>> Announcer: Boston, Massachusetts
It's theCUBE.
Covering OpenStack Summit 2017.
Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation,
RedHat, and additional ecosystem support.
(upbeat techno music fades out)
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by John Troyer,
and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live broadcast
of OpenStack 2017 here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts.
Actually, the clouds have been breaking up,
a little bit of sunshine here,
and it's our third day of broadcasts.
We have really a lot of our editorial segment today.
Going to be talking to more community members,
talking to one of the Superuser winners,
a number of startups, and happy to start the day,
Lisa-Marie Namphy who is the US OpenStack ambassador.
CUBE alum, been on a number of times.
Lisa, tell us what's new in your world.
>> Thank you Stu, and thanks John
and what a pleasure to be here with you folks,
and hello, Boston and world, good morning.
What's new, well the OpenStack ambassador program
is expanding all the time, we just had a great session
that Sonia did to kick off the day today to really
talk about, you know, how to get involved in OpenStack,
even if you're not necessarily a technical person.
It's really important to acknowledge
how everybody in our community can contribute,
and that's one of the things the
ambassador program does really well.
So we just had a session on that.
One of the things that I've done with our user group
that is new and super exciting is
I've morphed it into a little bit of the
OpenStack in Containers user group.
So I've been focusing a lot on containers,
done 12 or 13 meetups on Kubernetes and or Docker
since last summer, and I just had the pleasure of speaking
in the CNCF communities track,
communities day track yesterday, and
that was so much fun,
out there in the grand ballroom, so
that's kind of some new and fun things we're doing.
>> It's great,
this is our fifth year doing theCUBE at this show,
always a robust community, really.
When we started coming, it was the people building it,
Now we have a lot of the users,
there's different sub-segments,
can you speak a little bit to the kind of
maturity of the community, and, you know
how do people get involved in the ambassador program,
how many are there geographically, number wise,
diversity, those kind of things.
>> Oh gosh,
yeah so it's geo, or it's a worldwide program
and it's been going a lot,
and you're right, you know years ago,
here it was the Design Summit,
and we sat around and talked about, you know
the next six months of the project,
and then it morphed into more
users, adoption, customers,
operators are a really big one too.
And now those things are all so big,
we have operators, Midcycles, and all
and the Design Summit has been, you know
sequestered off into, separated out
so that we can really focus here on
the customers, the community, users, and
those type of contributors as well.
So things have changed a lot in the seven years
since we've been doing OpenStack.
The ambassador program is fantastic.
The foundation has done a really good job in the last
couple of years of acknowledging the contributions
of the user community,
and so not necessarily
the code contributors only, but the people who are
also spending as much time contributing in really
significant ways to our community,
and growing our commnity.
Open source doesn't work without a community.
So we know that,
and we're doing a much better job of
acknowledging who those people are
and rewarding them.
>> John: How many ambassadors worldwide?
>> There's about twenty of us.
I'm the only one in the US right now,
but we're about to change that.
I believe my friend Sheila is going to join
and cover the East Coast,
and I'll be able to do everything west of the Mississippi,
but most countries only have one, and...
>> And the role of an ambassador, do you do a lot of meetups?
Do you go speak?
You're there as a,
for people to contact as well, right?
>> Yeah, we generally recruit or ask people to be
ambassadors if they are already doing those things,
if they're already running a local user group,
if they already have a brand in OpenStack,
and they speak, and they kind of already know
how to reach out to people,
and how to inspire people, or people see them on stage,
and that's why the foundation approached me to do it.
I had been running the San Francisco Bay area
meetup for three years,
and speaking, I don't know this is probably my
eighth, ninth, maybe tenth OpenStack Summit that I've been
speaking at, and OpenStack days and all of that.
And so, you kind of see who's already doing it.
The cool thing about community
is nobody is asked to do it, like you do it
because you have a passion for it,
because you love it, because it's the right thing to do,
because it's helpful to push the technology forward
because you have a passion for the technology,
because you love people, all these reasons is why
people get into it.
So you find all over the world people who are doing this.
They're already doing it and they're not being paid to do it
they're doing it, those are the people you grab, because
you know, there is a burnout level to it but those are the
people who have enough passion about it
and commitment, and believe in community
that they're going to be successful at it.
>> Can you talk a little bit about the Bay Area
OpenStack user group?
It's one of the largest OpenStack user groups,
and one of the themes we've seen this week is
a lot of talk about containers, a lot of talk about,
well, Kubernetes, but containers in general,
kind of demystifying the sometimes confusing story about
where's OpenStack good for,
where's the container layer good for,
it turns out it's good for a couple different places,
you can containerize OpenStack, you can also...
