 Okay, packed house, as I suspected, because no one on the planet wants to hear Sean Kerner talk about security or Adrian Otto talking about containers, because we're so tired of those things. I can hardly contain myself. So while I ask you guys a couple questions, just so we can really tailor make this thing for you, because there's not that many of you today, although it will be shown to millions. Oh, I'm only going to switch it once after this. I just thought we'd put up sort of our philosophy here for you, but just a show of hands who right now is running a community or managing a community, a community organizer of some sort. Okay, which community? You're the, you're on the Korea user group. Okay, what's your name? Ian Choi. Ian Choi? Oh, welcome Mr. Choi. Okay, anyone else? All right, then, and, but how many have been to one of your local meetups? Open-stack meetups. Okay, just one. Okay. What, what geo area are you from? Oh, okay. So like the Raleigh meetup? RGP. RGP? Okay. Good stuff. Okay. And let me ask, where are you from? DC. Okay. Mexico City. Mexico City, right on. And sir? Orange County. Orange County. Oh, so Gary's here. No, no, no, no. Somewhere in between. Oh. Orange County people, they come down to San Diego. Here we go. Here we go. You don't want to go all the way up to Pasadena. And we're going to start already, aren't we? Doesn't it kind of, okay. I'm going to have to separate these two. I think it has to do with traffic. And the time of day, I imagine, if you did a breakfast meetup, maybe you'd have the opposite situation. And then one more. Sir, where are you from? Orange Country? I'm sorry. What country are you from? No, like what? China. Okay. Sorry. That's where I was getting at. Okay. China. So China has lots of user groups. Shanghai or Beijing? Beijing. Okay. Okay. Great. And you walked in late. I was just asking people what geographic area they're from. LA. From LA. Okay. So Gary would be your... Have you been to Gary's meetup? Yeah. Oh. Oh, okay. You snuck in after I said who is actually an organizer of a... No, we were just trying to gauge if we were talking to people who were already running user groups and wanted maybe a little bit more information about how to do that. If you're looking to start a user group yourself. Or we've done this talk a few times before and so we like to make it a little bit different every time. And this time, we're really focusing on if this is the year of the user and the year of adoption, what role do the user groups play in that? And that's what we're going to focus on today. But I'm going to let my esteemed panelists introduce themselves. And if they don't say enough nice things about themselves, I will fill in. I pick them all because they're very different and they're very talented and I love them all. And they all run really amazing communities. So why don't we just go from the side to that side, John, will you introduce yourself? Sure. I'm John Studeris. I run the OpenStack San Diego user group. We're an official user group as of, I guess six months ago. I've been running the group about a year. It was dormant when I picked it up. My involvement with OpenStack, I actually am not involved with a large company. I think you'll find out a couple of the other people are involved with large companies that use OpenStack. I have a small one-man shop technology consulting business, mainly do security and compliance, and sort of run the OpenStack user group because it gives me a chance to get my hands dirty and actually dive into using OpenStack and running things. So when I run the user group, I tend to focus things. There are a little bit more hands on because I find out I get a lot more novice users. So he says he gets his hands dirty. He gets his hands are really dirty. They do a hackathon or a workshop before every meetup down there in San Diego. So if you're ever in the San Diego area, make sure you look at his calendar and you can really get your hands dirty with OpenStack as well. Okay, Beth? So I'm not one of the founders of Women of OpenStack. That was Ian Gentel, but one of the people that kind of keeps it going. And also was active in the Boston users group, one of the founders, but have actually not been going recently because it's difficult. But actually one of my coworkers here is Ross. And one of the reasons he's here is something I'd like to talk about. Because I work for Verizon, which is a very large company. And Verizon really needs a users group to really build the expertise in the muscle. And there's no reason why we can't have regular meetings. And of course they'd be on WebEx and teleconference. But that's again, that's fine. Because that's what the Women of OpenStack meetups are. We do bi-weekly WebEx. On your WebEx? What? On your WebEx. Yes, on my WebEx. Thanks, Verizon. Yes. And we can really start doing things like introducing OpenStack. I have done a little bit within Verizon, but I think we can really expand it. My name's Gary Kivorkian. I'm with Cisco. I run the OpenStack LA group. My co-organizers that just joined me about a month or so ago is Jessica. She's back there. We also just achieved official OpenStack user group status about two months ago after a little bit of fighting and arguing. Long overdue. Just over, surprisingly enough, over a thousand members in the LA group see a lot of interest in OpenStack within the entertainment community with all the production studios that are there. And I actually got into OpenStack through the original company I worked for prior to joining Cisco, which