are just creating a really good feedback loop. Is that accurate and even diving into specific use cases and maybe verticals, to streamline development so that it’s a little more focused. That’s great for everyone I think.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I think being able to have information from the folks who are actually trying to use OpenStack and then about what they need. What are they trying to do with that full contextual information, I think that just makes it a lot easier for the developers to be able to really understand what does that mean in OpenStack? What do I really need to put in place because they have that full rich description and ideally, could even go back to that where was the source of the use case for more discussion, and maybe even being able to bounce ideas off of them. If we implemented it this way, is that going to meet your needs?
Maybe they’re some of the things that didn’t come in in the use case that are other requirements that wouldn’t get met from that approach. Being able to bring that information in, I think allows the developers to make better decisions and to have a better design. I think all of that just leads to faster innovation, more capabilities coming out to the market that are more usable just right out of the gate by the developers. I think it’s going to be a collaboration of taking that input and figuring out how do we capture it in a way that it’s actionable by the developers? How do we provide more input to that process so that they can have a sense of relative priorities ideally around these capabilities.
Niki Acosta: I really think this is the right approach and I say that because you have feedback from developers, you have feedback from users, you have feedback from operators, and you’re getting end user feedback ultimately back through the loop because I think, every company out there who’s running or offering OpenStack as a vendor definitely feels the demand coming from their customers in terms of what they need or what they want to see, depending on their use case. This seems like a really good way to organize all of that and provide direction. I commend you and all the great folks working on the product working group. It’s really cool that Intel lets you have the freedom to go and do this, to better OpenStack. I think that’s really awesome.
Carol Barrett: Thanks. There’s a lot of great people who are really backing and causing the product work group to move forward. I think that notable mentions on that are really around Sean Roberts, and Rob Hirschfield, and Alison from HP who started the original conversation about the hidden influencers. The product managers inside of most of the companies that contribute to OpenStack who are defining priorities and have strategies and roadmaps for their teams. The conversation of how do we get those to be more visible and how do we drive some type of alignment around those so that the community can actually work more collaboratively and more in the open?
A large part of the folks who are participating inside of the product work group are those type of folks like me, who go ahead and define road maps for Intel developers who are contributing to OpenStack around priorities. Our priorities for Intel as well as the other product managers, come from the customers we’re looking to serve. By going ahead and all of us talking about that in the open, I think that the real advantages to the project technical leads, which is being able to align development resources to a capability for a release, so that there’s more confidence that the implementation’s going to happen in the time frame that the PTL is expecting it to happen, because the resources are really committed to it.
Niki Acosta: If someone out there is listening and they want to get involved in the product work group or follow along what’s happening, what is the best way for them to do that?
Carol Barrett: Go up to OpenStack.org and go ahead and search for product work group and you’ll find our Wiki page. You can go ahead and sign up to our mail list from there as well where we go ahead and post all about the meetings as well as some of our different work items through the mail group. We meet every other week, it’s on Wednesdays at 4:00 Pacific and it’s IRC pound OpenStack meeting. Come on in and join us there. You can also go ahead and find the link to all the previous meeting logs and information as well off the Wiki site.
Niki Acosta: You all met in Vancouver as well, correct? Were any of those sessions recorded?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I think two of them were. There was one that was a glimpse of the OpenStack road map and then the other one was the state of product management. I think both of those were recorded and should be available off of OpenStack.org.
Niki Acosta: Then there are off cycle meetings maybe? I heard of a meeting that took place in California, some kind of product summit if you will.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, we did have basically a mid cycle meet up during the Kilo development cycle. That was hosted at VMware site. We’re talking about and trying to figure out when we want to do a mid cycle during the Liberty development. Because we’ve continued to learn more and more, we’re now thinking that we want to try and co-locate our mid cycle meet up potentially with the ops mid cycle meet up, so that we can continue the cycle with the feedback and use case development, and aligning on priorities. Potentially be able to go ahead and align it with some of the other working groups, whether it’s the Enterprise work group or the Telco work group’s going to have a mid cycle meet up. See if there’s an opportunity to try and align with some of those folks who really are collaborators in the community for bringing about use cases and creating a road map for OpenStack.
Niki Acosta: Aside from having an excuse to going to California, I’m tempted to show up. It sounds like a really cool thing, especially if you can co-locate with operators and with the product managers and other folks doing the work. It’s interesting to note too, because I had a panel with some of the folks on the product working group, [Shamel 00:25:01], and Jim [Hasselmeier 00:25:01], and some folks from EMC, and Andre from Blue Box. It’s amazing to see the different perspectives that come through and hear about the different use cases, and also hear about customer requirements. It varies so widely and to be able to have the ability to focus on something that will have the most impact, I think is only going to accelerate OpenStack as a whole, which is good for everybody.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I agree with you. I think by accelerating the capabilities inside of OpenStack it allows us to accelerate the deployments, which accelerates the ecosystem, and all of that really just becomes a reinforcing cycle for innovation across all of the products and all of the markets for everybody inside of the community.
Niki Acosta: That was the product working group. Did you want to talk a little bit about the Enterprise working group and the work that’s happening there?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I’d like to. The Enterprise work group was formed I guess, coming up on about 2 years ago now. It was really focused on identifying and removing the barriers for Enterprise IT managers to deploy OpenStack today. Not what they would need in 6 months or 12 months, but why couldn’t they drive it and deploy it today? A large group of folks from across the community came together and focused on this area. We went ahead and broke into a series of sub teams where we focused on where we could just segment and start to get bite-sized pieces that we could understand, put action plans around, and then go ahead and execute to. It’s really been great to see everybody come together and really make progress. At this point in time I think we’ve got 4 teams that are formed, and it’s sort of morphed. After each summit we would look at, “Okay, we made this progress, we have more Enterprises deploying. What are the barriers today to the folks who are not deploying?” Then we would align the work group to those different types of challenges.
Today we focus around deployment, so what are the challenges to onboarding traditional Enterprise work loads into the Cloud, into OpenStack specifically? We have a business and marketing team that’s been doing a lot of work around the perceptual barriers or the awareness barriers to Enterprise IT deployment. Then we’ve just combined a couple of teams to create a top 5 ISV team. What we hear from Enterprise is, “I have a series of current applications that I use to manage or interact with my current IT installation in the Enterprise. I want to be able to continue to use those as I stand up an OpenStack cloud next to that, but there’s some issue somewhere with it.” Maybe they just don’t know how to do it, maybe there’s actually some gaps in the inter-operability with those applications.
This last team has identified what are the top 5 apps in about 6 different categories, and then are starting to work through the engagement with those ISVs so that they can have inter-operable solutions within OpenStack Cloud, and we can have all the information and documentation for Enterprise IT so that they could stand it up and [inaudible 00:28:30]. Really just trying to knock those barriers down. I think that the Enterprise work group is going to start to dovetail and flow more information into the product work group as we define use cases around each of these different … Whether it’s the inter-operability of an ISV, or whether from a deployment team point of view, it’s rolling upgrades with zero down time, then feed those into the product work group so we can identify those commonality of requirements across other segments like HPC, or Cloud service providers so that as the development community implements these capabilities, that we do it in a way that it serves all of the markets. We can get a capability that allows us to advance the OpenStack deployment much more broadly than just Enterprise.
Niki Acosta: One thing that I’ve been battling, and I’ve certainly felt this at the OpenStack Summit a little bit because one of my panelists was from Sprint. We couldn’t talk about what they were doing other than Rob Lindross from Sprint was on my panel. Why is the Enterprise so reluctant to talk about what they’re doing? I know for a fact that there are many Enterprises that are using OpenStack but we’re not hearing about them. Why do you think that is?
Carol Barrett: I think there’s a couple of reasons, but one of the ones that I hear most frequently is they really are very protective of the resources that they have assembled that are experts in both OpenStack and their infrastructure and their architecture. If they’re too loud and public about what they’re doing, people will come and poach their resources because there’s a need in the marketplace for people who are OpenStack experts. That’s actually one of the top reasons I hear that Enterprises are not willing to be so public about things.