A lot of talk about the app layer on top,
but you actually, what you just said, you've actually
expanded the conversation, you don't just sit there and say
"this month we're talking about Neutron,"
you talk about a lot of different topics,
and you bring people to the table.
>> Yeah, San Francisco area, you are correct, it is the
world's largest OpenStack user group,
we have over 6,000 members.
Not all of them are located in the Bay Area,
I think people like to join the user group because
we provide a lot of really good content,
and we live stream our meetups,
we have Google Hangouts, I record them all,
they're all on our calendar,
if you go to meetup.com/openstack,
you get to us because we were the first one.
So we do get a lot of people from around the world,
and I write newsletters with lots of interesting information
but it is a local community and we do encourage people to
participate, so the meetups are super important
and the only way to make sure that you keep your
community strong and keep people coming back is to
have phenomenal content in your meetups.
So I work really hard to make sure that
the content is interesting, that it's relevant,
and the most exciting, most relevant conversation
since last summer has been containers.
The year before that it was networking,
and it still kind of is and always will be.
So we do a lot of meetups on networking, too,
but containers has been what people want to talk about.
They're trying to figure this out.
OpenStack has reached a maturity level where people,
you know, they're not necessarily learning or if they are
they can take an OpenStack 101 course and those exist
all over the place.
So we've gone to the next level,
and whether it was Cloud Foundry or now Containers
we do like to talk about what else you can do with
this fabulous technology, and how you should do it.
So we've had meetups where we've presented
OpenStack on communities, communities on OpenStack,
where I personally came in and did a whole
meetup on Kubernetes as the underlay,
and Rob Starmer came in and did a whole workshop
and hands-on about how to run OpenStack on containers.
Yesterday our panel, you heard Dan Berg talk about
just simplifying it, run everything in a container,
but keep it as simple as possible,
so what pieces do you need?
So these are the conversations that we like to have
in our user group, and people keep coming back
because it's an exciting conversation.
>> Yeah, expanding on that,
you talked about just people are always coming,
new people to the community that don't know it,
people that are changing jobs all the time,
new technologies,
I mean, we all know community building is a constant,
you know, reinvention in something, you keep needing to work
How do the ambassadors, how do stay energized on it,
how do you keep the momentum and the
energy of the community going?
>> Yeah, well the cool thing about an open source community
is no matter where you're working,
you're still part of the community.
So I've worked with so many other people here,
I don't even know where they are sometimes.
I mean we don't tend to talk about
what company we're actually working for,
or who's paying your paycheck,
and especially in the early days of the project
that was definitely true,
and so some of my good friends have been at
four different companies in the time that
we've been doing this OpenStack thing,
but we're all still working on OpenStack,
and I suspect Kubernetes will be very similar,
or Docker.
You know, how many people are working on Docker?
But there's only 200 people that work for Docker, right?
So these technologies kind of take on
these lives of their own,
and people do switch jobs a lot,
but people come to meetups because it's a constant thing,
and it's also a good place to keep networking and keep
looking for work, so we got a lot of that.
The beginning of every meetup,
I ask for a show of hands of who's hiring.
If I ask for who's looking, not everybody raises their hand
but if you ask who's hiring,
there's a lot of people hiring all the time, and
so then the people can look around and say
"okay I'm going to go talk to those people,"
so yeah, the networking is an important part.
>> On that point, are you seeing any trends as to
what are the roles that they're hiring for, or you know,
companies or industries that definitely have
changing skillsets, you know John spent a lot of time
helping all those virtualization people moving to
that next thing, what are you seeing?
>> Engineering is the big one, and people are still
looking for OpenStack engineers.
I mean people ping me all the time,
saying "do you know any OpenStack engineers?"
So that's usually the number one thing, developers
to help build out these things,
and then also the companies that, you know,
that aren't OpenStack companies, you know
companies like GE that are trying to hire
what, 20,000 developers in the next couple years,
and Mercedes and Tesla, and you see all these companies
that are trying to build out their software
developer programs.
So another role that is interesting that people are
hiring for is these developer, DevRel,
Developer IVC community roles to try to figure out,
you know how are we going to build our
developer community within our company?
If these are really large companies,
or you know, companies like IBM
which have interest in things like
the Apache Spark community, or
you know, you find these pockets in
these large companies as well.
Or there's a lot of startups, you know
unlike, probably not like Docker as much,
but Kubernetes is going to have this ecosystem of
partners that build around it,
and these companies are popping up out of the woodwork
and they're growing like crazy,
and there's like 30 of them in the Bay Area, right?
So they're really trying to expand as well.
>> I wanted to ask about the general mood of the summit.
My first summit...
You know, it happens every six months.
I've been impressed by how grounded people are,
I see a lot of first time attendees, people
starting new OpenStack installations in 2017 right now,
here to learn...
