 Hi Ken, thanks for joining me today on SuperUserTV. I know that you're very involved in the OpenStack community as a whole, but more importantly in the Northeast United States, so can you introduce yourself and what you do and what user groups you're involved in? Sure, thanks Allison, thanks for having me on. So my name is Ken Hoi, I'm over at Rackspace as a Senior Technical Marketing Manager in the OpenStack Business Unit. So my job is to produce hopefully good technical content to help Rackspace customers and prospects learn more about OpenStack. And I've been involved with the OpenStack user group community since 2013. I'm currently a co-organizer for the New York user group and also the Philadelphia user group. In addition, back in around 2014, the OpenStack Foundation created a group called the OpenStack Ambassadors and several of us were kind of named to be on that initial group. And our job is basically to help groups around the world kind of get going and help them with maintaining the group. So currently I have the responsibility for a number of groups, primarily groups that are east of the Mississippi River. Wow, and that's a lot of people that you're representing. So what kind of people in the community or even organizations do you represent in your group and kind of how have you seen that grow, I mean over the last three years? Yeah, so both in New York and Philadelphia, which is two groups since I'm a co-organizer, I'm most involved, as it kind of mirrors the growth of OpenStack, it actually started with a lot of vendors, lots and lots of vendors and some partners that join. What I'm seeing now, though, is as adoption of OpenStack kind of grows, I'm seeing more and more users. And in particular it was interesting in the last few, I would say in the last six months to a year, I'm definitely seeing an upshot in the number of people who were, for example, VMware administrators and who are now kind of taking a look at OpenStack and have heard that one of the good ways to learn about OpenStack is to join a user group. That's really awesome. I know the user group program has grown globally so it's kind of nice to see different kinds of people join and get involved in the community. So how often do y'all meet and then kind of tell me what y'all are doing this month to celebrate the OpenStack 6th birthday? Yeah, sure. So we target to meet once a month, doesn't always work out. We've been in the Northeast, we've had a couple of meetings that will cancel because of blizzards. So on average, I would say we meet between, even though we target every month, we really meet maybe nine to 10 times a year, which is frequent enough, I think, for people to feel like they are part of something that's ongoing. So you mentioned this is the 6th birthday of OpenStack. So both the New York and the Philadelphia group are having celebrations. New York one just happened and it was great. We had a group of about 50 people join the group. We had a birthday cake and some stickers that we were able to hand out. One of the things that we're actually kind of selling in conjunction with the fact that it was the 6th birthday, the ambassador's program actually just created what we call official OpenStack user groups where we recognize some of the user groups that have been going on that they meet certain criteria and as part of being recognized, we basically have created user group specific OpenStack logos with the name. So we were able to get that for both the New York and Philadelphia group. So in the New York group, the birthday cake actually had our OpenStack New York logo on it, which was fun. That was great. Yeah. And one of the things we did was because we were seeing so many new people, especially from the VMware space, I actually gave a presentation on kind of the history of VMware's involvement with OpenStack and where that stands today. And then we also had, I think, Allison, you were good enough to send over a presentation that kind of walks through kind of, I would say, the year in OpenStack in particular. And we also walked through that and then just spend the most of the time enjoying some food and enjoying the cake. So that's in New York. Philadelphia's is actually next week and similarly, we'll have a cake there. And because we have a slightly smaller group, we could do more of the budget. So we're actually making OpenStack t-shirts using the Philadelphia OpenStack user group logo that we got from the foundation. Nice. That's really awesome. And great to see that both of those groups are recognized. Yeah. Awesome. And so six years and you've been in the community for a really long time. So what do you see is the next step? What's coming next for OpenStack, both as a project and as a community? Yeah, so I think going forward, again, we have to kind of find that balance. I think there is now a good number of people who've been in the OpenStack community for a while and are using a lot of the projects and kind of going, what's next? You know, that's, for example, containers is big. How do we do containers? How do we do bare metal? But at the same time, we've got a number of people where this is completely new and they're just trying to get off on the ground floor. And it's I know that in the user group, it's sometimes hard to maintain that balance. I think as a community as a whole, we need to figure out how to really make sure that we're able to meet the needs of those more advanced users, but at the same time, not running ahead so fast that new people can, you know, the barrier to entry is too high for new users. No, I think that's really important. Yeah. And then the other thing we talked, I actually mentioned when I was at the celebration, like I said, our job as technologists hasn't gotten, even though there's so many great technologies, our job hasn't gotten easier. It's actually gotten harder in that there are so many new technologies that are coming down the pipe now every few months instead of a few years. And OpenStack, it has, the community as a whole has been able to figure out how to help us kind of navigate through those new technologies and help us figure out which ones make sense and which ones they need to wait and help us be with it kind of as the foundation to start out the integration engine for these new technologies. Awesome. Yeah, I definitely think I agree. I feel like every summit, we bring up a new technology or something new that's emerging that, you know, we're a community or a technology that we're working with. So I think that's definitely a great point and to keep in mind those new folks that are entering the ecosystem that not to create that entry level to where it's too difficult to complex to understand. Well, awesome. Well, thank you again, Ken, for joining me today. And I appreciate you talking about your user groups and what your focus is and how that group has grown over the last three years. Thank you. And I really appreciate the support of Foundation. The New York group, I think actually one of the oldest groups it was actually started in 2010, even before I got involved. And, you know, the foundation has been great at supporting us and helping us get to basically our six years as well as a user group. Thank you. Awesome. I love to hear that. Yeah. Well, thank you again. And enjoy the rest of your day. You too. Thank you, Alison. Bye.