Niki Acosta: I have not heard that, but that makes complete logical sense. Hey, if you want a job just put OpenStack on your LinkedIn right? You will get offers.
Carol Barrett: I don’t know if there was any booth at the OpenStack Summit in the marketplace that did not have a we’re hiring sign up, right? Everybody was.
Niki Acosta: Yeah, the recruiters were definitely there in full force, no doubt.
Carol Barrett: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: Interesting. You said there were two reasons? Did you say there were two reasons?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, well I think there’s multiple. I think that that’s a large one, I think the other one is that competitive advantage or business advantage. I think the way that the companies are deploying it, are providing them some advantages that they don’t necessarily want to signal out to the market yet. Right? It allows them to either deploy things more quickly or to manage more effectively, which is going to allow them to deliver new value out to their customers, and they’re just not really ready to give their competitors more information about how they’re doing it so that they can copy them as well. I think competitive advantage is another big reason that we hear it as well.
Jeff Dickey: We have a hard time getting end users on the show, and most end users want to and they do really want to talk about what they’re doing, but it’s kind of a PR issue. They say, “Yes, I want to do it, let me check,” and then it’s a, “No, I can’t.”
Niki Acosta: Yeah, they get stopped somewhere with their marketing people or their PR people or their legal people more often than not, depending on the size of the customer. We did have Ebay on at the OpenStack summit, which if you guys haven’t gone and looked at that list of podcasts from the OpenStack summit, I recommend checking them out. They’re about 20 to 25 minutes each. Ebay was so awesome and forthcoming about what they were doing. We had another user, Cern, Tim Bell from Cern …
Jeff Dickey: Tim Bell.
Niki Acosta: Was there too and talking about really cool things they’re doing at Cern and upgrades to the Hadron collider and how it’s the coldest place on earth, which is so geeky. Everyone knows that I have love for Tim Bell.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: He’s warned his wife about me since she joined Twitter.
Jeff Dickey: We had Getty Images on too, on those little mini-casts.
Niki Acosta: You had what?
Jeff Dickey: Getty Images.
Niki Acosta: Oh, sweet. Awesome.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, so check that out too.
Niki Acosta: I missed that day. I was riding a bike, sorry.
Jeff Dickey: That’s okay. Scott did a great job, filled in. That was good, and I just listened to the Tim Bell episode yesterday morning on the way to work, because I wasn’t on that one.
Niki Acosta: It’s always a little different without you Jeff. Carol’s laughing at us. Tangent. Go ahead.
Jeff Dickey: Okay. We were just talking a little bit about the conference. Carol, how was the conference for you? Was it good? Was there things that were missed out on? What was our overall impression of the Summit?
Carol Barrett: I thought it was dynamite. Really, it was great to be able to connect with so many folks and to be able to sit down face-to-face and have real hands-on working sessions. Then at the same time, it was great to meet new people who are interested in … Either working on the product work group or in the Enterprise area, and being able to sit down and talk with them as well. I thought all of that went really well. It was interesting, the venue was fabulous right? Love Vancouver, the convention center and all of that was just absolutely a great host spot for everybody. I think one of the challenges, especially coming from Paris, was we had so much room that there were so many parallel sessions that went on in Vancouver that it was really hard to choose where to go. It was neat to see the dynamic in the working groups, where the folks would come together and we would actually figure out a divide and conquer strategy. Especially for the product work group where they wanted to be in a lot of the user committee sessions and the up summit, and then some of the other work groups.
We could go ahead and say, “Okay, you two cover this and you cover this, and we’ll cover that,” and then come back together either through the mail list or on a working session to share what we learned and where we think that there might be some good collaboration and commonality for us. That was one of the challenges, was to deal with all the parallels that was going on there, but the venue and the session and just, I thought the caliber of attendees was really strong. I think that if I think back to Atlanta, where there were a lot of folks who were still there for the first time but were also really trying to get a foundation of understanding of OpenStack, and then you look at Vancouver where there was still lots of first time people but they knew a lot more. The level of knowledge of the people who are coming into the community is much higher than it was in Atlanta. I think that that’s just a great sign for where we’re going. It’s not just people who are considering, it’s people who are seeing that this is a direction for them and they need to really start to get more information and dig in so that they can plan their deployment or the next phase of their deployment. That level of knowledge and engagement was much, much higher.
Jeff Dickey: It was. I was at the booth a little bit. The folks that would come by were actively implementing OpenStack and had it either ready for production or in production. I haven’t been to a summit since Portland, so it was crazy to see like you said, just the maturity and everything. I think what overwhelmed me the most was just the keynote, the size of that space and the people. I came in late so I was in the very back, and just looking at this, you couldn’t even see the stage. It was so huge. It was huge, the [crosstalk 00:36:40].
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I agree. I know there were 6,000 plus people there, is when you walked into the keynote venue.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: I don’t know if it was the weather and the venue or what, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there was a level of excitement and energy that has been missing from the last few summits. Paris was kind of dreary, Hong Kong was kind of dreary, Atlanta was just rainy and muggy and kind of miserable, and hot and sticky. No offense to the Foundation, but it seemed like there was just a lot more happening and like you said, kind of the sense that everyone’s stepped it up a level. It’s always good to see almost a mini-revival after you feel like you’re maybe not moving upward, to refresh and say, “Okay, cool, it’s back on the upward swing.” I think a lot of that just has to do with maturity. I think there were a lot of doubters and a lot of haters and it’s always good to prove those folks wrong considering I’ve invested multiple years into this.
Carol Barrett: Great. I think there was a lot more of that. A lot less doubting and a lot more around inevitability. Yeah, it’s inevitable that these companies are each going to have some degree of an OpenStack cloud setup, and trying to figure out what does that look like? What do I put in it? How do I manage it as part of my overall setup? Yeah, I think that’s a major change.
Niki Acosta: Jeff, do you want to ask a question? I’ve been hogging the mic a little, maybe.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, I just want to hear more. Carol, we were talking before the show, I think you’re our fourth guest from Intel actually, which is kind of surprising. We were talking about Intel’s this very much not a well-known I don’t think, entity as much as you guys contribute. You guys are quietly contributing a lot to OpenStack. Do you want to share some stuff about what you guys are doing or around SAA or any of the pieces? Feel free to talk about anything.
Carol Barrett: Sure. It’s been very much a conscious effort inside of Intel over the last 18 months to 2 years to increase our contributions and the broad base of developers that we have that we can bring to the community. Because it just fits in with out overall strategy of being port of choice, and what that really means in non-Intel speak, is whatever software solution our customers want to run on our products, we want to make sure that it’s available to them and that it provides the best possible experience for them. As our customers started to talk more and more about OpenStack and how that was part of their strategy in the data center, that became more and more important to Intel that we make sure that OpenStack had the capabilities to be able to meet those different market needs, and that it also provided the best benefits on the Intel platforms as well.
It really is a strategy that you see Intel use on everything from laptops or handheld tablet devices, whether it’s Android or working with Microsoft on the Windows platforms, all types of Linux contributions. OpenStack is clearly a big part of our data center strategies and what our customers are telling us they’re going to deploy. Where I am is inside of the software and services group inside of Intel. We’re almost a service organization to the people who actually build the products, what we call platforms, that will ship in the market. In working with our data center group who is the customer for our OpenStack work, understanding exactly what market segments, whether it’s HPC or Enterprise, they see adopting the Cloud and OpenStack more rapidly than others.
What is that drive for requirements around solution stacks, and then specific features? Some care more about scalability like in the Telco space. Some care more about security, when we start to get into the FSI space, making sure that those capabilities are inside of OpenStack so that they can go ahead and deploy it and do what we need to do to go ahead and support them as they do that as well. It’s a really interesting place to be as you look at the community and all the different products that are coming out based upon the OpenStack community development efforts, is that we really want all of them to be successful and we want to make sure that they really take full advantage of our platforms and they have the features and functions needed by the markets to deploy.