was MetaCloud. We required about two and a half years ago. So I took over the OpenStack LA group from actually Mike Perez, who was the Cinder PTL at the time, but he was moving to Northern California. So he was looking for someone to take over his ownership of the group and it fell to me and I've been running with it now for a little over three years. Okay. Awesome. And I'm Lisa Marine-Ampi. Most people call me Lisa. I run the San Francisco Bay Area user group. We have a little over 6,000 members. It was the first OpenStack user group to start and to run Meetup, so that's one of the reasons. It's bigger than Boston, but not by much. How many members do you have? Well, actually, I'm not sure at this point. I think you're absolutely the biggest one. Because we looked at them all and Seattle was second and Gary's down in LA was third and not to be counting, but to be fair, a lot of those 6,000 members are not located in the San Francisco Bay Area since we did a lot of online things and I always do record the Meetups and put the recording out there on the calendar and try to live stream whenever I can. We have quite a wide international following as well. So a lot of members from around the globe, which is a really cool thing. I'm also the US OpenStack ambassador. I think after running this Meetup for so long, just the foundation said, you should do that, too, also in your free time. Also do that. And so, but I'm really proud that the first thing I did as ambassadors, make the well-deserving San Diego user group an official user group. And one of the second things I did was go after LA. That was also very long overdue. There's a lot of user groups out there. If you are running one and you don't have official status, it's not that hard to get it. We'll turn your gray OpenStack logo to a red one on the official page. Hey, Bruce, how are you? And we'll look after you. So my picture's a little fuzzy. I was just thinking that's post Meetup, Lisa, after a little bit of whiskey. But those are our Twitter handles. So I did promise, if you have a question and you were too shy to ask it, I did promise you could tweet it up there and we will try to catch it. So although my phone's been going crazy today, so if it gets too annoying, I'll not do that. You'll just have to shout it out. But keep the conversation going. This session doesn't have to stop when this session stops. You can tweet us anytime and we're all here for you and tag us all and we'll get you answers and we'll keep the conversation going. So a couple of people straggled in. Who here, if you don't run a user group right now or you're interested in running one in the very near future? Oh, we lost our memory over here because we would be writing your name down or right now. All right, so the first question I'm going to ask our lovely folks here is, what role do you see the user groups playing as OpenStack becomes more mainstream? Because I think we can now say at seven years old, OpenStack is, you can't even argue it's not enterprise ready, it's being run and proven and the demo best showed on MainStage yesterday is also validation of how fantastic this technology is and how stable and how scalable it is and all that. So I think we can now not argue whether it's mainstream or not and just say it is. And so what role do you think the user groups are going to play now that this technology has been adopted so much and is it some mainstream? Would you like to start, John? So maybe I'll argue with you on whether or not it's mainstream. I thought we were done with that. So I actually run multiple user groups and because I find that people are looking for cloud computing, they want to do cloud computing, so they find my user groups because they're doing searching for cloud computing, not necessarily that they're doing searching for OpenStack. They come in, they want to do cloud computing and then we basically show them that OpenStack is a way of doing cloud computing. So I see the regional user groups as being sort of a grassroots movement, getting in new people that have never heard of OpenStack before and showing them, hey, this can solve your problems. This is really the cloud computing platform that you need. And then things like OpenStack Days and the OpenStack Summit are really for people that are using OpenStack and want to get to the next levels. So you get the smaller groups, it's more personal, it's less intimidating than coming to a summit, it's less expensive, right? You can come in, it's got sort of a regional flavor to it. Maybe it's an office or a location that they're used to going to anyways. So they can show up, I try and move my groups around, so it's- Aren't they free? Yes, they're free and we serve some pizza as well. Yeah, free with pizza. Right, and that grassroots movement gets new users in and basically about 80% of people that come to my user group have never even heard of OpenStack before. And really, they want to learn about cloud computing and so it's some topic that meet up and it's not necessarily a pure OpenStack topic. It's WordPress on the cloud, it's IoT on the cloud. And guess what? The cloud happens to be an OpenStack cloud. So while they're learning about WordPress, guess what? They're learning about OpenStack, it opens their eyes. It's trainers on OpenStack, it's a good one. Right, because infrastructure is sort of boring, right? But you add an application on top of it that's then you draw in an audience and get people in. So 80% new members each time, but do people come back? Yeah, yeah, people come