For the last few days I’ve been in Geneva for the CentOS dojo at CERN.
What’s CERN? – http://cern.ch/
What’s a dojo? – https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/
What’s CentOS? – http://centos.org/
A lot has happened that I want to write about, so I’ll be breaking this into several posts:
(As usual, if you’re attempting to follow along on Facebook, you’ll be missing all of the photos and videos, so you’ll really want to go directly to my blog, at https://drbacchus.com/)
Event Report, ApacheCon North America 2017
May 15-19, 2017
(This is an abridged version of the report I sent to my manager.)
Last week I attended ApacheCon North America in Miami. I am the conference chair of ApacheCon, and have been for on and off for about 15 years. Red Hat has been a sponsor of ApacheCon almost every single time since we started doing it 17 years ago. In addition to being deeply involved in specific projects, such as Tomcat, ActiveMQ, and Mesos, we are tangentially involved in many of the other projects at the Apache Software Foundation.
Presentations from ApacheCon may be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6pLDCyPxByWQwYTL-JrF5Rp (Yes, that’s the Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel – this ApacheCon was produced by the LF events team.)
I’d like to draw specific attention to Alan Gates, at Hortonworks, who has developed a course to train people at the company in how to work with upstream projects. He did this because, as the company expanded from a small group of founders who deeply understood open source, to thousands of employees who kinda sorta got it, but not always.
Also of great interest was the keynote by Sandra Matz about what your social media profile tells the world about you. It’s worth watching all the way to the end, as she doesn’t just talk about the reasons to be terrified of the interwebs, but also about how this kind of analysis can actually be used for good rather than evil.
Event report: Red Hat Summit, OpenStack Summit
May 1-5, 2017 and May 8-11, 2017
During the first two weeks of May, I attended Red Hat Summit, followed by OpenStack Summit. Since both events were in Boston (although not at the same venue), many aspects of them have run together.
Mini-cluster
On the first day of Red Hat Summit, I received the mini-cluster, which had been built in Brno for the April Brno open house. There were one or two steps missing from the setup instructions, so with a great deal of help from Hugh Brock, it too most of the first day to get the cluster running. We’ll be publishing more details about the mini-cluster on the RDO blog in the next week or two. However, most of the problems were 1) it was physically connected incorrectly (ie, my fault) and 2) there were some routing table changes that were apparently not saved after initial setup.
Once the cluster was up, we connected to the ManageIQ cluster on the other side of our booth, and they were able to manage our OpenStack deployment. Thus, we were able to demonstrate the two projects working together.
In future events, we’d like to bring more projects into this arrangement – say, use Ceph for storage, or have ManageIQ managing OpenStack and oVirt, for example.
After we got the cluster working, in subsequent days, we just had to power it on, follow the startup instructions, and be patient. Again, more details of this will be in the RDO blog post in the coming weeks.
Upcoming CentOS Dojos
I had conversations with two groups about planning upcoming CentOS Dojos.
The first of these will be at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), and is
now tentatively scheduled for the first Tuesday in September. (If you saw my internal event report, I mentioned July/August. This has since changed.) They’re interested in doing a gathering that would be about both CentOS and OpenStack, and draw together some of the local developer community. This will be held in conjunction with the local LOPSA group.
The second Dojo that we’re planning will be at CERN, where we have a great relationship with the cloud computing group, who run what we believe to be the largest RDO installation in the world. We have a tentative date of October 20th, immediately before Open Source Summit in Prague to make it easier to combine two trips for those traveling internationally. This event, too, would cover CentOS topics as well as OpenStack/RDO topics.
If you’re interested in participating in either one of these events, you need to be on the centos-promo mailing list. Send mail to centos-promo-subscribe@centos.org to subscribe, or visit https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo for the
clicky-clicky version.
General Impressions
The Community Central area at Red Hat Summit was awesome. Sharing center stage with the product booths was a big win for our upstream first message, and we had a ton of great conversations with people who grasped the “X is the upstream for Red Hat X” concept, seemingly, for the first time. The “The Roots Are In The Community” posters resonated with a lot of people, so huge thanks to Tigert for pulling those together at the last minute.
The collaboration between RDO and ManageIQ was very rewarding, and helped promote the CloudForms message even more, because people could see it in action, and see how the communities work together for the greater good of humanity. I look forward to expanding this collaboration to all of the projects in the Community Central area by next year.
The space for Red Hat Summit was huge, making the crowd seem a lot smaller than it actually was. The opposite was true for OpenStack Summit, where it was always crowded and seemed very busy, even though the crowd was smaller than last year.
Where next?
In three weeks I’ll be heading to the High Performance Computing event in Frankfurt. My mission there is to talk with people that are using CentOS and RDO in HPC, and collect user stories.
