 Well, hey everybody welcome. Thanks for joining us today. So I'm Michael Solberg and this has been Silverman We wrote a book called open stack for architects over the last about a year and a half and we wanted to talk to you today A couple things like first of all why why we wrote the book. What's in the book? What was writing the book like? and also Why would anyone write a book anymore? So I'm a I'm an architect at Red Hat for the past maybe like Four or five years. I've been working on open-stack clouds with customers designing them and helping them build them out And Ben. I'm an architect at Onyx Enterprise Solutions Formerly, I was at Mirantis as an architect as a system architect there and prior to that I Built American Express's first open-stack cloud at the time about 2013. It was the largest financial services cloud That existed it was on Havana the nice house. I'm sure I built a larger one at another bank. I can't So you know you think about when a lot of us got our start in IT if we've been doing this for a while I think one of the things that we would all do is go down to Barnes & Noble and get a book Right, we'd sit down and read the book and learn how to program or whatever and it seems like these days Less and less that's happening But I still read a lot of books in technology and I think Ben and I both have an interest in it So we'll kind of start with the first question that we had which is you know, why did we write the book? So one of the things for me that when I got started was I feel like the existing open-stack documentation is very very good at telling you how to do Very particular things right so if I'm going to install the Nova Compute service There's great documentation on how to do it. There's great documentation on You know all the different options that you can set and what you'd set them to But I feel like there is not a lot of good documentation on Why would I set them to something right so you know If I'm gonna do neutron why would I use a third-party SDN? Why would I use the internal SDN? Why would I do neutron? And so that was a lot of the kind of questions we tried to answer in the book And I thought too I looked at I helped with some other open-stack books By from different publishers and different authors and there were great books on how to how to install open-stack Here's a command by command and here's a description of all the projects and it just kept you know kept getting redundant Nobody was answering the question of how do I plan for a deployment? How do I you know once I'm done? What's day two look like? What do we didn't think about with operations? What about our existing enterprise processes authentication backup? What is what is all that? What does the operations look like? Nobody was really dealing with it. It was kind of a You know a third rail if you will because it's it's such a Temporal mental topic in many enterprises So we want I wanted to you know write a book and answer some of these questions maybe not as in-depth as You know required for most companies but enough that people could get a good start to kind of get a feel for You know putting in open-stack is more than just installing the software and getting instances running It is a culture change and it is a change to a lot of business and an operational processes So I figured that there was no book out there that that did that and I sure made a lot of mistakes in that area And then I watch my customers make the same mistakes over and over and over again So and you know instead of complaining about it I wanted to write a resource for them to go to and future customers to go to so they know at least You know where we were where we were coming from Cool, so how do we write the book? So this is actually Ben and I met for the first time in person last week And we've been working together for gosh. I'm not well over a year on the book I started the book working with a publisher and Kind of got to a point where I realized there was no way that I was gonna be able to get the book done on the Publishers timelines, so we both have you know demanding jobs and families at home And so the publisher got me in touch with Ben and got him on the project And it was really kind of been saved me on the book for sure by coming in and giving me a hand So we started out with kind of me starting on the book and then Ben came in and then we ended up finishing Collaborities the last chapter of the book is actually kind of written by both half of half and half of us And we've been working together on it since then and you know I had a similar idea to Michael's idea and Submitted it at the same time Michael's in process of writing his book and the publisher just so happy happened to be the same publisher So, you know, they were smart enough to put two and two together and said hey Don't write two books guys write the same book and by the way this guy needs some help So he saved me half my writing that I was going to do and he's done He did an excellent job on the first part, so I was really glad to kind of team up with him But it was very interesting You know in the digital age getting us together You're showing me his parts me showing him You know they're my parts and then dealing with the publisher in the middle doing the editing and making suggestions and then You know I'm having me go back over his parts to say, okay Well, my parts don't quite fit with that Can we can I modify his parts and going back to him and you know that whole coordination? Not being in person not sitting down at a whiteboard or whatever was let's say interesting. It's very interesting No, and I would say if you if you are working with a publisher and another author You know making sure that the coordination is happening at the author level and then presenting a very