back, sorry, they start to get involved to it. Since it is a community, you get that connection, a local connection. And that draws people back as well. But it's if people are busy and San Diego, it might not seem like a big town, but people living in the northern part of San Diego tend not to come to Southern part and vice versa. So as I move around, maybe people might not show up every time, but they'll show up one time and three. And sometimes I have to repeat sessions as well, so I'll do a session in the northern part of San Diego and then again in the southern part of San Diego to make sure of pulling the audience. Okay, you guys want to talk about women of OpenStack on this one? Actually I want to talk about something that John said, which is that I found, this doesn't apply to women of OpenStack so much, but to the Boston OpenStack users group, which is that we have a very high percentage of new users every time. And that's actually a problem because the people who are well versed in OpenStack aren't necessarily going to want to continue coming back if 50% or more of the audience is new users, so how do you deal with that? And for a while, and I have to admit I haven't been active recently with the current version of it, but for a while what we were doing is we have sort of introductory, we start it with an introductory session every time and it would run for like half an hour or something and during the pizza. So people could come starting at 6.30 and if they were new they could get the introduction and then the people who weren't interested in the introduction could hang out and do the pizza and Shmoos thing and then follow with the main event which would be more appropriate to a general audience or people who have OpenStack experience. So we bring in, we actually brought the CTO of Docker when Docker was like tiny little three-person company, he came and talked to us about what Docker was doing and that was pretty interesting and new DB and we brought in a bunch of little startup company, CTOs or CEOs of little startups, they're always happy to come and talk to you. And of course they're always doing something really interesting which is going to be interesting to the more experienced users, so you really have to balance that mix of audience to really build the people to come back. And part of the reason I stopped going to the Boston one other than it moved to downtown and I work out in the suburbs. And again for a while we moved around so that we would hit different groups. There wasn't as many sort of interesting things for me to go to. And the person who runs it currently is not local so that makes it even worse. From my standpoint I think I'm going to try to address your sort of core question which was how do we sort of focus content and I think that really is the big part of trying to facilitate adoption through the user groups. And for many, many months doing my meetup they tended to be very technical deep dives into under the hood with Neutron and networking this and that. And we've really started to try to focus on in recent months more around use cases and what people are doing on top of OpenStack sort of like John was saying is like it's down there just trust us but here's what you can do with it. And I think those are the things those are the topics that are really starting to resonate with people because you also part of those talks what you get a lot of are sort of those lessons learned stories that you know I know that I think in Barcelona someone gave a talk called broken stack. Oh that was a fantastic talk. Which I thought was awesome because it was basically don't let this happen to you. Here's what we've learned by doing this and I think that sort of content shift from continually doing deep dives and technical talks and I'm not saying that they don't have a place at the meetup but I think that there's a balance that we need to achieve between those technical talks and the use cases. We just did one actually our last meetup was focused exclusively on use cases and it really resonated really well with the audience. The other half of the adoption point and I think it comes to John what John was talking about about new members coming in over and over and over again is that what I'm seeing from a lot of my groups recently is that I've got existing engineers existing developers coming in and they're really trying to figure out where to place their bets on the future of their careers and I do I need to learn OpenStack basics should I be learning AWS skills okay I know I said it should I be building my Kubernetes skills what you know where should I focus and I'm finding that a lot of the people especially new coming to our meetups are really sort of looking to where they should be investing their their you know sort of their education and their skill set. Those new users when people first find out I get people who show up and they say yeah I took a look at OpenStack I tried to install it didn't work and then I gave up and I'm like okay well that's the wrong approach come into a user group use OpenStack find out what it's all about and then once you've mastered that then go back and work on installing OpenStack. I think that's a key point of what the use what the user groups need to be is just yeah. I'd like to talk about the the career people because in the Boston user group we get a lot of people they're either you know some of them are working some of them are not but they're they're definitely looking to build some career skills and they're looking to see if