 My name is Allison Price, and I'm with the OpenStack Foundation. And today I have Yusuf, who is one of the user group coordinators in the OpenStack community. And I'd like to go ahead and pass it over to him to introduce himself and how he is involved in his local community. All right, Allison, thank you so much for that. So I'm Yusuf Raja. I live in a very exciting place called Durban, South Africa. And I hope a lot of you guys come and visit too. So the reason I started the Durban OpenStack user group was that I started using OpenStack about two years ago. The reason I started looking at it is I work with many different types of organization. And South Africa is quite diverse. So we've got SMMEs that are able to afford certain types of technologies. And then we've got quite rural type of communities who need technologies, but they have very limited access to it. And so I thought a thing like a free and open-source cloud operating system sounds like something every community would want to use because without the internet, without access to simple things, like I think Uber has made stuff so exciting for users. But if you don't have an infrastructure to run things like that on, you can apply it in a local context. And so when I looked around, there was nobody. And after two years, I figured if nobody did it by now, I better start it and hopefully they'll come. So that's how it started. Awesome, and what has the response been like in your community so far? Have you had a lot of people interested in joining meetups or how has that kind of effort started? Okay, so ironically, it works a lot more by me actually talking to someone face-to-face and saying, hey, have you heard of OpenStack? I don't know if guys, other user groups have the thing, but I literally made posters and went to like the local stores and stuff and put posters up so that people just at least see the name and then ask about it. And then people were actually involved in DevOps in our country. Some of the people, members of the team haven't even heard the name OpenStack. So, you know, I started asking myself, why? You know, it's, and it's similar to a few years ago when we started using Linux, but a lot of people, down here, they don't pronounce it Linux, they say Linux. So it just goes to show you like there's a lot of barriers to entry for the technology. And so I have to do a lot of explaining first, but once the guys start to get it, then they can start seeing, hey, wait, this is something we need to pay attention to because it's actually quite an important piece of technology that we need to be a part of. And also, I don't know, maybe it's a geek or nerd thing to say, but it's also quite a feat of engineering because it's not just a code, it's this whole community, they're all over the world. They get up and go to sleep at different times. They are so diverse. And, you know, our country's history, we've been through a lot when it comes to being able to communicate with each other as a normal community, we were literally kept physically apart. So you had white people that lived in separate places, black people that lived in separate places. So we've got all those whoops to jump through. And I think technology, especially something like OpenStack, is a fantastic platform to start bringing people together in a creative way. Because, I mean, I make my living of consulting on things like Linux and OpenStack. If they didn't exist, I wouldn't be able to send my kids to school. So it makes a big impact on my life. And we have a lot of intelligent people here, but unfortunately to get to them and to get the resources they need is a bit of a challenge. But I think that's gonna change now, yeah. Definitely, that's a great story. And it's really interesting, like you said, how it impacts your country as y'all are, you know, you're trying to spread the word and your ideas for how OpenStack can bridge even some of the culturally cultural things in your country that y'all are facing, excuse me. And you mentioned that you've been using OpenStack or around OpenStack for two years. What have you seen change? Because we're, this month is the sixth birthday. So what have you seen change? And what do you think is gonna change next? Like what do you foresee to come? Well, look, in terms of, okay, let's start at the interface level. There's been a lot of nice changes in horizon. It's simple things, but the fact that when you click on the network tab and you can see that beautiful network topology diagram pop up, it's a bit of eye candy. But that same eye candy is what a lot of people look at on this end to take something seriously. They want to see, it doesn't matter that it's free and that it's open source, that's secondary to them. They wanna see a polished product that works. And when they can actually start seeing those things, doing something meaningful for them, then they start to get onto it. In the earlier days when I was first putting an example client, it's a large educational institution. And they serve content for people outside of South Africa as well. So they depend on an environment that's a bit elastic. However, they don't use cloud technologies to do that. They're still using quite traditional methods. And to get them to make those steps has taken a long time and they've taken it in stock. You know, the faith in the technology is not yet there. So when changes in OpenStack happen, like for example, object storage. You know, it's a simple thing, but to explain object storage to people here and why it's important, you can only win them over when you can actually display the technology at work for them. And what has happened, things like for Ansible and OpenStack, that has been a good thing for me because it means standing OpenStack up was a lot easier. And I could demonstrate it, you know? And so things like that have made the difference where you can show a real use case for why this works. Definitely, and so this month, we signed up to celebrate. So what is your local community or what are you doing in the community to celebrate the sixth birthday with the folks that you have gotten interested? Okay, so thank you very much. We are so excited to have this party. I don't know if I can just tilt the screen to show you our really proud T-shirt. Tantara, the thing. It's very exciting. So what I figured is how we would get the word out is bright red T-shirts with a big six on it and a whole lot of people that's gonna get some attention. So that's good. It's a icebreaker. So we've got T-shirts, there's a cake and I'll send you guys pictures with the logo and stuff on it. The idea is to have a bit of a festive type of attitude and laid-back setting. So we've got some nice music. We had a place called Green Door that's very laid-back and chilled out because people get really nervous about hearing about this new technology and using words like cloud. People even in the tech sector, you're still being cloud means storing your files in the internet like that type of thing. It's still a little primitive in a way but it's not that they need to be educated more about it. So I wanna do that in a playful environment and so we're gonna have a little presentation, light-hearted talk and a bit of Q&A and then we're gonna raffle off the exam. Thank you guys very, very much for that because actually that's the part I'm really excited about. The person that gets that opportunity is actually, I cannot emphasize what a huge opportunity it is because it could change their lives. There's very few DevOps in our country. A lot of us who use the word DevOps also are not entirely confident that we are playing it the same way like everyone else. So we just need a few guys to sort of run with it and then they're gonna get it. They're gonna get it and I'm excited about that. I'm really excited about that. That's fantastic. We're very excited to have someone in each user group take the certified open stack administrator with a COA exam. So definitely interested for feedback and excited to get more people trained around the world who can do what you do and share that message. Thank you again though, Yusuf. This was really great and it's really interesting to learn about open stack in your area and I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with us. You're welcome. It's been such a privilege for me. I mean, I cannot tell you how grateful I am. I mean, I wish that a lot more people around here can get that kind of people. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe you guys know about it. Maybe this, you've got a bug in your code that bites the person that starts using it and then it get a fever and an open stack thing starts. I'm hoping to get more people with that open stack fever and get them excited about it. I believe in the technology. I feel it can make a difference too. At a very real level to people who never thought technology could be different.