Niki Acosta: You supported a lot of the Women in Tech stuff going on at the Summit as well right?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, diversity is a large priority here at Intel. BK, our CEO, made a couple of big announcements earlier in the year at CES about Intel’s investment both within the company to drive a well diversified population at all of the different levels through the company, recognizing that different points of view and conversation around those points of views and experiences are going to yield better solutions, better strategies, better designs, whatever it is. It’s always going to yield a better result, and that we inside of Intel had work that we could do and that we needed to do in order to really get to the level that we want to for diversity. The high tech community in general has work that needs to happen there, and certainly when you look at open source software, there’s some pretty strong data that shows us that our environment or our community is not as diverse as we would want to be.
I was in the OpenStack board meeting on the Sunday before the start of the summit, and I think they were saying of the roughly 6,500 attendees that are coming to the summit, it was just under 10% that were women. That’s a pretty small segment of that community and realizing that we all think differently and together we can do things that are better, we need to figure out how do we beef that section up? How do we enlist more women to come and be active in the community and contribute their technology, their thoughts, their knowledge from markets and solution architecture, so that OpenStack can really be as strong and robust and capable as all the markets that we want to serve need it to be? Intel really took, I thought, a strong step forward to trying to bring together the women in the community and try and figure out, what can we do to change the dynamics? How can we get more women in? What are the barriers? What are the challenges? I think that we’re going to continue to work in that area and I thought it was fabulous that Comcast as the Superuser award winner, donated their 2 all-paid passes and accommodations and all of that, to the Women of OpenStack. I just can’t say enough about what a great thing that was for them to do for the community.
Niki Acosta: Total class act.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, really job well done. I’m sure that they’ll go to women who can help to make a real impact and difference in OpenStack.
Jeff Dickey: We had, was it Murali Sundar
Carol Barrett: Oh yeah, Murali Sundar.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, we’ve had her on the show from Intel. We’ve had a couple folks from Intel. She was great too, but yeah. I didn’t notice it, especially in the sessions that there weren’t very many women at the show.
Carol Barrett: I think it’s an area for us to grow. Honestly, I think it can even start in the entire thinking of how the Foundation stages the conference. We’re still looking for the first woman to do a keynote. Right? That still has not happened yet at an OpenStack summit.
Niki Acosta: I’m crossing my fingers for childcare, so when I go to these fantastic cities I can stay a couple of days and hang out. Just saying, just throwing that out there.
Carol Barrett: I’m sure you’re not the only one that would find that really useful.
Jeff Dickey: I would use that Niki.
Niki Acosta: Would you?
Jeff Dickey: Yes I would.
Niki Acosta: I would too, and I would also appreciate some healthier food options during the booth crawls. Pizza and burgers all the time gets a little old. Just saying.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I thought the Vancouver booth crawl was really just amazing, how just jam packed it was.
Niki Acosta: Oh yeah, you couldn’t walk and I got a little warm in there. I was like, “Man,” people were literally shoulder to shoulder. It was happening.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, it was just amazing what was going on there, to see everybody talking and then seeing the different demos and somebody would go ahead and say, “Well, what about this scenario?” And people would actually try to respond to that by changing the demo or changing some of the configuration and being able to respond to it right there. That was really neat to watch happen.
Niki Acosta: You know what I’m bummed about, is the fact that now that there is such a large number of attendees, that fewer people are giving away good t-shirts. Did anyone else notice that? I was so bummed, so so bummed, and the giveaway this year was a really cool windbreaker and by the time I went to get mine they didn’t have smalls or mediums left, which was a bummer. They were unisex sized so I didn’t actually get something that I think I’ll be able to wear unless I want it hanging down to my knees. That’s all right, there’s always Tokyo.
Carol Barrett: That was a great giveaway though.
Jeff Dickey: A nice jacket, yeah.
Niki Acosta: It was.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, and what it said inside of it when you actually opened it up, there was a sentiment of community and working together. I thought that was just fabulous, really fabulous.
Jeff Dickey: My favorite swag was the Intel sweatshirt. Inside the sweatshirt it said, Intel inside.
Niki Acosta: No way.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it’s a super comfy sweatshirt. It said OpenStack on it.
Carol Barrett: I thought that HP’s, their sweatshirt, the jacket that they did and then all of the badges for each of the different projects. I thought those were great, yeah.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Carol Barrett: Such a great [sat 00:48:22] and they were just so colorful and just really cute too. I thought that was a great giveaway.
Niki Acosta: Always fun going to these, you never know what to expect until you get there. It seems like they just keep getting better because everyone’s trying to outdo each other. HP’s party was so ridiculous, they had stunt people and you could go and get yourself recorded with a stunt man doing some crazy stunt. It was pretty neat, they had food trucks with hand made ice creams and all kinds of different foods, and HP sure knows how to throw a party that’s for sure.
Carol Barrett: It will be interesting to see how everything transforms as we go to Tokyo, right?
Niki Acosta: Oh, most definitely, most definitely. What are you looking forward to in Tokyo?
Carol Barrett: I think first off, it will be seeing new segments of the OpenStack community show up at the summit. Just like when we saw in Paris, the North America and US percentage went way down and we had a lot more folks from Europe who were there. I’m sure as we go to Japan we’ll go ahead and see the same North America numbers drop down and the Asian numbers climb. I think that that’s going to be great because that will provide us the opportunity to sit down and have face-to-face conversations with folks who we haven’t been able to do that before. All types of new things are going to come out of that. I think we’ll get a different set of end users and operators, and they’re going to have different requirements and different environments that they’re trying to stand up clouds in. That’s going to be really great information for us to get. I love Tokyo, it’s just such a great city and the ways that all the venues and opportunities for being able to throw parties to bring folks together, are really going to be creative I’m sure. Those are the main ones for me.
Niki Acosta: I’m definitely looking forward to it and maybe Jeff and I will not go into this Summit booking 12 podcasts in a row over the course of 6 hours for 2 days. I don’t know what we were thinking. I was pretty waxed after 12 podcasts in a row, but we still had a good time.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it was a rough end of the show for me. I think we did 10 podcasts and then I had to drive home, I was worn out. [crosstalk 00:50:46]
Niki Acosta: You did all the hard work bringing all the equipment into that, so thanks for that Jeff. What’s next for you Carol? What’s going to be going on for you? Any last closing words you want to talk about?
Carol Barrett: Right now it’s all around planning and execution for Tokyo. Whether it’s the product work group who’s looking to go ahead and create the updated roadmap, which will go ahead and take us out through the end release and incorporate all the information from the Liberty design summit. Then starting to put together the use cases to feed into the M design summit, and having conversations with everybody across the community. Then from the Enterprise point of view, executing on the things that we know that we need to deliver from code contributions like rolling upgrade. We have some experiments we’re doing around graffiti and the metadata tagging to support onboarding traditional IT work loads into the Cloud, and being able to prove out those solutions for capabilities that are already inside of OpenStack. Then continuing to develop more reference architectures and white papers and how-to guides with end users and ISVs. Lots to get done between here and Tokyo. As usual it will go by in a blink of an eye, these next 5 or 6 months. These cycles are just incredibly quick.
Niki Acosta: I know, I feel like call for papers is about to open or something already. Growing and it’s like, “Man, is it time to write another abstract? Good night. What am I going to talk about this time?”
Carol Barrett: Yeah, but there’s always lots to talk about. That is the good news here.
Niki Acosta: We look forward to seeing you for sure, and sorry I didn’t get to meet you in real life. Hopefully I’ll get to catch up with you in Tokyo. You’ve been an absolute pleasure to have on the show, just so knowledgeable and we really appreciate the work you’re doing with the product working group and Enterprise working group and all the good stuff that Intel’s doing with women in tech and all that stuff. We typically like to end the podcast by asking what two guests you would like to see on the show.
