 at Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem of support. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live broadcast of OpenStack 2017, here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, the clouds have been breaking up a little bit of sunshine here, and it's our third day of broadcast. We have really a lot of our editorial segments today, going to be talking to more community members, talking to one of the super user winners, number of startups, and happy to start the day, Lisa Marie-Nanffy, who is the US OpenStack Ambassador, CUBE alum, been on a number of times, and Lisa, tell us what's new in your world. Thank you, Stu, and thanks, John, and what a pleasure to be here with you folks in, and hello, Boston and world, good morning. What's new? Well, the OpenStack Ambassador program is expanding all the time. We just had a great session that Sonia did to kick off the day-to-day to really talk about how to get involved in OpenStack, even if you're not necessarily a technical person. It's really important to acknowledge how everybody in our community can contribute, and that's one of the things the Ambassador program does really well. So we just had a session on that, one of the things that I've done with our user group that is new and super exciting is I've morphed it into a little bit of the OpenStack and Containers user group. So I've been focusing a lot on containers, done 12 or 13 meetups on Kubernetes and or Docker since last summer, and I just had the pleasure of speaking in the CNCF Kubernetes track, Kubernetes Day Track yesterday, and that was so much fun out there in the grand ballroom, so. That's kind of some new and fun things we're doing. It's great. This is our fifth year doing theCUBE at this show. Always a robust community, really. When we started coming, it was the people building it. Now, you have a lot of the users, there's different sub-segments. Can you speak a little bit to kind of the maturity of the community and how do people get involved in the Ambassador program? What, how many are there geographically, number-wise, diversity, those kind of things? Oh gosh. Yeah, so it's GEO, oh, it's Worldwide Program, and it's been growing a lot, and you're right. Years ago, here it was the Design Summit, and we sat around and talked about, well, the next six months of the project, and then it morphed into more users adoption, customers, operators are a really big one, too. And so, and now those things are all so big. We have operators, mid-cycles, and the Design Summit has been sequestered and separated out so that we can really focus here on the customers, the community, users, and those types of contributors as well. So, things have changed a lot in the seven years since we've been doing OpenStack. The Ambassador program is fantastic. The Foundation has done a really good job in the last couple of years of acknowledging the contributions of the user community. And so, not necessarily the code contributors only, but the people who are also spending as much time contributing in really significant ways to our community and growing our community. Open Source doesn't work without a community, so we know that, and we're doing a much better job of acknowledging who those people are and rewarding them. How many ambassadors worldwide? There's about 20 of us. I'm the only one in the U.S. right now, but we're about to change that. I believe my friend Sheila is going to join and cover the East Coast, and I'll be able to do everything west of the Mississippi, but most countries only have one. And the role of an ambassador? Do you do a lot of meetups? Do you go speak? Do you're there for people to contact as well? Yeah, we generally recruit or ask people to be ambassadors if they are already doing those things, if they're already running a local user group, if they already have a brand in OpenStack and they speak and they kind of already know how to reach out to people and how to inspire people or people see them on stage. And that's why the foundation approached me to do it. I had been running the San Francisco Bay Area and meetup for three years and speaking at, I don't know, this is probably my eighth, ninth, maybe 10th OpenStack Summit that I've been speaking at and OpenStack days and all of that. And so you kind of see who's already doing it. The cool thing about community is nobody is asked to do it. Like you do it because you have a passion for it, because you love it, because it's the right thing to do, because it's helpful to push the technology forward, because you have a passion for the technology, because you love people. All these reasons is why people get into it. So you find all over the world people who are doing this, they're already doing it, they're not being paid to do it, they're doing it. Those are the people you grab because there is a burnout level to it, but those are the people that have enough passion about it and commitment and believe in community that they're going to be successful at it. Can you talk a little bit about the Bay Area OpenStack user group? It's one of the largest OpenStack user groups. And one of the themes we've seen this week is a lot of talk about containers, a lot of talk about Kubernetes, but containers in general, kind of demystifying the sometimes confusing story about where's OpenStack good for, where's the container layer good for. It turns out it's good for a couple different places, you can containerize OpenStack, you can also still very, a lot of talk about the app layer on top. But you actually, what you just