I'm just kind of curious,
over the last couple summits is there anything
different you see about here in Boston,
anything you're looking forward to going to in the next one,
in terms of kind of mood and how people are,
are people feeling good, are people,
you know, are people still puzzling out this
container issue, or are people still
talking about public versus private, or
what are kind of the mood and conversations you hear
from other community members?
>> I think people are talking about
public versus private again, not still right?
I mean is it, that was kind of an interesting one,
and I think Johnathan brought it up on
main stage on the first day
about that kind of readoption of private cloud,
and that you know, we knew that was a sweet spot
for OpenStack particularly in the US.
You know, lots of public clouds running on
other parts of the world, but
that's a fun conversation,
and it's containers of course, but not just containers.
I think it was maybe Lauren Sell who put the slide up
of all of those other technologies
that are, you know affiliate now, and...
>> Another ecosystem of open source projects
>> Lisa: Yeah, yeah >> that can all interoperate
with openstack. >> With Cloud Foundry,
and Ansible was up there, and Ceph,
and you had a slide full of technologies,
OpenDaylight, that are all playing a role here
and that the conversation has been about,
and I just encouraged in the ambassador session
and in the meetup sessions to do that with your meetup.
Our meetup has been really successful and the people
have loved it because we started bringing in
this other technology.
People want to talk about IoT, they want to talk about AI,
they want to talk about machine learning,
so there's those, they want to talk about, you know
what are the best use cases for OpenStack
so we showcased to GoDaddy
what they built with Docker on top of OpenStack.
So there's a lot of fun conversations to be had right now,
and I think there's a buzz around here, you know
that, what, day one when Johnathan put the slide up
saying, you know, people have predicted the end of OpenStack
and that was like four years ago or whatever,
that was an awesome slide, right?
I'm sure talked to him about it.
>> Yeah, I absolutely traded notes, and
caught opinion about it, too.
Lisa, you live in The Valley,
I'm curious about perception in The Valley, you know,
OpenStacks now been around seven years, it's kind of,
you know, it's matured, it's moved on,
some called it boring because we fixed
some of the main issues, you know
We mentioned all the OpenStack days with you know
Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, all these software pieces on top,
what do you hear in The Valley when people
talk about OpenStack, any misperceptions you'd want to
clarify?
>> Yeah, yeah it's not boring.
It's funny when you say to a California girl
"you live in The Valley," I'd be like,
"let's just say The Silicon Valley."
Not the, not the other Valley.
>> Stu: Not the Valley girl >> Don't make me start talking
like that, right? >> Stu: Oh my god! (laughs)
>> Right, so, no.
It's never boring, it's never...
It hasn't been boring from day one, and
there's been times where I felt like
okay we've been talking about infrastructure
for years now, let's talk about some other things, but
I love the way at this conference they're talking about,
they're calling it the "open infrastructure conference."
You know, this is what OpenStack has become,
and that just opens the conversation.
You know, I love that shift.
There's always something exciting to talk about,
and I don't mean the little inside baseball things,
like should we have done Big Ten,
should Stackalytics go away, I mean, you know
people like to talk about that stuff,
but I don't find that customers or the people
at the meetups are talking about that stuff.
People at the meetups are talking about
you know, how should we run this with Kubernetes?
How do these technologies fit together?
You know, lots of different things, you know
where does Docker play into it?
Networking is still a conversation and a problem
to still be solved, and how are we going to do this?
We had OpenContrail do a meetup
with us a couple of weeks ago.
There's still a lot of interest in
figuring out the networking piece of it,
and how to do that better.
So we're never going to run out of things to talk about.
>> Alright, so how do more people get involved,
how do they find their meetups,
where do they find resources?
>> Most of, openstack.org has a list of all the communities,
but most of the communities use meetup.com,
almost globally, so if you go to meetup.com,
and you put in your geo, you'll find one.
You can contact your local ambassador.
If you want to get involved, I say just go to a meetup.
I mean you can't start leading communities until you
participate in communities.
There is no way to phone this in.
You have to, it's hands-on, roll up your sleeves,
let's get to work and participate, and have some fun.
So go to a local meetup, and meet your meetup organizers,
volunteer, help, and it's so rewarding.
Some of my best friends that I have,
I've met through OpenStack or open source projects.
It creates many opportunities for jobs.
So just start going to meetups and get involved,
and if you want to be an ambassador, there's a list
on the website of how to figure that out.
Tom Fifield runs the whole program with
Sonia's help out of Australia,
but regionally we're always looking for help.
There's no shortage of roles that people can play
if people really want to.
>> Definitely a vibrant community here, doing well,
Lisa-Marie Namphy, always a pleasure to catch up with you,
and we have a full day of programming coming,
so stay tuned and thank you for watching the cube.
>> Lisa: Thanks Stu, thanks John.
(upbeat techno music)