Carol Barrett: I think the two that come to mind are first, it would be John Garbutt because I’m really interested as the new Nova PTL, to understand what his vision is around Nova and what does he see being a direction for modularity, and how do you either rework some of the elements around Nova like the number of reviewers and how many folks can really commit time to that, versus breaking Nova into smaller pieces so that the rate of innovation continues to be as high as we need. Nova is such an important project for almost every service to grow and become more capable, that I’d like to know his view coming into that role. How do you go ahead and allow Nova to become really the thing that fuels the innovation across all of the services?
Then I think the other one would be Kyle Mestery to understand, what’s the path between Neutron and Nova networks? How do we get to one solution inside of a community that everybody can be confident in and really start to deploy widely, and be able to get all of our developers so that we’re developing just one capability instead of splitting some of our development resources across a couple of capabilities that are somewhat similar. Those would be the two that I’d be most interested in, thinking about it from my Enterprise point of view or from a product work group point of view.
Niki Acosta: Great recommendations.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: We need to get on that, Jeff.
Jeff Dickey: I will.
Niki Acosta: Yes. Anything else, Jeff?
Jeff Dickey: No. Carol, thank you so much for being on the show and thanks for everything you’ve done for OpenStack and the Foundation, and all the stuff that you’ve done. It’s been great work.
Carol Barrett: I appreciate that, and thanks for having me on here today. It was just great to meet you guys and get a chance to hopefully meet some other folks in the community as a result of talking more about the product work group and the Enterprise work group too.
Niki Acosta: Carol’s going to send us the latest version of the deck, yes? Or a link to it on slide show and we’ll make sure to post that when we post the video here on YouTube. We’ll drop it in the comments there, we’ll get transcripts and drop it in a blog as well. Stay tuned for that and Carol, thank you so much.
Carol Barrett: Thank you.
Jeff Dickey: Thank you, so next week we’re not doing a show. Niki and I are both probably on a plane, so just listen to the last … There’s 20 new mini podcasts in your feed, sorry for cluttering everyone’s podcast feed. Josh McKenty is going to be on in the next week or so, which will be interesting to hear his point of view. Stay tuned to that and keep the comments coming.
Niki Acosta: If you’re a user, we’d love to hear from you. Just ping Jeff or me on Twitter or find us somehow. We would love to have more users on the show. All right, everybody say bye.
Jeff Dickey: Bye, everyone.
Carol Barrett: Bye-bye.
To see the full transcript of this podcast, click on Read More below
Jeff Dickey: All right, we’re live everyone. Hi, I’m Jeff Dickey from Redapt.
Niki Acosta: I’m Niki Acosta from Cisco, and we have an awesome guest, another awesome woman in tech so I’m super thrilled to have Carol Barrett with us today. Carol, introduce yourself.
Carol Barrett: Hi Niki, Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me here today. My name’s Carol Barrett, I’m with Intel Corporation and I work inside of our open source technologies center specifically on open source software for the data center, which puts OpenStack front and center for me.
Niki Acosta: Fantastic. We typically like to introduce our guests and always ask how you got into tech.
Carol Barrett: It was sort of a last minute call for me as I was getting out of high school. I’d always been really strong in math and was looking at different career options. Then my senior year in high school I needed to go ahead and fill out some electives, and they had one on, I think it was computer programming basics. It was a little Honeywell system, a 2100A, and you walk into the room and it filled the entire room. I know I’m dating myself. We actually had paper tape that we would use to go ahead and create our hello world programs on and then put it through the system to actually load it up and make it run. I thought it was just absolutely fascinating. I really appreciated the structure and the logic around it and the way it played with my math background.
Then I started looking for colleges that had computer science or computer technology or computer engineering programs, and I eventually went to Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, which was one of the ones that was sort of leading in the development of programs like that in the late ’70s, early ’80s at that point in time. I didn’t really know what I would do with that and going through the first couple of years of school, it was just all the basics. I still really didn’t know what I would do with it as a career or how it would manifest itself out in the world. Then I went and did a co-op for 6 months with General Dynamics, the electric boat division in Groton, Connecticut. I worked on weapons systems on the USS Ohio, the first trident class submarines. That really gave me a strong sense of, “Okay, there’s a big world out there of ways you can use computer technology,” and that I could start to really identify usages and application areas a lot better after I had that experience.
I continued to become more and more fascinated by it and eventually when I did graduate, I started working in embedded systems because I really found that that interaction of software and hardware that would instantaneously make something happen, was really exciting. I developed all types of different instrumentation and hardware development devices for a long time before I actually moved further down into end user type of software applications. It just amazes me as I look back now on how mainstream technology has really become. It just always, always amazes me and delights me quite honestly because I could never imagine it when I started in technology 30 plus years ago that it would get this far.
Niki Acosta: Speaking of 30 plus years ago, I can’t imagine at that time, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but that the number of men versus women in college period was much higher than it is now. Women are more dominant at this time, but I suspect that there were very, very few women in that program. What was that like?
Carol Barrett: I think it was probably even accentuated because where I went to was a school that was really primarily for engineers of all different flavors. That was going to reduce the number of women that were going to be there anyhow, besides being in just computers alone. It was interesting and at first, it was intimidating. I’d say actually through most of college it continued to be a challenge to still be willing to give my thoughts voice and speak out in classes and in small teams where I would be the only woman in there. To go ahead and say, “Well, I think we ought to do things differently.” When I got out into more of the professional world, I actually discovered that being the only woman in the world was my competitive advantage, because I thought differently than the majority of the other people in the room.
I had a different viewpoint that was unique and that if I had the courage to go ahead and speak up and express it, that people would generally be open to hearing it and it would cause them to think. Then that whole process of merging the different viewpoints so a better overall analysis or design emerged, really came to be. I would think of it that way when I would go into a session where I knew I was going to be the only woman. It’s like, “Okay, that’s my competitive advantage. How am I going to go ahead and use that to contribute something to the meeting that I was getting ready for?” That was a learning point for me, was discovering that competitive advantage piece.
Niki Acosta: That’s awesome. Taking something that could be maybe a little intimidating and turning it into something that’s advantageous. That’s really cool. Carol, you’ve been doing a lot of work with the product working group and the Enterprise working group, and just before the show you talked about how those two things dovetailed together. For those of you who are watching the live video of this, Carol wanted to share a couple slides. If you’re just listening in we’ll do our best here to kind of explain as we go through these slides since you obviously won’t be able to see them. We will make those slides available for viewing and we’ll post those through the Twitter account, through the YouTube video, and through the blog once we get the blog posted with the transcripts of this. Carol, I’ll turn it over to you to take us through the product working group overview and talk about the good work that you and many other people from many companies are doing to drive OpenStack forward.
Carol Barrett: That’s great, that’s a great topic actually. I’m going to start with the last piece, which is who are the folks that are involved. What you’re looking at here is just a representative sample. It has obviously, Intel’s involved, but we have folks from Cisco and Rackspace and Mirantis and Red Hat, and Dell, and VMware, and EMC, and just a really large group of folks have come together. The focus around the product work group is looking to actually be a place for aggregation for the different use cases, sometimes we call them, requirements sometimes we call them. It really represents the needs of different markets or users that they have for being able to go ahead and deploy OpenStack in their environment. Whether it’s Enterprise, whether it’s a high performance computing installation, whether it’s a Cloud service provider, any of those.
Really looking to be that place where we can bring all that information together, identify the commonalities across those needs, and then be able to provide that information into the technical community. Whether it’s the project team leads, or the developers, or the technical committee quite honestly, to be able to bring more information ideally in some type of a ordered format as another input into the design summits, and the specification of what will be included in the different releases of OpenStack. The goal there is to make sure that all of the development resources that are going into OpenStack have visibility and or are working on the features and function requests that are most important and will help us to increase the adoption and deployment of OpenStack throughout the community. We’ll get more feedback and we can continue to really grow and have a vibrant ecosystem.