said, you've actually expanded the conversation, you don't just sit there and say, this month we're talking about Neutron, you talk about a lot of different topics and you bring people to the table. Yes. Yeah, Sam's Bay Area, you're correct, it is the world's largest OpenStack user group. We have over 6,000 members. Not all of them are located in the Bay Area. I think people like to join the user group because we provide a lot of really good content and we live stream our meetups, we have Google Hangouts, I record them all, they're all on our calendar. If you go to meetup.com slash OpenStack, you get to us because we were the first one. So we do get a lot of people from around the world and I write newsletters with lots of interesting information. But it is a local community and we do encourage people to participate so the meetups are super important. And the only way to make sure that you keep your community strong and keep people coming back is to have phenomenal content in your meetups. So I work really hard to make sure that the content is interesting, that it's relevant and the most exciting, most relevant conversation since last summer has been containers. The year before that it was networking and it still kind of is and always will be. So we do a lot of meetups on networking too. But containers has been what people want to talk about. They're trying to figure this out and OpenStack has reached a maturity level where people, they're not necessarily learning and if they are they can take an OpenStack 101 course and those exist all over the place. So we've gone to the next level and whether it was cloud foundry or now containers, we do like to talk about what else you can do with this fabulous technology and how you should do it. So we've had meetups where we've presented OpenStack on Kubernetes, Kubernetes on OpenStack. Rob Hirschfield came in and did a whole meetup on Kubernetes as the underlay and Rob Starmer came in and did a whole workshop and hands on about how to run OpenStack on containers. Yesterday our panel, you heard Dan Berg talk about just simplifying it, run everything in a container but keep it as simple as possible. So what pieces do you need? So these are the conversations that we like to have in our user group and people keep coming back because it's an exciting conversation. Yeah, expanding on that, we talked about just people are always coming new people to the community that don't know it, people that are changing jobs all the time, new technologies. I mean, we all know community building is a constant reinvention and something you keep, need to work. How do the ambassadors, how do you stay energized on it? How do you keep the momentum and the energy of the community going? Yeah, well the cool thing about an open source community is no matter where you're working, you're still part of the community. So I've worked with so many other people here. I don't even know where they are sometimes. I mean, we don't tend to talk about what company we're actually working for who's paying your paycheck and especially in the early days of the project that was definitely true. And so some of my good friends have been at four different companies in the time that we've been doing this open stack thing but we're all still working on open stack and I suspect Kubernetes will be very similar or Docker. How many people are working on Docker? But there's only 200 people that work for Docker, right? So these technologies kind of take on these lives of their own and people do switch jobs a lot but people come to meetups because it's a constant thing and it's also a good place to keep networking and keep looking for work. So we get a lot of that at the beginning of every meetup. I ask for a show of hands of who's hiring. If I ask for who's looking, not everybody raises their hand but if you ask who's hiring, there's a lot of people hiring all the time and so then the people can look around and say, okay, I'm going to go talk to those people. So yeah, the networking is important part. On that point, do you see any trends as to what are the roles that they're hiring for or companies or industries that definitely have changing skill sets? John spent a lot of time helping all those virtualization people moving to that next thing. What are you seeing? Engineering is a big one and people are still looking for OpenStack engineers. I mean, people ping me all the time saying, do you know any OpenStack engineers? So that's usually the number one thing, developers to help build out these things and then also the companies that aren't OpenStack companies or companies like GE that are trying to hire 20,000 developers in the next couple of years and Mercedes and Tesla and you see all these companies that are trying to build out their software developer programs. So another role that is interesting that people are hiring for is these developer dev rel, developer advocacy community roles to try to figure out how are we going to build our developer community within our company if these are really large companies or companies like IBM which have interest in things like the Apache Spark community or you find these pockets in these large companies as well or there's a lot of startups, unlike probably not like Docker as much but Kubernetes is going to have this ecosystem of partners that build around it and these companies are popping up out of the woodwork and they're growing like crazy and there's like 30 of them in the Bay area, right? So they're really trying to expand as well. I wanted to ask about the general