united front to the publisher is always a good idea So what's in the book? So the book is mainly about architectural decisions kind of from soup to nuts that you make when you're doing an open stack project it starts out with brief introduction to open stack and then goes into You know the kind of larger considerations around hardware software selection things like that one of the things that is important to both of us Is that even though we work for open stack vendors? We want to make sure the book was vendor neutral And I think we took a pretty good approach at that and kind of pointed out some things that are good about you know Say morantis and things that are good about red hat And a lot of things that are good about kind of going your own way So the book is geared that direction And I think the only regret we have about what's in the book is that there could be more in the book So we're working on a second edition that'll fill out some of the areas that it might have been a little bit Short right and I think that you know if you decide to go get the book and read it You know people the feedback we've been getting is that it's an excellent read so it reads very smoothly It's not a technical book in the sense that again. We've no line for line It's not a reference guide. It really is kind of written in a story model Talks about everything from deployment planning how to plan a deployment how to think about your architecture But also goes into operations talks about considerations things that we've seen You know, it's all experiential learning that we've tried to impart on in the book. So And as Michael said, I think that the only thing we didn't do is make it a 500 page book because it easily could have been Had we expanded on some of the chapters and we're saving that for the second edition So we're looking for feedback for you know this book to have people tell us Hey, we don't think you went far enough in this area. I'd like to hear more And that will be our second edition really giving everybody what they want to know And then lastly a kind of a question that we wanted to impart on if you're looking to write a book, too I think you know, what would we do different next time? I think we both felt When you're working with a publisher kind of the process works something like you and the publisher set out an agreed timeline And an agreed amount of content and then you kind of work through this process of trying to get them the content in an agile Fashion right so you deliver content. They're working on the technical review of it And then you deliver content and they're working on the technical review and there's a tension on the timelines So I think you know the main thing that I would do differently and what we've been talking about for the next edition is get as much Content written upfront as you can So that you're not feeling pressure while you're doing it. So writing a book is a really enjoyable thing It's something that's a lot of fun to do But it's not fun if you're kind of facing down deadlines and feeling pressure So the more content you write before you start to work with the publisher I think that that's the main thing certainly that's the approach we're gonna take on the next edition is trying to get as much Written as we can before we engage the technical editing process and they do they do chase you down They'll chase you down On the phone, they'll chase you down an email I had one of them like find my Skype Skyping me and it's like I'm going to get this to you. I promise I will I thought I would write this book It's just you know, we're not we're not professional authors. We don't we don't write books for a living So we don't know all the tricks and the trade of the trade. So as Michael said the next book We're gonna just get a jumpstart and we're gonna probably sell them on the idea when we're mostly done That way, you know the timelines they could have whatever timelines they want We just go pretty much go to sleep We just wait for you know the ticker to expire and we pump with the polish on until they're until they're ready to do the full review Hey, one more thing too that I would say is the more collaboration you can have With you know all sorts of different people on the book the more fun it is I I've read a lot of other open-stack books and I've always been jealous because it seemed like they had a lot more collaboration than we did on our books so You know the more people you can rope in the more reviewers a lot of the good feedback that I got earlier was You know from co-workers of mine that I just send a chapter to and get their thoughts on How they recommend doing that yeah, and and if you're gonna write a book also be careful that when your publisher sends it out That all the information is correct, especially when it goes out to them Macafe that the Macafe's the O'Reilly's and the Amazons of the world because they had the wrong authors on our book for I don't know how long in pre-release is like guys Can you please fix this and it was almost like a fixing a dam They put their thumb here and then over on O'Reilly would think had the wrong title for the book or the wrong picture I think our book is still classified as like Advanced neoclassical architecture. Yeah, like we're building buildings Amazon But it's in Amazon. It's doing well in that section. Yeah, we're number one best-seller Italian eight architecture With the Barcelona, I am like second to gaudy for that chapel Amazon So I do have a copy of the book up here With me so if anyone wants to come and look at the chapters if you're considering buying it You want to just take a quick browse through it? I'll be glad to show it to you And that's it. Yeah, we have no more time. So thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you appreciate it