if OpenStack skills are something to be worth investing in. We actually periodically host the DevOps LA group in the same facility where I would do OpenStack LA and the moderator of that group he starts every meetup with who's looking for work yeah and you know and it's great because it really those are the groups that I really have to push out the door at the end of the evening because everybody's busy networking with each other trying to you know exchange a business card here you go but I thought that that was a very unique approach with especially within that community just starting off the day with who's looking who's searching. I said the other way though I say who's hiring because everybody this people always learn for OpenStack and people don't always want to admit if they're you know looking for work but or to have put them put them on the spot but if you say who's hiring and then I tell people to leave their hands up and then say okay look around the room now if you are looking for work go and talk to one of those people during the the networking session and that's kind of a less invasive way to connect people but you know kind of back to the the different levels we didn't get a lot of beginners for a while in the Bay Area we kind of had the people sort of knew what they wanted to do with OpenStack we we were separating the meetup out where we had an advanced and a beginning session and we were kind of doing it every other way I run two meetups a month and that's how we used to do it advanced beginner and then it it just became where everybody wanted to be in everyone so I found if you just really publish the agenda very very clearly of what you're going to talk about then you don't get that you get the right level and all of our meetups tend to be pretty technical but then since I started doing more meetups on containers now people are coming because of Docker and because of Kubernetes and they don't know as much about OpenStack so I am getting a crowd now that gets a little bit lost when we start getting to the OpenStack part of it if we if we are talking about OpenStack at all but speaking of content we always get asked as user group organizers you know how do you get the presenters where do you find the good content what is it that draws the audience what should the content look like how technical should it be so let's start at the other end Gary you want to you want to start with that one okay actually that was like my greatest fear when I took over the when I took over the group not only was I new to running the group I was relatively new within the OpenStack community didn't have a lot of connections I remember going to sleep at night after meetup in March and waking up the next morning and going oh my god I've got 30 days to find a speaker for April and it really can be kind of a daunting task the great thing is that the meetup is a great network and the people in the meetups will know people and they will know people I think one of the other great things about the meetup.com website although I have my own issues with its limitations is by looking at your member list you can see the other groups that they're involved with and you can reach out to those groups and find you know speakers OpenStack has just created I mean relatively recently a speakers bureau where you can go and find people to speak on specific topics and that's been a great resource but yeah that's always a challenge but it's through the people you work with and people you know you generally can find some pretty compelling content yeah and if you guys are ever you know star for content like I said if you go through the calendar of our SF Bay OpenStack user group I leave all the content up there I leave the presentations and the and we just started a YouTube channel and so you can always see the videos those speakers some of them traveled to come and speak at our meetup they'll travel to speak at yours so you know ping one of them or ping me if you need an intro and we can also connect you with good speakers look at local conventions that are coming into your town and if if you live in a town that has a conference center and you know if there's a container world or a Docker pond or something maybe you can grab a speaker that's coming into town so there's there's lots of ways to I'm lucky I live in the Bay Area there's like just a lot there's no short people ask me to speak rather than the other way around but do you have this problem because you published your calendar way out right and the reason why I keep the calendar so far out is because I was exactly in the same boat and I couldn't sleep at night going oh geez I gotta do another meetup in 30 days but yeah when I started it it was like I gotta figure out I had twice the problems because I had to find speaker and content but then I also had to find a location every month right and so you know when you're doing this off the ground finding location was tough so it's a lot of networking it's a lot of going out it's finding out who are the companies in town that are running an open stack and that are going to be somewhat sympathetic and want to help out it's co-working spaces I mean this is sort of the latest thing everyone's joining a co-working space so talking to co-working spaces they've got people there that are involved they're also have to lend out their space to solve jump around and have presentations of co-working spaces I take content like sometimes their labs at the open stack summits so I'll take those and bring them back and do them if I