This is the lightning talk I gave this evening at ApacheCon:
ApacheCon is a high point of my year, every year, going back to March of 2000.
In late 1999, Ken Coar told me I should submit a talk for ApacheCon. Astonishingly, my talks were all accepted, and I found myself in Orlando speaking in front of a few hundred people who thought I knew what I was talking about. I have since made a career out of that particular game.
This is the 28th ApacheCon since the creation of the Apache Software Foundation. 29 if you count the event in 1998 before there was a Foundation. I don’t count it, because I missed it. I also missed the ApacheCon in Sinsheim, Germany, in 2012, for which I will never forgive my boss at the time. But I *think* I have been to more ApacheCons than anyone else. 27 of them.
I love being on stage. With hundreds of people looking at me, hanging on my every word, believing I know what I’m talking about.
But there’s other reasons I love ApacheCon. It’s the place I go to see some of my oldest friends – many of whom I first met at ApacheCon, including some new ones this week.
I love ApacheCon because it shows me that I’m not alone. As C. S. Lewis said, we read to know that we’re not alone. Except that he didn’t say it. It’s actually just a quote from a movie about him.
I love ApacheCon because I love Apache. And Hawaiian shirts. Shane’s lightning talks are another high point of my year, because they are both entertaining and informational. Except I hear he’s not giving one this year.
I love ApacheCon because of the passion that I see in the people that attend. People that love Apache, and also love solving actual real world problems. The sessions here at ApacheCon range from the esoteric and philosophical to the deeply practical, but at the heart of each one is a desire to solve problems in the real world. To scratch your own itch, as the saying goes.
I love ApacheCon because of our sponsors. Talking to sponsors about why they are here at ApacheCon has the effect of re-centering us. Sure, open source is about having fun and tinkering, but it’s also about solving problems for real people that rely on us. People that depend on Apache because we have a reputation for vendor-neutral, high-quality software which is sustainable because of those esoteric philosophies that we cling to even in the face of practical realities.
I love ApacheCon because of the time I’ve put into it. I’ve worked on ApacheCon for 18 years now. I often refer to ApacheCon as my life’s work. I spend hundreds of hours on it, and so do many other people, including our amazing producers, our numerous volunteers, our tireless Infra contractors, our beloved Melissa, and our supportive board of directors. ApacheCon is my sweat and tears, literally and figuratively. It’s older than two of my kids, and the oldest kid grew up knowing that Dad loves ApacheCon. The wall in my office is covered with ApacheCon attendee badges – 27 of them. And ApacheCon has become a part of my identity.
So as we look forward to the next ApacheCon (details coming very, very soon, I hope) we need to figure out what *you* want ApacheCon to be, and make it that, rather than doing it just because it’s what we do, and what we’ve always done. ApacheCon is about building community, more than it’s about anything else, and that’s really why I love ApacheCon. I love seeing communities come together around a common goal, and believing that I was a catalyst in making that happen.
So, thank you so much for coming to ApacheCon, my friends. I hope you’ll come again, and I hope that you’ll come to love it as much as I do. But that might not be possible.
Despite my best intentions of blogging every day at Red Hat Summit, time got away from me, as it often does at these events. There’s always 3 things going on, and it’s hard to find a moment between that first cup of coffee, and stumbling into bed at the end of the night.
I spent almost the entire event working the RDO booth in the Community Central section of the expo hall. While traffic wasn’t as heavy as at OpenStack Summit, it was still pretty constant.
In the swag department, I had our “what does RDO stand for” tshirts, and TripleO QuickStart USBkeys.
Several things stood out to me from this audience.
First, I was delighted to hear story after story of companies that use RDO in the test/dev/lab environment, and use Red Hat OpenStack Platform in their public/production environments. This is what I really want to see happening, so it’s very gratifying when I get anecdotal evidence that it is happening. Now, if I can only convince those folks to follow up with case study writeups for the user stories page.
Second, from people who were not quite as familiar with either RDO or OpenStack, if there was a consistent thread in the questions, it was confusion as to the overlap between oVirt (or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization), OpenStack, and OpenShift, and when one might use one vs. the others. This looks like a good opportunity for some blog posts around what the overlap is, what the distinctions are, and what recommendations are for using one or another.
Brian and I did an OpenStack vs oVirt comparison talk at last year’s Red Hat Summit, but I don’t believe we ever wrote it up anywhere. And OpenShift has the added confusion of having a similar name, which gets people kind of mixed up before they even consider the feature set.
And, finally, the week was yet another reminder that I work for the best company in the world, with the best coworkers. I feel sorry for the rest of you.