Foggy Software

Or ... some thoughts about organizing OpenStack Meetups On February 1st I've had to joy (and hassle) to coordinate another Boston OpenStack meetu p. This time, using Harvard facilities, which are quite different than our previous venue - suffice to say that Harvard is very different than the Lexington Historical Society (you don't need to know where the vacuum is). But I digress. If you were in the room, you know all about the value of a community, so skip ahead to the "closing notes" for links to preso's, future events, acknowledgements and such. What I find exciting about open source projects is the sense of shared mission and destiny. An open source project fails or succeeds to a large extent based on how well it builds a community.  To be successful a project needs to create a dedicated community of users, developers, vendors and service providers. Users have real problems to solve. Real use cases, real businesses, real money. Devel...

or,dissipating   the fog in the cloud Update (Feb 3,2012):  read the meetup retrospective here OpenStack  is creating lots of buzz in the IT industry. Its promise is to revolutionize the cloud market in the same way that Linux revolutionized the operating system market. Part of the reason that Linux was successful is the community of devotees that saw the potential and ushered the code base to where it is today. But communities don't always just happen, they're made with sweat and pizza. My group has taken on the goal of making OpenStack users in the Boston area a vibrant community. The promise of OpenStack and quick pace of activity has spurred a worldwide  wave of excitement, with local groups spanning the globe - from Argentina  to Japan, Australia to British Columbia. I half stumbled into organizing the  Boston meetup group . Being an engineer, it gave me a new appreciation to what it takes to make an event happen. From gett...

or, what's this DevOps thing everybody is talking about Agile in software development is an attempt to be more real - rather than attempt to predict the future, the methodology is all about taking stabs and correcting with a fast feedback cycle. Start producing real value quickly, and keep chasing the value fanatically. In a recent Openstack meetup discussing Swift  an attendee asked - so swift has all these parameters, do you have good guidance on how to set them ?  A traditional approach would involve enormous efforts attempting to predict workloads, methodically simulating them in a lab environment, and laboriously attempting to tune parameter after parameter to find the optimum setting for those workloads. Can you predict what would happen? You will end up deploying optimized the system based on the lab results driven by the simulated workloads.  By the second week in production you realize that the actual workloads are substantially different t...

Or.. .why do you care about DevOps (and why you want devOps ++) If you've ever written (or tested) a piece of software, you've heard this all before - "but... it works in my setup". That endless back and forth of finger pointing, until way too often, it ends up being some silly environment setting that causes the application or service to miss-behave. DevOps is there to help. No more manual deployment steps to deploy an app. No longer 13 page project plans requiring coordination of at least 5 geo-distributed teams (half of which are in a timezone where the sun has long stopped shining). The DevOps motto is simple - "if it hurts and its dangerous, do it often". The industry has accepted this in the Continuous Integration case - builds that integrate disparate development streams are painful. Assumptions made in isolation prove to be wrong, and whole hell breaks loose when you try to put different, independently developed pieces together. This is a pai...

I have succumbed to the web completely - so here's a blog. Working on open source projects and interacting with the world seems to absolutely mandate that I have a blog.  Well - here it is. Some of the topics I'm involved with include, in no particular order: Open source cloud platforms, mostly OpenStack but poking at things SOA and Cloud - best buddies? Java, python ruby php and their ilk seem to be part of the territory... For the occasional excursion from excitement I try to go hiking camping and when the weather in the US NE is like today, riding. I'm still hoping to get (back) around to flying and fly my homebuilt Q200 (at that point in time, I'd probably need a pig-radar) ... that's it for today. I've got me some RAID's to configure!