What we’ve done today is, in preparation for the summit, we really worked on two things. One was, “How can we put together a starting point for the roadmap?” Looking to be able to publish out a multi-release roadmap that would be able to communicate outside to operators and users of what they directionally can expect in the upcoming releases of OpenStack. Then inward to the community to be able to be a tool for detailed tracking of where we are or in implementing these capabilities. I think one key point of that is, a lot of these capabilities are cross-project. I think more and more we’re seeing inside the community that the capabilities that users and operators want do indeed cross projects. That’s a complicated management and coordination process inside of OpenStack. It’s tough inside of most companies I think actually, that are building up complex software solutions like in OpenStack.
Certainly inside of our community it’s a challenge and I think that that’s an area that the product work group is really looking to provide support to the PTLs and the development teams, so that we can go ahead and have a better visibility on the cross project activities and where we stand with them, and how we keep them aligned so that the resources invested in each of the projects result in a meaningful increment in the capabilities and functionality around OpenStack. We put together three different views of the roadmap and this would be one of the things that would be really interesting to get more feedback on from folks who are either watching or listening to the podcast. The first view is really high level. We call it the 30,000 foot view and it really talks about the themes that are the focus areas for the different projects inside of OpenStack. As we looked at what was planned, this started before Kilo was out, so Kilo, Liberty, and then the end release.
Really we saw a strong grouping around scalability, resiliency, manageability, modularity, and then new functions coming into the projects. We would be able to go ahead and look at this, and I’m going to put it in presentation mode, and by looking at it we could see certain trends emerge around different releases. We could see a strong focus in scalability across Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, some of our more mature projects inside of the community. We could go ahead and see for other projects that there was a strong focus on new functionality inside of the Kilo release as well. It allows us to see at a pretty high level the trends of the different projects.
Niki Acosta: How are you finding those trends? Is it through co-contributions or is it through just anecdotal collection of data?
Carol Barrett: We sort of do a combination. We would go ahead and look at all the available data that we could find from all the different projects in there. Blueprint repositories and in-spec repositories, and then from listening in on different IRC meetings that would go on. Then we actually did a divide and conquer within the product work group to actually meet and have a conversation in whatever form, with all of the PTLs. To go ahead and confirm what we had heard, see if there was anything that we had missed, and get their thoughts also on Liberty and at that point in time because it’s hard to find a lot of information in the repositories that go that far out today. We did it in multiple ways and we got just really outstanding support from all of the PTLs in talking with us and sharing their thoughts and visions, and where they thought their teams wanted to go. Even equally important I think, is how can the product work group help them? Right? What can we do to make their jobs easier, make the work for their teams more clear, and easier for them to go ahead and move forward and coordinate with the other projects?
Jeff Dickey: It seems like this is almost a grading system for it. Has there been any push back?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, surprisingly there hasn’t been any. We all were very tentative quite honestly, when we started on the work of this work group, sort of trying to bring some type of input into the planning process that would be more structured and coordinated. We were concerned that that would be perceived as trying to be overly influential or try and dictate directions. What we’ve heard from all of the PTLs, I think I can safely say, is that they welcomed the input. Being able to get more input from end users and marketplaces in a consistent form, and from one central location actually will make it a lot easier for them to understand it, internalize it, and then map it to what they’re doing or what they may consider doing as they go through the design summits. That was really heartening and really encouraging for everybody in the work group, and really put a lot of energy behind the activities that the team was doing.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, and under manageability, is that the upgradeability piece?
Carol Barrett: Yes. I put upgrades in there as well as other types of basic capabilities interacting with the modules as well. Modularity generally is an internally focused theme, that is what we see. In the case of Neutron, it’s the modularization of Neutron, we see there’d be a similar type of thing you’d see around Nova, breaking it out into different pieces so that it becomes more manageable from a project point of view and from a reviewer point of view as well.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it looks fantastic.
Carol Barrett: [Crosstalk 00:15:23] interesting to see it all come together. Then we actually took it down another layer and where on the 30,000 foot view you can see all the projects on one slide, here we actually broke it into three different slides covering five projects per. What you start to look at here is more, instead of a trend you start to look at it more from a release by release point of view. What is Kilo shaping up for across these five projects? What is Liberty shaping up for and what is the M release shaping up for? Here we start to get a different view and a different type of takeaway from looking at this information on a slide. We found that some people thought that this would help them to figure out how they would stage their deployment or how they would go ahead and stage their application onboarding onto their OpenStack deployment by being able to look at it from this view. Then we provided one more view, which was what we called the 30 foot view which is a project by project basis providing more detail of what specifically would be implemented in that project.
I think from a developer point of view that this was one of the ones that was most important because it helped them to see the collaboration points they had across projects, and where they could get involved based upon their areas of expertise. I think maybe the other slide, just to talk a little bit about it is, as being the point of aggregation for requirements, or input, or use cases. This is a slide that actually was first drafted by Tim Bell, who leads the user committee. What we’re really trying to show is how all of the different elements of the community can come together, both from teams that are looking around specific marketplaces like Telco and Enterprise, or whether it’s working groups inside the community who are looking to build with certain capabilities like standard longing or ops tools or monitoring. How these different funnels of work can come together and allow us to be able to look across then these different requirements and be able to feed that as sort of a one voice if you will, or one set of information that’s unified into the development organization. This is the larger view from a community point of view and how we could all work together.
Niki Acosta: It sounds like you guys are just creating a really good feedback loop. Is that accurate and even diving into specific use cases and maybe verticals, to streamline development so that it’s a little more focused. That’s great for everyone I think.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I think being able to have information from the folks who are actually trying to use OpenStack and then about what they need. What are they trying to do with that full contextual information, I think that just makes it a lot easier for the developers to be able to really understand what does that mean in OpenStack? What do I really need to put in place because they have that full rich description and ideally, could even go back to that where was the source of the use case for more discussion, and maybe even being able to bounce ideas off of them. If we implemented it this way, is that going to meet your needs?
Maybe they’re some of the things that didn’t come in in the use case that are other requirements that wouldn’t get met from that approach. Being able to bring that information in, I think allows the developers to make better decisions and to have a better design. I think all of that just leads to faster innovation, more capabilities coming out to the market that are more usable just right out of the gate by the developers. I think it’s going to be a collaboration of taking that input and figuring out how do we capture it in a way that it’s actionable by the developers? How do we provide more input to that process so that they can have a sense of relative priorities ideally around these capabilities.
Niki Acosta: I really think this is the right approach and I say that because you have feedback from developers, you have feedback from users, you have feedback from operators, and you’re getting end user feedback ultimately back through the loop because I think, every company out there who’s running or offering OpenStack as a vendor definitely feels the demand coming from their customers in terms of what they need or what they want to see, depending on their use case. This seems like a really good way to organize all of that and provide direction. I commend you and all the great folks working on the product working group. It’s really cool that Intel lets you have the freedom to go and do this, to better OpenStack. I think that’s really awesome.
Carol Barrett: Thanks. There’s a lot of great people who are really backing and causing the product work group to move forward. I think that notable mentions on that are really around Sean Roberts, and Rob Hirschfield, and Alison from HP who started the original conversation about the hidden influencers. The product managers inside of most of the companies that contribute to OpenStack who are defining priorities and have strategies and roadmaps for their teams. The conversation of how do we get those to be more visible and how do we drive some type of alignment around those so that the community can actually work more collaboratively and more in the open?
A large part of the folks who are participating inside of the product work group are those type of folks like me, who go ahead and define road maps for Intel developers who are contributing to OpenStack around priorities. Our priorities for Intel as well as the other product managers, come from the customers we’re looking to serve. By going ahead and all of us talking about that in the open, I think that the real advantages to the project technical leads, which is being able to align development resources to a capability for a release, so that there’s more confidence that the implementation’s going to happen in the time frame that the PTL is expecting it to happen, because the resources are really committed to it.
