In which I explain why comparing yourself to the more-senior engineers around you is a mistake: they have a structural advantage of earlier access to information that can be hard to distinguish from prescience.| ZeroBanana News
One model that many people have used for making sense of the multiple services in OpenStack is that of a series of layers, with the ‘compute starter kit’ projects forming the base. Jay Pipes recently wrote what may prove to be the canonical distillation (this post is an edited version of my response):| ZeroBanana News
The OpenStack Foundation has begun the process of becoming an umbrella organisation for open source projects adjacent to but outside of OpenStack itself. However, there is no clear roadmap for the transformation, which has resulted in some confusion. After attending the joint leadership meeting with the Foundation Board of Directors and various Forum sessions that included some members of the board at the (2018) OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, I believe I can help shed some light on the situat...| ZeroBanana News
Like many in the community, I am often called upon to explain what OpenStack is to somebody completely unfamiliar with it. Usually this goes one of two ways: they turn out to be familiar enough with cloud computing to quickly grasp it by analogy, or their eyes glaze over at the mention of the words ‘cloud computing’ and no further explanation is sought or offered. When faced with someone who is persistently curious but not an industry insider, you immediately know you’re in trouble.| ZeroBanana News
One of the great things about forcing yourself to write down your thoughts is that it occasionally produces one of those lightbulb moments of clarity, where the jigsaw pieces you have been mentally turning over suddenly all fit together. I had one of those this week while preparing my platform for the OpenStack Technical Committee election.| ZeroBanana News
A curious notion that seems to be doing the rounds of the OpenStack traps at the moment is the idea that Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds must by definition be centred around the provisioning of virtual machines. The phrase ‘small, stable core’ keeps popping up in a way that makes it sound like a kind of dog-whistle code for the idea that other kinds of services are a net liability. Some members of the Technical Committee have even got on board and proposed that the development of OpenS...| ZeroBanana News
As the Juno (2014.2) development cycle ramps up, now is a good time to review the changes we saw in Heat during the preceding Icehouse (2014.1) cycle and have a look at what is coming up next in the pipeline. This update is also available as a webinar that I recorded for the OpenStack Foundation, as are the other PTL updates. The RDO project is collecting a list of written updates like this one.| ZeroBanana News
At the last OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, I had a chance meeting in the hallway with a prominent Open Source developer, who mentioned that he would only be interested in Heat once it could replace Puppet. I was slightly shocked by that, because it is the stated goal of the Heat team not to compete with configuration management tools—on the principle that a good cloud platform will not dictate which configuration management tool you use, and nor will a good configuration management tool dic...| ZeroBanana News
The subject of Platforms as a Service and their long-term relationship with OpenStack has been the subject of much hand-wringing—most of it in the media—over the past month or so. The ongoing expansion of the project has many folks wondering where exactly the dividing line between OpenStack and its surrounding ecosystem will be drawn, and the announcement of the Solum related project has fuelled speculation that the scope will grow to encompass PaaS.| ZeroBanana News
It was my privilege to attend the inaugural Frankfurt OpenStack Meetup last night in… well, Frankfurt (am Main, not the other one). It was great to meet a such a diverse set of OpenStack users, from major companies to students and everywhere in between.| www.zerobanana.com