 Yeah, and it was not the evening. Hi everyone, my name is Sheila Sabie and Thank you for being here. Our presentation is it's an open-source world as we know it how Comcast is embracing open-source culture as well as OpenStack itself Like I said, my name is Sheila. I'm a community development lead at Comcast What that means is basically I'm a community manager Originally, I was working on the open-stack operations team as an engineer and about a year ago I started doing community management work around open-stack and now it's mainly all open-source communities My name is Courtney Ferry. I am a technical count manager at Comcast and the kind of confuses folks sometimes I am not an account manager in that I deal with external Comcast customers instead our cloud team Performs a As a service delivery to our internal Product teams so my customers are our product teams that are delivering Comcast services and using our cloud infrastructure and I Work with them to help solve technical architectural problems capacity planning You name it Some so Comcast Most of you have heard of Comcast or you may use Comcast or you have it in your homes But in case you don't we are a multi service operator global technology software company Or traditionally we were cable and now we're moving towards You know being Majority of technology anyway, so we're two it's two Comcast and NBC Universal We have high-speed internet video IP telephony security and automation for home as well as media properties and universal parks So yeah open source open mindset as you know Making enterprises talking to leadership and getting them to shift the way they think it's pretty challenging sometimes Lots of times people are used to using traditional vendors and being locked into contracts But open source is a little bit different. So Think outside the box There are cultural and organizational changes that need to be made Sometimes you have to go and talk to your senior leadership or send representatives to go and persuade Why we should be using these tools or why we should be open sourcing the software that our team just built And building communities around it and making that process easier for engineers so that they're not battling with with Legal is really important. So thinking outside the box and making things easier for the company to move that towards that direction Is really important. All right so the next question is why or If you want to move towards open source and you need to present this argument to You know your your boss or something they're gonna ask why why do we want to move to open source? The first is gonna be transparency, you know, obviously it's open source everybody can see the code so this is a everybody gets to be on the same page and You also are able to know whoever who has contributed to the code and to some people that actually matters You get to move at a speed that you can control if you are contributing to a Product like to a certain bit of code So there's a feature out there that you don't need or that you need and doesn't exist Anybody ever asked a vendor to add a feature to a piece of software and If you're not a fortune 50 company it may take, you know quite some time to have that happen And it still might even if you are So it's a lot easier if you can just Work with your developers work with the community as a whole and get the problem solved and put your own effort into it to move at the speed that you need and That's again that gives you that flexibility. It also gives you the flexibility to Work on the particular features that you are interested in Thing ahead on my slide, so I've got an example of that Having to do actually with open stack There was a point where IPv6 was not included in In open stack. I think actually Jonathan was talking about this during the keynote on Monday I was talking about it being a feature that was added and largely successful And that was actually a feature that we needed very much at Comcast to be successful I think you can imagine, you know, we're doing a lot of IP CDN work and that sort of thing. We really need We needed to have IPv6 and we put a lot of resources into working on that as well and Worked a lot with the community worked a lot with the teams To get that upstream to get it into a release in time for us to be able to use it to be successful with it and Yeah, that's pretty gosh darn liberating and All right, the other really cool thing is okay. It's free You know free software is really nice if you're doing a POC of something and you don't need to spend a lot of licensing It gives you that flexibility to you know, play with something new without making an investment If you really like it, you don't have to turn around and pay for both licensing that sort of thing Another very important aspect of what we've got open source these days is the common API's This allows you to be vendor neutral You know, we're vendor neutral If I stand up, you know, if we stand up a cloud somewhere On a particular brand of hardware And get everything set up, you know, we've got our deployments all ready to go and then six months later we Want to stand up another Instead of infrastructure and we go to buy the hardware this time, you know Another vendors got the same specification or specification. We like, you know, a little better or something We're not locked in to using something that only works on that particular vendor is only approved by them These common API's you'll find that pretty much all of the hardware vendors out there are supporting These ubiquitously so it helps keep you from being locked in there from another aspect With the API's it also allows you to be Platform independent in that you can use You can you can build yourself a hybrid cloud more easily. You can use your internal cloud stick out on open stack Then those API's are available on Public clouds that are out there it allows you to tailor your workload You know own the base and rent the spike which means Put the workload that you know is