Niki Acosta: If someone out there is listening and they want to get involved in the product work group or follow along what’s happening, what is the best way for them to do that?
Carol Barrett: Go up to OpenStack.org and go ahead and search for product work group and you’ll find our Wiki page. You can go ahead and sign up to our mail list from there as well where we go ahead and post all about the meetings as well as some of our different work items through the mail group. We meet every other week, it’s on Wednesdays at 4:00 Pacific and it’s IRC pound OpenStack meeting. Come on in and join us there. You can also go ahead and find the link to all the previous meeting logs and information as well off the Wiki site.
Niki Acosta: You all met in Vancouver as well, correct? Were any of those sessions recorded?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I think two of them were. There was one that was a glimpse of the OpenStack road map and then the other one was the state of product management. I think both of those were recorded and should be available off of OpenStack.org.
Niki Acosta: Then there are off cycle meetings maybe? I heard of a meeting that took place in California, some kind of product summit if you will.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, we did have basically a mid cycle meet up during the Kilo development cycle. That was hosted at VMware site. We’re talking about and trying to figure out when we want to do a mid cycle during the Liberty development. Because we’ve continued to learn more and more, we’re now thinking that we want to try and co-locate our mid cycle meet up potentially with the ops mid cycle meet up, so that we can continue the cycle with the feedback and use case development, and aligning on priorities. Potentially be able to go ahead and align it with some of the other working groups, whether it’s the Enterprise work group or the Telco work group’s going to have a mid cycle meet up. See if there’s an opportunity to try and align with some of those folks who really are collaborators in the community for bringing about use cases and creating a road map for OpenStack.
Niki Acosta: Aside from having an excuse to going to California, I’m tempted to show up. It sounds like a really cool thing, especially if you can co-locate with operators and with the product managers and other folks doing the work. It’s interesting to note too, because I had a panel with some of the folks on the product working group, [Shamel 00:25:01], and Jim [Hasselmeier 00:25:01], and some folks from EMC, and Andre from Blue Box. It’s amazing to see the different perspectives that come through and hear about the different use cases, and also hear about customer requirements. It varies so widely and to be able to have the ability to focus on something that will have the most impact, I think is only going to accelerate OpenStack as a whole, which is good for everybody.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I agree with you. I think by accelerating the capabilities inside of OpenStack it allows us to accelerate the deployments, which accelerates the ecosystem, and all of that really just becomes a reinforcing cycle for innovation across all of the products and all of the markets for everybody inside of the community.
Niki Acosta: That was the product working group. Did you want to talk a little bit about the Enterprise working group and the work that’s happening there?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I’d like to. The Enterprise work group was formed I guess, coming up on about 2 years ago now. It was really focused on identifying and removing the barriers for Enterprise IT managers to deploy OpenStack today. Not what they would need in 6 months or 12 months, but why couldn’t they drive it and deploy it today? A large group of folks from across the community came together and focused on this area. We went ahead and broke into a series of sub teams where we focused on where we could just segment and start to get bite-sized pieces that we could understand, put action plans around, and then go ahead and execute to. It’s really been great to see everybody come together and really make progress. At this point in time I think we’ve got 4 teams that are formed, and it’s sort of morphed. After each summit we would look at, “Okay, we made this progress, we have more Enterprises deploying. What are the barriers today to the folks who are not deploying?” Then we would align the work group to those different types of challenges.
Today we focus around deployment, so what are the challenges to onboarding traditional Enterprise work loads into the Cloud, into OpenStack specifically? We have a business and marketing team that’s been doing a lot of work around the perceptual barriers or the awareness barriers to Enterprise IT deployment. Then we’ve just combined a couple of teams to create a top 5 ISV team. What we hear from Enterprise is, “I have a series of current applications that I use to manage or interact with my current IT installation in the Enterprise. I want to be able to continue to use those as I stand up an OpenStack cloud next to that, but there’s some issue somewhere with it.” Maybe they just don’t know how to do it, maybe there’s actually some gaps in the inter-operability with those applications.
This last team has identified what are the top 5 apps in about 6 different categories, and then are starting to work through the engagement with those ISVs so that they can have inter-operable solutions within OpenStack Cloud, and we can have all the information and documentation for Enterprise IT so that they could stand it up and [inaudible 00:28:30]. Really just trying to knock those barriers down. I think that the Enterprise work group is going to start to dovetail and flow more information into the product work group as we define use cases around each of these different … Whether it’s the inter-operability of an ISV, or whether from a deployment team point of view, it’s rolling upgrades with zero down time, then feed those into the product work group so we can identify those commonality of requirements across other segments like HPC, or Cloud service providers so that as the development community implements these capabilities, that we do it in a way that it serves all of the markets. We can get a capability that allows us to advance the OpenStack deployment much more broadly than just Enterprise.
Niki Acosta: One thing that I’ve been battling, and I’ve certainly felt this at the OpenStack Summit a little bit because one of my panelists was from Sprint. We couldn’t talk about what they were doing other than Rob Lindross from Sprint was on my panel. Why is the Enterprise so reluctant to talk about what they’re doing? I know for a fact that there are many Enterprises that are using OpenStack but we’re not hearing about them. Why do you think that is?
Carol Barrett: I think there’s a couple of reasons, but one of the ones that I hear most frequently is they really are very protective of the resources that they have assembled that are experts in both OpenStack and their infrastructure and their architecture. If they’re too loud and public about what they’re doing, people will come and poach their resources because there’s a need in the marketplace for people who are OpenStack experts. That’s actually one of the top reasons I hear that Enterprises are not willing to be so public about things.
Niki Acosta: I have not heard that, but that makes complete logical sense. Hey, if you want a job just put OpenStack on your LinkedIn right? You will get offers.
Carol Barrett: I don’t know if there was any booth at the OpenStack Summit in the marketplace that did not have a we’re hiring sign up, right? Everybody was.
Niki Acosta: Yeah, the recruiters were definitely there in full force, no doubt.
Carol Barrett: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: Interesting. You said there were two reasons? Did you say there were two reasons?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, well I think there’s multiple. I think that that’s a large one, I think the other one is that competitive advantage or business advantage. I think the way that the companies are deploying it, are providing them some advantages that they don’t necessarily want to signal out to the market yet. Right? It allows them to either deploy things more quickly or to manage more effectively, which is going to allow them to deliver new value out to their customers, and they’re just not really ready to give their competitors more information about how they’re doing it so that they can copy them as well. I think competitive advantage is another big reason that we hear it as well.
Jeff Dickey: We have a hard time getting end users on the show, and most end users want to and they do really want to talk about what they’re doing, but it’s kind of a PR issue. They say, “Yes, I want to do it, let me check,” and then it’s a, “No, I can’t.”
Niki Acosta: Yeah, they get stopped somewhere with their marketing people or their PR people or their legal people more often than not, depending on the size of the customer. We did have Ebay on at the OpenStack summit, which if you guys haven’t gone and looked at that list of podcasts from the OpenStack summit, I recommend checking them out. They’re about 20 to 25 minutes each. Ebay was so awesome and forthcoming about what they were doing. We had another user, Cern, Tim Bell from Cern …
Jeff Dickey: Tim Bell.
Niki Acosta: Was there too and talking about really cool things they’re doing at Cern and upgrades to the Hadron collider and how it’s the coldest place on earth, which is so geeky. Everyone knows that I have love for Tim Bell.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: He’s warned his wife about me since she joined Twitter.
Jeff Dickey: We had Getty Images on too, on those little mini-casts.
Niki Acosta: You had what?
Jeff Dickey: Getty Images.
Niki Acosta: Oh, sweet. Awesome.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, so check that out too.
Niki Acosta: I missed that day. I was riding a bike, sorry.
Jeff Dickey: That’s okay. Scott did a great job, filled in. That was good, and I just listened to the Tim Bell episode yesterday morning on the way to work, because I wasn’t on that one.
Niki Acosta: It’s always a little different without you Jeff. Carol’s laughing at us. Tangent. Go ahead.