have a vendor coming in and giving a talk I'll find out what's the talk about can we do a little bit of topic beforehand universities so in San Diego we've got the San Diego Super Computing Center they use open stack and part of their cloud so I had them come in and one guy gave a talk on their storage system so we did you know we did a storage hands-on lab before he spoke and he was impressed about that so yeah it's networking I try to try to keep an archive of ideas that I can sort of tap and and every time I put together a workshop I put it up and get so you can go to github.com slash open stack San Diego and all the workshops and all the presentations and all the lab material I keep online really my hope is that other user groups can can leverage that and and start using you know those things within their own presentations I'm hoping that the foundation can help with that as well build out some good solid content for the novice level and then also I reach out to public providers so OVH and what's the other one but they're happy to donate credits so when people come in and want to use a cloud I can give out credits for them and we'll do tutorials on that is super cool I want to come back to that a little bit later just like those extra things that you do and that you've gone out on your own to do but as you can tell John's content it's pretty technical what he puts together San Francisco Bay Area as well I found that works well for us it sounds like you left the boss because it wasn't technical enough and you know Gary you probably have more vendors speak than than we do so what do you do to make sure they don't do a vendor pitch necessarily or commercial and that the content is technical enough that the users are happy about that nothing gets presented without a screening everybody sends everybody sends an abstract all the content is pre-approved and the interesting thing is that my members won't take it they will they've shut down a couple of presenters who started to stray off the presentation that they originally submitted no they'll be like wait this isn't what we came for thanks for the pizza but you know hey what's going on but no my group is very very sort of marketing centric or marketing sensitive excuse me and they they recognize a pitch when it's coming right at them so well there's usually a kind of dead giveaway the title of the person who shows up if it's the director of marketing he's not likely to do a technical talk having spent a career in marketing I I am very sensitive to that because I I'm very good at gauging who the audience is and if it's not you know I blind every marketing pitch this is not how I'm wired but but I don't throw anyone out just because they're titled so I've met some really depending on the company to you know you definitely a frog or some of the startups and the team is very technical and they'll keep it very devy focused but what Gary said you'll lose your audience in a heartbeat if you if they're getting sold to you or if there's a commercial that they're getting pitched and so we're also very clear that that doesn't happen it's happened to us a couple times but then those presenters are never invited back because you do you lose your community so as a community manager and organizer we I do want to talk about women of open-stack because so we actually have content that is not technical particularly and that's deliberate actually so what we're doing in addition to the things that we do at the summits is that once we we have meetings twice a month it's actually every two weeks but whatever and every other meeting we do we do some kind of presentation and what we do typically is we focused it on career development or mentoring or something along those lines to give people those softer skills that they need we you know we feel that there's plenty of opportunities to get those hard skills in the technical skills you know an open-stack wherever you can get them at the you know at the meet-ups they're in person and so we've been focusing on that you know developing your confidence and their soft skills that you really need particularly women unfortunately particularly need to make make it in in a technical career we have a lot of mentorship that takes place within the groups and actually that's one of the things that's been fun to watch over the course of you know having someone come in a meet-up eight months ago and said I've never heard of open-stack before but I'm interested in what do I do to friendships building over the course of the months and you know I sat down with Bob and he helped me you know go through all these different courses and you know these these are now open-stack engineers and they walked in the door not knowing what open-stack was but they were just curious yeah alright so since I didn't see anyone raising their hands and they were dying to start a new group I think I'll skip the question about getting started but in case anyone was too shy to raise their hand there are there are resources out there and you can ask us about those through the foundation or ambassador programs and we just if you have a group in your area we encourage you to join that please do not start a new one if there already is one working the user group is an absolutely terrible thing to do just like forking open-stack would be or anything else but let's talk about setting agendas and expectations and I think we have about 10 minutes left if I'm seeing that correctly so some of the open-stack growth areas in my is that right 10 minutes I'm just