static on the gear that you own Use that an effective level of utilization and then when you've got those spikes when World crisis has happened or the olympics or whatever if you need to be spike out to a public cloud Or if you've got a workload that only runs for two hours in the middle of the night You can put those out onto a public cloud And save yourself money for something that doesn't have to live out there all the time And you don't have to have unused infrastructure sitting around for it Yet you're not having to build something different and use different apis to direct your your workloads to different places Support There's a lot of There's a couple different ways to actually get to get support on an open source platform And a lot of people are going to stand back and they're going to go, oh, but it's open source I can't get any support. Well, actually you can there's a lot of vendors out there that are offering support for these platforms You've all been down to the marketplace, right? And I hear sometimes well, that's really a cop out. Then are you really using open source? And yeah, you're still using open source You're still using the apis. You're still using the application That you know has these codes available that you can actually look at you can follow the track you can be You can follow the roadmap of where it's going to go to help make your plans You can come and work with the community to help develop features still You just may not have your own, you know department of developers that are going to be contributing or You know a giant pile of engineers to help you work on something because We all know this is complex and challenging So there are companies that you you can get support as a service Instead of having to worry about spending all of your money out a bunch of licenses And then Really, what are we all doing for support? It's our community, right? We are all supporting each other. We can jump an irc and ask a question. Hey, I've got this problem How do I do this you use one of the mailing lists? So this community support is something you don't necessarily get with the proprietary product either All right, so let's talk about our journey back in 2000. We were predominantly just Pretty much using open source as a consumer We I'm pretty sure that at that time there was a lot of influencing going on it was before Courtney and I's time but And in 2006 we were also consuming commercial open source software By 2017 which is present day. We are consuming. We're leading. We're Upstreaming and we're pretty much trying to lead the path in open source One example is in 2015 our content delivery network, which is patchy traffic control It's it was open sourced and so You know we go we do keynotes We speak at the conferences and we build tools and this is not just necessarily open stack related It's open source all across the company We use tools such as ansible github a lot of time on github terraform open stack kubernetes So yeah, so we're just basically using a lot of the open source tools We're trying to get stuff upstream today and we're trying to do more So the team that i'm working on is actually open source practice at comcast So we're trying to kind of standardize everything and just make it a lot easier to do this kind of stuff All right, so That's open source as a whole our story with just using open source software in general Okay, so we're at an open stack conference you know, what about what about open stack? So what is As comcast, what's our story with open stack? How did we get where we are? To be you know part of the hundred thousand core club, right? So 2013 we started off of with a proof of concept. We built two regions and we put it on idle hardware read that as old Because you know didn't want to put a lot of investment into it and wanted to kick the tires on this Took us one year to decide that this was something that we really wanted to get behind We got at that point we opened up our test environments to our product teams and said Okay guys stick some applications on them see what you can do and the applications team said This works. This is great. They enjoyed the flexibility that they then had to Start using the tools and we went all out. We ended up buying, you know, I mean we made the investment we bought a lot of hardware and We got open stack into production One i'm talking about production when you pull out your Remote control and you start pushing buttons to change the station That remote control talking to set top box Is actually making a call to an application running on an open stack cloud That you know looks up What show is supposed to be showing on that channel in your market and then it's talking to another application that is then directing The content, you know from the video service down to your set top box These are applications that are actually running in production on open stack Today these are very this is We're not using it just for our our back end, you know internal stuff. These are customer facing bread and butter What else are we doing we have built an internal community around open stack so We have these summits here we And everybody you see how we're benefiting it from it, you know as our larger community Well, we do internal summits also at Comcast. We try and do two a year As we can We have our open stack team will actually come and talk to our cloud team will come and talk And let our users know how things are going what we've got planned Hey, here's some cool tools. We've been working with The really important thing about this though is that then we have Our users our product teams come up and present To all of the other users about what they're doing what tools they're using how They're using, you know open stack and how they're using these other open source tools to produce the product. So we've got this Community and the sharing and learning going on internally We also Something else that somewhat mimics the the greater community that we do internally We