Jeff Dickey: Okay. We were just talking a little bit about the conference. Carol, how was the conference for you? Was it good? Was there things that were missed out on? What was our overall impression of the Summit?
Carol Barrett: I thought it was dynamite. Really, it was great to be able to connect with so many folks and to be able to sit down face-to-face and have real hands-on working sessions. Then at the same time, it was great to meet new people who are interested in … Either working on the product work group or in the Enterprise area, and being able to sit down and talk with them as well. I thought all of that went really well. It was interesting, the venue was fabulous right? Love Vancouver, the convention center and all of that was just absolutely a great host spot for everybody. I think one of the challenges, especially coming from Paris, was we had so much room that there were so many parallel sessions that went on in Vancouver that it was really hard to choose where to go. It was neat to see the dynamic in the working groups, where the folks would come together and we would actually figure out a divide and conquer strategy. Especially for the product work group where they wanted to be in a lot of the user committee sessions and the up summit, and then some of the other work groups.
We could go ahead and say, “Okay, you two cover this and you cover this, and we’ll cover that,” and then come back together either through the mail list or on a working session to share what we learned and where we think that there might be some good collaboration and commonality for us. That was one of the challenges, was to deal with all the parallels that was going on there, but the venue and the session and just, I thought the caliber of attendees was really strong. I think that if I think back to Atlanta, where there were a lot of folks who were still there for the first time but were also really trying to get a foundation of understanding of OpenStack, and then you look at Vancouver where there was still lots of first time people but they knew a lot more. The level of knowledge of the people who are coming into the community is much higher than it was in Atlanta. I think that that’s just a great sign for where we’re going. It’s not just people who are considering, it’s people who are seeing that this is a direction for them and they need to really start to get more information and dig in so that they can plan their deployment or the next phase of their deployment. That level of knowledge and engagement was much, much higher.
Jeff Dickey: It was. I was at the booth a little bit. The folks that would come by were actively implementing OpenStack and had it either ready for production or in production. I haven’t been to a summit since Portland, so it was crazy to see like you said, just the maturity and everything. I think what overwhelmed me the most was just the keynote, the size of that space and the people. I came in late so I was in the very back, and just looking at this, you couldn’t even see the stage. It was so huge. It was huge, the [crosstalk 00:36:40].
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I agree. I know there were 6,000 plus people there, is when you walked into the keynote venue.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: I don’t know if it was the weather and the venue or what, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there was a level of excitement and energy that has been missing from the last few summits. Paris was kind of dreary, Hong Kong was kind of dreary, Atlanta was just rainy and muggy and kind of miserable, and hot and sticky. No offense to the Foundation, but it seemed like there was just a lot more happening and like you said, kind of the sense that everyone’s stepped it up a level. It’s always good to see almost a mini-revival after you feel like you’re maybe not moving upward, to refresh and say, “Okay, cool, it’s back on the upward swing.” I think a lot of that just has to do with maturity. I think there were a lot of doubters and a lot of haters and it’s always good to prove those folks wrong considering I’ve invested multiple years into this.
Carol Barrett: Great. I think there was a lot more of that. A lot less doubting and a lot more around inevitability. Yeah, it’s inevitable that these companies are each going to have some degree of an OpenStack cloud setup, and trying to figure out what does that look like? What do I put in it? How do I manage it as part of my overall setup? Yeah, I think that’s a major change.
Niki Acosta: Jeff, do you want to ask a question? I’ve been hogging the mic a little, maybe.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, I just want to hear more. Carol, we were talking before the show, I think you’re our fourth guest from Intel actually, which is kind of surprising. We were talking about Intel’s this very much not a well-known I don’t think, entity as much as you guys contribute. You guys are quietly contributing a lot to OpenStack. Do you want to share some stuff about what you guys are doing or around SAA or any of the pieces? Feel free to talk about anything.
Carol Barrett: Sure. It’s been very much a conscious effort inside of Intel over the last 18 months to 2 years to increase our contributions and the broad base of developers that we have that we can bring to the community. Because it just fits in with out overall strategy of being port of choice, and what that really means in non-Intel speak, is whatever software solution our customers want to run on our products, we want to make sure that it’s available to them and that it provides the best possible experience for them. As our customers started to talk more and more about OpenStack and how that was part of their strategy in the data center, that became more and more important to Intel that we make sure that OpenStack had the capabilities to be able to meet those different market needs, and that it also provided the best benefits on the Intel platforms as well.
It really is a strategy that you see Intel use on everything from laptops or handheld tablet devices, whether it’s Android or working with Microsoft on the Windows platforms, all types of Linux contributions. OpenStack is clearly a big part of our data center strategies and what our customers are telling us they’re going to deploy. Where I am is inside of the software and services group inside of Intel. We’re almost a service organization to the people who actually build the products, what we call platforms, that will ship in the market. In working with our data center group who is the customer for our OpenStack work, understanding exactly what market segments, whether it’s HPC or Enterprise, they see adopting the Cloud and OpenStack more rapidly than others.
What is that drive for requirements around solution stacks, and then specific features? Some care more about scalability like in the Telco space. Some care more about security, when we start to get into the FSI space, making sure that those capabilities are inside of OpenStack so that they can go ahead and deploy it and do what we need to do to go ahead and support them as they do that as well. It’s a really interesting place to be as you look at the community and all the different products that are coming out based upon the OpenStack community development efforts, is that we really want all of them to be successful and we want to make sure that they really take full advantage of our platforms and they have the features and functions needed by the markets to deploy.
Niki Acosta: You supported a lot of the Women in Tech stuff going on at the Summit as well right?
Carol Barrett: Yeah, diversity is a large priority here at Intel. BK, our CEO, made a couple of big announcements earlier in the year at CES about Intel’s investment both within the company to drive a well diversified population at all of the different levels through the company, recognizing that different points of view and conversation around those points of views and experiences are going to yield better solutions, better strategies, better designs, whatever it is. It’s always going to yield a better result, and that we inside of Intel had work that we could do and that we needed to do in order to really get to the level that we want to for diversity. The high tech community in general has work that needs to happen there, and certainly when you look at open source software, there’s some pretty strong data that shows us that our environment or our community is not as diverse as we would want to be.
I was in the OpenStack board meeting on the Sunday before the start of the summit, and I think they were saying of the roughly 6,500 attendees that are coming to the summit, it was just under 10% that were women. That’s a pretty small segment of that community and realizing that we all think differently and together we can do things that are better, we need to figure out how do we beef that section up? How do we enlist more women to come and be active in the community and contribute their technology, their thoughts, their knowledge from markets and solution architecture, so that OpenStack can really be as strong and robust and capable as all the markets that we want to serve need it to be? Intel really took, I thought, a strong step forward to trying to bring together the women in the community and try and figure out, what can we do to change the dynamics? How can we get more women in? What are the barriers? What are the challenges? I think that we’re going to continue to work in that area and I thought it was fabulous that Comcast as the Superuser award winner, donated their 2 all-paid passes and accommodations and all of that, to the Women of OpenStack. I just can’t say enough about what a great thing that was for them to do for the community.
Niki Acosta: Total class act.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, really job well done. I’m sure that they’ll go to women who can help to make a real impact and difference in OpenStack.
Jeff Dickey: We had, was it Murali Sundar
Carol Barrett: Oh yeah, Murali Sundar.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, we’ve had her on the show from Intel. We’ve had a couple folks from Intel. She was great too, but yeah. I didn’t notice it, especially in the sessions that there weren’t very many women at the show.
Carol Barrett: I think it’s an area for us to grow. Honestly, I think it can even start in the entire thinking of how the Foundation stages the conference. We’re still looking for the first woman to do a keynote. Right? That still has not happened yet at an OpenStack summit.
Niki Acosta: I’m crossing my fingers for childcare, so when I go to these fantastic cities I can stay a couple of days and hang out. Just saying, just throwing that out there.