checking everybody left I think technically we're till 420 340 to okay so 11 minutes no it's 420 now yeah you have one minute oh okay I'm sorry I didn't see you like telling us take questions okay we can do that well my first question for Beth because I really do want to talk about this because it's kind of one of the reasons I have around the panel just about the like the edge technologies and the setting the growth areas because we're talking about how we're growing the adoption of open-stack through user groups and the roles of the user groups so what are those growth areas we're seeing so much of it in telco and I want Beth to to talk about some of that sure so the telco community has really embraced open-stack in a big way and there's a lot of telcos here and as I found out there's about a hundred people from Verizon attending this conference which I actually am totally shocked about because I had no idea we're a big company you know there's 160,000 of us so so that's not surprising that I wouldn't know everybody but so any of the so I think what I'm finding is the big growth areas are kind of hidden because they're not the public clouds you know HP failed and a couple of the other open open clouds you know dream cloud and some of those are kind of public clouds specifically have kind of gone away and so the the new emerging thing are private clouds in a really big way and private clouds that are you know particularly in the telco world are they're huge they're really at scale and edge computing I just came off birds of the feather meetup that that the the Jonathan Price he literally said he was in the meeting and he said oh I figured about 10 or 15 people would show up and and over 60 people crammed into that room to talk about edge computing the use case and you know what that means and and so those are really growing areas and and they're technically very complex and difficult so I think what's really going on here is that open stack is being adopted by companies that want to use it in ways that you can't use like like Amazon you can go to Amazon but you know Amazon comes in one flavor fits all you know it does what it does it's great at what it does but if you want it to do something else oh you wanted it in chocolate right all clouds are vanilla as far as we're concerned so open stack really has the opportunity for you to do chocolate vanilla strawberry cherries on top and that's a real powerful for companies that that want to stand up private clouds so okay and I would say you could say the same thing about containers as well you know we've done a lot of hands-on workshops and containers I know you've done containers and a lot of other open source technologies as well in your meetings is there anyone in particular you think is super important to focus on technology is on top of open stack you know if you want to get widest adoption I would things things that people are running on Amazon typical workloads that people use on a daily basis I did a workshop that was iot devices you know so rather than having to do hardware devices you simulate them in an open stack cloud and start up multiple and time together automation how you can use open stack to time multiple components of open stack together to create an end solution to a lot of people don't think about that they don't realize that hey I can use some of the object storage I can use some of these other things to create when component ties to you know you can stand up a swift storage and and use no other components so and that's that's very and swift is a you know pretty darn good storage system I mean I think to me the thing again driving sort of adoption is just watching what happened at this summit versus previous summits with the addition and inclusion of all the other tech all the other ecosystem technology and really I think that's something that is probably a little overdue but learning that cloud native and open daylight and open NFV and all these other things can really all sort of play together in the sandbox and share their toys and everybody you know there's plenty of opportunities for everybody but the fact that open stack started to promote this event as the open infrastructure event I think was a big step in that sort of helping everybody sort of understand all the different things that are out there that you can use to build your clouds and it's not if you do this you can't do that and that's I think that's a big piece that is beautiful and I'll just leave you guys with the notion of kind of redefining what what success in open stack looks like because we hear this all the time it was open stack to succeed is it going to fail and as as user group organizers and community architects we feel responsible but I think you've seen also with this summit summit Tiri's going to have a talk tomorrow I think about you know should stack elitics go away we've the things we've used to define success and open stack in the past and counting you know commits lines of code and vendor contributions just is going away so just think about different ways to define what success means in open stack and I think you can look at a lot of really successful user groups and some very successful technology that was showcased on the in the keynotes today throughout the entire summit and see that we have really changed the the definition of success in open stack so thank you all for coming we're here that's us keep the conversation going and tweet us feedback good bad all of it and you know come say hi when you come to our town yeah thank you