have we use slack and we have an internal slack channel called open stack And I looked this morning. It currently has 1129 People in it in our internal open stack slack channel and Maybe 20 30. I don't know. I didn't have an actually counted, but yeah A handful of them are actually people that work on the cloud team, right? We're all in there The rest of them are our users people within the company that are using this application You know people that are gung-ho about this people that have just started and have questions to ask like, you know, how do I You know, how do I build a VM? I mean we get people in there doing that and then we've got other folks and they're talking about You know how they're tuning their databases so Yeah, and just to touch on what Courtney just mentioned the slack channel is awesome because I used to be in operations And I would sit there and answer questions and then once customers started answering other customers questions It just became a forum and it's popular and active and people are chatting in there They talk about their applications what tools they're using and it just kind of you know Became this awesome tool. So we're really happy with it. We highly we highly recommend it. Yeah, definitely So the footprint so we're in over 30 regions. We have a region being deployed right now as we speak. I think tomorrow It's supposed supposed to be tomorrow tomorrow. It'll go live. We're very invested in open stack We've got over 900 projects and by projects tenants. That's not necessarily applications. It's just pretty much Um The tenants that we get requested so we can talk more later You guys can see us and we'll talk about some of the we can dive deeper into the applications that are on the cloud But yeah, so we've got petabytes of seph objects and block storage Again, if you want numbers see Courtney and I later, we'd be glad to help, you know, answer some of those questions And we've got over 20 000 instances All right So One of the things she mentioned earlier is that if you're going to be doing open source things within your company Not just using open source products, but if you actually want to Produce an open source product You've got to actually give your engineers a path To be able to do it. You've got engineers sitting around saying wait, I've got this great application I really want to you know upstream it because Or I really want to put it out there because I want other people to contribute to it and help me grow this application And and do these and we want to put it out there because it'll look good for the company And the engineers are going You know, I'm sorry you guys aren't, you know marketing people you're uh, they're not Lawyers to understand licensing and that sort of thing So as a company you need to actually make a path for your technical people to be able to do these things So you have to develop a process and let people know what it is. So We've done this Real high level our process. Um, you have to give folks some way to actually be able to contact the folks The smart folks that understand the business rules For us you open up a ticket that way you don't have to go hunting them down figure out what their email is You go open up a ticket and the ticket gets routed off to our open source advisory board And the folks on the open source advisory board get back to you through the ticket And then they're going to set up some talks and there's Going to be some going back and forth and talking about the application and how it represents the company and obviously right It's a big company. There's got to be a lot of talks with the business teams But at least they have a path of finding each other because you'd be shocked in a large company How challenging that can be if you don't actually set it up and say hey guys, this is what you do Once uh, you know and once you've gotten got through that it gets pretty simple, you know You publish it. Where do you put your code on? We use github You can get your pr teams behind it. You can market the fact that you know, hey, we're great. We've put this out there um The next really important thing though if you're actually, uh Putting out your own open source you're open sourcing your own application Is not pushing it out of the nest and going fly free, you know, uh You need to stay involved try and build a community around it The idea of putting it out there is for the application to grow You want other people to not just use your application but also to contribute back to it So other folks using it are you know, this is great But if we do this it can do you know a little bit more and that won't that be amazing and you end up with Open stack, right Yeah, and that's basically I mean that's how you maintain accountability for You know the baby bird you pushed out of the nest Yeah, and the whole oh sorry open sourcing process that Courtney just mentioned it's a work in progress So if anybody's doing it really efficiently at their company Please let us know we'd love to talk to you and you know figure out how to make the process smooth And an easy transition for our engineers So how to get people to do it streamlining the processes as she just mentioned Make it easy for your engineers to open source their software or to upstream their work For example, let's say Courtney has a documentation patch that she wants to put in And it's let's just use an example deployment documentation. It goes to the operations guide. She's Been doing this for months, you know, she doesn't need to go through a ticket every single time She wants to put in a patch maybe blanket that process for her make it easier for You know the engineers and the developers Foster inclusiveness make sure everybody knows that They're welcome to contribute. It's not necessarily you don't have to necessarily be a python developer to Contribute to open stock. There are a lot of many ways that you can contribute make sure, you know, you spread the word documentation Yeah documentation work groups