Carol Barrett: I’m sure you’re not the only one that would find that really useful.
Jeff Dickey: I would use that Niki.
Niki Acosta: Would you?
Jeff Dickey: Yes I would.
Niki Acosta: I would too, and I would also appreciate some healthier food options during the booth crawls. Pizza and burgers all the time gets a little old. Just saying.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, I thought the Vancouver booth crawl was really just amazing, how just jam packed it was.
Niki Acosta: Oh yeah, you couldn’t walk and I got a little warm in there. I was like, “Man,” people were literally shoulder to shoulder. It was happening.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, it was just amazing what was going on there, to see everybody talking and then seeing the different demos and somebody would go ahead and say, “Well, what about this scenario?” And people would actually try to respond to that by changing the demo or changing some of the configuration and being able to respond to it right there. That was really neat to watch happen.
Niki Acosta: You know what I’m bummed about, is the fact that now that there is such a large number of attendees, that fewer people are giving away good t-shirts. Did anyone else notice that? I was so bummed, so so bummed, and the giveaway this year was a really cool windbreaker and by the time I went to get mine they didn’t have smalls or mediums left, which was a bummer. They were unisex sized so I didn’t actually get something that I think I’ll be able to wear unless I want it hanging down to my knees. That’s all right, there’s always Tokyo.
Carol Barrett: That was a great giveaway though.
Jeff Dickey: A nice jacket, yeah.
Niki Acosta: It was.
Carol Barrett: Yeah, and what it said inside of it when you actually opened it up, there was a sentiment of community and working together. I thought that was just fabulous, really fabulous.
Jeff Dickey: My favorite swag was the Intel sweatshirt. Inside the sweatshirt it said, Intel inside.
Niki Acosta: No way.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it’s a super comfy sweatshirt. It said OpenStack on it.
Carol Barrett: I thought that HP’s, their sweatshirt, the jacket that they did and then all of the badges for each of the different projects. I thought those were great, yeah.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Carol Barrett: Such a great [sat 00:48:22] and they were just so colorful and just really cute too. I thought that was a great giveaway.
Niki Acosta: Always fun going to these, you never know what to expect until you get there. It seems like they just keep getting better because everyone’s trying to outdo each other. HP’s party was so ridiculous, they had stunt people and you could go and get yourself recorded with a stunt man doing some crazy stunt. It was pretty neat, they had food trucks with hand made ice creams and all kinds of different foods, and HP sure knows how to throw a party that’s for sure.
Carol Barrett: It will be interesting to see how everything transforms as we go to Tokyo, right?
Niki Acosta: Oh, most definitely, most definitely. What are you looking forward to in Tokyo?
Carol Barrett: I think first off, it will be seeing new segments of the OpenStack community show up at the summit. Just like when we saw in Paris, the North America and US percentage went way down and we had a lot more folks from Europe who were there. I’m sure as we go to Japan we’ll go ahead and see the same North America numbers drop down and the Asian numbers climb. I think that that’s going to be great because that will provide us the opportunity to sit down and have face-to-face conversations with folks who we haven’t been able to do that before. All types of new things are going to come out of that. I think we’ll get a different set of end users and operators, and they’re going to have different requirements and different environments that they’re trying to stand up clouds in. That’s going to be really great information for us to get. I love Tokyo, it’s just such a great city and the ways that all the venues and opportunities for being able to throw parties to bring folks together, are really going to be creative I’m sure. Those are the main ones for me.
Niki Acosta: I’m definitely looking forward to it and maybe Jeff and I will not go into this Summit booking 12 podcasts in a row over the course of 6 hours for 2 days. I don’t know what we were thinking. I was pretty waxed after 12 podcasts in a row, but we still had a good time.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah, it was a rough end of the show for me. I think we did 10 podcasts and then I had to drive home, I was worn out. [crosstalk 00:50:46]
Niki Acosta: You did all the hard work bringing all the equipment into that, so thanks for that Jeff. What’s next for you Carol? What’s going to be going on for you? Any last closing words you want to talk about?
Carol Barrett: Right now it’s all around planning and execution for Tokyo. Whether it’s the product work group who’s looking to go ahead and create the updated roadmap, which will go ahead and take us out through the end release and incorporate all the information from the Liberty design summit. Then starting to put together the use cases to feed into the M design summit, and having conversations with everybody across the community. Then from the Enterprise point of view, executing on the things that we know that we need to deliver from code contributions like rolling upgrade. We have some experiments we’re doing around graffiti and the metadata tagging to support onboarding traditional IT work loads into the Cloud, and being able to prove out those solutions for capabilities that are already inside of OpenStack. Then continuing to develop more reference architectures and white papers and how-to guides with end users and ISVs. Lots to get done between here and Tokyo. As usual it will go by in a blink of an eye, these next 5 or 6 months. These cycles are just incredibly quick.
Niki Acosta: I know, I feel like call for papers is about to open or something already. Growing and it’s like, “Man, is it time to write another abstract? Good night. What am I going to talk about this time?”
Carol Barrett: Yeah, but there’s always lots to talk about. That is the good news here.
Niki Acosta: We look forward to seeing you for sure, and sorry I didn’t get to meet you in real life. Hopefully I’ll get to catch up with you in Tokyo. You’ve been an absolute pleasure to have on the show, just so knowledgeable and we really appreciate the work you’re doing with the product working group and Enterprise working group and all the good stuff that Intel’s doing with women in tech and all that stuff. We typically like to end the podcast by asking what two guests you would like to see on the show.
Carol Barrett: I think the two that come to mind are first, it would be John Garbutt because I’m really interested as the new Nova PTL, to understand what his vision is around Nova and what does he see being a direction for modularity, and how do you either rework some of the elements around Nova like the number of reviewers and how many folks can really commit time to that, versus breaking Nova into smaller pieces so that the rate of innovation continues to be as high as we need. Nova is such an important project for almost every service to grow and become more capable, that I’d like to know his view coming into that role. How do you go ahead and allow Nova to become really the thing that fuels the innovation across all of the services?
Then I think the other one would be Kyle Mestery to understand, what’s the path between Neutron and Nova networks? How do we get to one solution inside of a community that everybody can be confident in and really start to deploy widely, and be able to get all of our developers so that we’re developing just one capability instead of splitting some of our development resources across a couple of capabilities that are somewhat similar. Those would be the two that I’d be most interested in, thinking about it from my Enterprise point of view or from a product work group point of view.
Niki Acosta: Great recommendations.
Jeff Dickey: Yeah.
Niki Acosta: We need to get on that, Jeff.
Jeff Dickey: I will.
Niki Acosta: Yes. Anything else, Jeff?
Jeff Dickey: No. Carol, thank you so much for being on the show and thanks for everything you’ve done for OpenStack and the Foundation, and all the stuff that you’ve done. It’s been great work.
Carol Barrett: I appreciate that, and thanks for having me on here today. It was just great to meet you guys and get a chance to hopefully meet some other folks in the community as a result of talking more about the product work group and the Enterprise work group too.
Niki Acosta: Carol’s going to send us the latest version of the deck, yes? Or a link to it on slide show and we’ll make sure to post that when we post the video here on YouTube. We’ll drop it in the comments there, we’ll get transcripts and drop it in a blog as well. Stay tuned for that and Carol, thank you so much.
Carol Barrett: Thank you.
Jeff Dickey: Thank you, so next week we’re not doing a show. Niki and I are both probably on a plane, so just listen to the last … There’s 20 new mini podcasts in your feed, sorry for cluttering everyone’s podcast feed. Josh McKenty is going to be on in the next week or so, which will be interesting to hear his point of view. Stay tuned to that and keep the comments coming.
Niki Acosta: If you’re a user, we’d love to hear from you. Just ping Jeff or me on Twitter or find us somehow. We would love to have more users on the show. All right, everybody say bye.
Jeff Dickey: Bye, everyone.
Carol Barrett: Bye-bye.
CONNECT WITH US