 Hi, this is Shamal Tahir with SuperUserTV from IBM as an offering manager and I'm here with Carol Barrett from Intel who is in data center planning group. Today we want to talk about a very important topic to the community which is operator feedback which Carol has been involved in immensely. So Carol, can you tell us a little bit about how you're involved with this topic, specifically with relations to the product work group? Sure. First off, thanks for having me here today and I'm really happy to talk about this topic. We started the product work group just about 18 months ago. It was sort of coming out of the Paris summit when there was conversation about wanting to have closer relationships and a stronger voice from the markets that OpenStack is looking to serve to help set our direction and guide what priorities we set for development and what's needed to really help operators be successful in deploying OpenStack. Absolutely. So how does this group specifically help the operators give their feedback into the community development process? The product work group works with the different work groups inside of the OpenStack community. Might sound a little confusing but it actually has a nice little funneling system that works where there are work groups that bring together people who are interested in high performance computing or the enterprise market segments or even telco. And those folks can share their needs and experiences and really to form what are the requirements that they have for ongoing deployments. And then the product work group goes ahead and talks with those different teams to get their feedback and input and to aggregate them together to provide one set of requirements and one set of needs into the development part of the community. That makes a lot of sense and I remember you and I along with about six other product work group members were actually in Palo Alto at the Operator Summit where we actually got a chance to sit down with the operator community, listening to the burning issues topics, listening to other conversations around monitoring and tools, rolling upgrades and we got a lot of good feedback out of that. So maybe you can talk about one of the examples of the feedback that we got that we actually took into a user story from that. Yeah that was a great opportunity to get to spend that much time with that many operators talking about what they're doing today and what they need to be doing tomorrow. Now one of the things that stood out in my mind was the user story around a scheduler simulator. Here the operators are saying we're interested in being able to have a sandbox where we can play with the new capabilities coming down the OpenStack release pike so that we can understand how do we use them to take advantage of the new capabilities while preserving the existing capabilities that we need and then we can plan our deployment before we actually roll it out. Exactly. You know it's great to have that opportunity to get that first hand information. Exactly so you can kind of experiment with how you plan on tweaking and tuning your OpenStack cloud before you actually commit to those changes themselves which was a really great idea which I think you know only operators could have brought to light for us. Yeah it wasn't something that had really come up in any of the conversations I'd had with other people up until then. Absolutely. So as a OpenStack community member and as a user and as an operator is the best approach to get involved directly with the product work group or how do you recommend communicating and working and giving your user stories and feedback into this working group. You know I think that there's really two primary paths for an operator who wants to go ahead and provide that input. I think one is participating in the operator's summits right whether it's the mid-cycles or here at the summits to allow us to have that face-to-face dialogue across all of the different operators in the different markets. I think the other way to get involved is to go ahead and join the group that represents your industry or the type of market that you're serving whether it's high performance computing or telco or we have sort of a large deployment area working group as well so that you can talk with the folks who are of a similar market and can both learn from them and share your challenges and then bring that into the product work group and into the community. Absolutely that's a great suggestion and I think you know having the conversation with your peers always gives new insights to everyone. And it is also an interesting point because the product working group actually belongs under the governance of the user committee where these working groups also reside and so by participating in those working groups you're still participating in the same committee and we're just helping to make sure that as those individual working groups come up with use cases requirements user stories that we're able to aggregate them and get them back into the community in an efficient manner. Yeah so true you know the user committee spans such a broad set of markets because OpenStack has the ability to span such a broad set of markets that we can come together and have a common set of requirements and then have a one voice into the development environment to help go ahead and increase the time to actually realizing those user stories or use cases as well as maximizing the efficiency of the developers in our community as well. So we already discussed that we want the users to hopefully help with these market-centric and task-centric working groups. Who do we need in the product work group and how do they get involved? So inside the product work group we're really looking for the people who are inside of the companies that are members of the OpenStack community and are setting the direction for their development teams and because they're setting those directions by talking to their users. So they're another voice and a channel for users to bring their information into the OpenStack community. So we're looking for those product managers that wear different titles and different companies but those folks who have that direct connection with the users and with the developers. Absolutely makes a lot of sense. Well thank you and it's going to be really interesting to see how the product working group aligns with the user committee with the operators to hopefully bring a new element of user requirements into the OpenStack community. Thank you so much. Thanks I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to talking with you all again in an upcoming summit. Take care. Thank you very much.