user groups What else do a talk at a summit? I mean, there's a lot of things you can do ask that open stock Answer questions for people you can answer questions on the mailing list. You can just hang out in irc You know lots and lots of ways Internal upstream open stock training. So what we did is we there are a lot of people They they might know git and garret and they might be developing for many years But the upstream process with open stock is a little bit different for example the git review process It's different. So make sure that people are all sitting in a room I know for us we just sent a calendar invite out and then I just you know trained everybody And they were so excited to Sit in a room and there was a lot of energy there people are helping each other You know put a patch in and then the especially when the patch goes through, you know Woo yay exciting. So share your milestones if let's say Courtney for example She wanted to upstream some code and she got the approval from the open source process She should probably share those milestones with everybody else so that they know that the process wasn't that bad maybe Recognize and reward the achievements and people that are contributing upstream in your company They're making your company look good and that's some street cred right there So make sure that you're recognizing them rewarding them send them to summits give them a raise I don't know whatever everybody's motivated by different things. So talk to your teams and see what Would make them happy Um, and then oftentimes I ask people why aren't you upstreaming this? You've just built this awesome tool and the community needs it. They don't have it You need to upstream this and they say oh, I don't have time You know, oh, I'm so busy. I have no time to do this Well include community efforts in their work day when you're doing your scrum planning or your agile planning Put 20 percent in for as a goal for people to do community work. It's really really important And then generate reports on community work. So when you're sending stuff over to your senior leadership teams reports numbers I don't know bi-weekly monthly report. Whatever it is include a community You know little section with community stuff on there so that they're aware because this kind of stuff goes a long way I'm not telling what Stacolytics does all right so One of the tools that we use for collecting our data on you know, hey, we're great. We upstream is Stacolytics Anybody can use it And this is where I get to brag about, you know, how wonderful we are. This is this is my uh, this is our we brag about ourselves slide so, uh What two years ago the Vancouver summit we'd contributed 36,000 lines of code Okay, come forward to two years. We're at 110,000 a little over 110,000 lines of code contributed to open stack at this point Um, and we've got data to show So this is nice. You can do this internally you can If you're spending a lot of time Doing this you can actually get you can pull these down for individual users and Go to your boss and say hey look cool stuff, right? And there's we've got a lot of other stuff in the contribution summary here But yeah numbers numbers are good, right? so That's not the only way that you can contribute though there are And other ways to actually gain recognition within The community for the work that you're doing One thing that we've been doing In northern virginia where i'm currently based Is we host the northern virginia open stack meetup group It's two years old. We've got 600 members in there now we've had We've had some really impressive speakers um Let's see here. We've had uh ben silverman out. Uh, he's the author of uh open stack for architects Um John dickinson ptl for swift came out get a talk on uh swift encryption for us and People eat this stuff up and it's great because we got all of this talking and communicating going on And it looks good for your company guys, right? Yeah, I think there there I am there are my shameless plugs. Yeah, and there's other ways that you can also Uh track the work like there's an a uc. So it's an active user Uh contributor, you know, there's a there's a there's just a lot of ways to get All those things tracked Um I was gonna say that you know the 600 numbers seemed really exciting two days ago until I talked to lisa marie So shout out to lisa marie. She has 6 000 over 6 000 members in her user group and it's uh san francisco bay area So that's awesome Oh, and if you're in those areas look them up just get in to meet me and Go look up open stack and you'll find a local meetup group. So if you need to if you want to do more of this locally Yeah, and we try to bring Uh users typically to come speak at our meetup so that it's not, you know, sales pitchy the entire time So we'll have you know, if we do have a vendor that wants to present that's great We we allow it, but we'll have another speaker come That's actually a user an operator and come Do a talk and then we'll do we'll dedicate like 15 20 minutes at the end for the vendor to do their their talk so I forgot to mention user groups No User groups. Oh, yeah, good. All right. So let's go ahead and end with a quote Free software is a matter of liberty not price to understand the concept You should think of free as in free speech not as in free beer. So That's my richard stallman And I guess we're done, right We're doing this No, sheila. We're not done You forgot about the the obligatory pet pics Because we have an adorable golden doodle pixel Goes with this one and and my mail order kitty zuzu because you know, you've you've got to have Whatever You have to have the obligatory pet pics Okay, so feedback The open stack summit mobile app includes a feedback button on the bottom We'd love to hear feedback. We'd love if we suck. Let us know if we were great Let us know anything in between whatever We'd love to know so give us feedback if you can Tell us what you think and thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it