mood of the summit. My first summit happens every six months. I've been impressed by how grounded people are. I've seen a lot of first-time attendees, people starting new open stack installations in 2017 right now here to learn. I'm just kind of curious over the last couple of summits is there anything different you see about here in Boston, anything you're looking forward to going to in the next one in terms of kind of mood and how people are feeling good or are people still puzzling about this container issue or are people still talking about public versus private or what kind of the mood and conversations you hear from other community members? I think people are talking about public versus private again. Not still, right? I mean, that one's been kind of an interesting one and I think Jonathan brought it up on main stage on the first day about that kind of readoption of private cloud and that we knew that was a sweet spot for open stack, particularly in the U.S. Lots of public clouds running on other parts of the world but that's a fun conversation and it's containers of course but not just containers. I think it was maybe Laurencell who put the slide up of all of those other technologies that are affiliate now. Another ecosystem of open source projects that can all inter-operate with open stack. It was God Foundry and Ansible was up there and Seth and she had a slide full of technologies, open daylight that are all playing a role here and that the conversation has been about and I just encouraged in the ambassador's session and in the meetup sessions to do that with your meetup. Our meetup has been really successful and the people have loved it because we started bringing in this other technology. People want to talk about IoT. They want to talk about AI. They want to talk about machine learning. So there's those. They want to talk about what are the best use cases for open stack. So we showcased a GoDaddy, what they built with Docker on top of open stack. So there's a lot of fun conversations to be had right now and I think there's a buzz around here that day one when Jonathan put the slide up saying people have predicted the end of open stack and that was like four years ago or whatever that was. It was an awesome slide, right? Sure you talked to him about it. Yeah, absolutely. Traded notes of cloud opinion about it too. At least you live in the valley. I'm curious about perception in the valley. Open stack's now been around seven years. It's kind of, it's mature. It's moved on. Some called it boring because we fixed some of the main issues. We mentioned all the open stack days with cloud foundry, Kubernetes, all these software pieces on top. What are you in the valley when people talk about open stack? Any misperceptions you'd want to clarify? Yeah, yeah. It's not boring. It's funny we say to a California girl we live in the valley I'd be like let's just say the Silicon Valley. Not the other valley. Don't make her so talking like that, right? Oh my God. Right, so no, it's never boring. It's never, it hasn't been boring from day one and there's been times where I felt like okay we've been talking about infrastructure for years now let's talk about some other things but I love the way at this conference they're talking, they're calling it the open infrastructure conference. You know this is what open stack has become and that just opens the conversation. I love that shift. There's always something exciting to talk about and I don't mean the little inside baseball things like should we have done big tents, shouldn't we, should stack let us go away. I mean, people like to talk about that stuff but I don't find that customers or that people at the meetups are talking about that stuff. People at the meetups are talking about how should we run this with Kubernetes? How do these technologies fit together? Lots of different things. Where does Docker play into it? Networking is still a conversation and a problem to still be solved and how are we going to do this? We had OpenCon Trail do a meetup with us a couple of weeks ago. There's still a lot of interest in figuring out the networking piece of it and how to do that better. So we're never going to run out of things to talk about. So how do more people get involved? How do they find their meetups? Where do they find resources? Most of it, adopastack.org has a list of all the communities but most of the communities use meetup.com so globally. So if you go to meetup.com and you put in your geo, you'll find one. You can contact your local ambassador. If you want to get involved, I say just go to a meetup. I mean, you can't start leading communities until you participate in communities. There is no way to phone this in. You have to, it's hands on, roll up your sleeves. Let's get to work and participate and have some fun. So go to a local meetup and meet your meetup organizers. Volunteer, help and it's so rewarding. I'm just one of my best friends that I have. I've met through OpenStack or through Open Source projects. It creates many opportunities for jobs. So just start going to the meetups and get involved. And if you want to be an ambassador, there's a list on the website of how to figure that out. Tom Feifeld runs the whole program with Sonya's help out of Australia. But regionally, we're always looking for help. There's no shortage of roles that people can play if people really want to. Definitely a vibrant community here, doing well. Lisa Marie-Nanffy, always a pleasure to catch up with you. We have a full day of programming coming so stay tuned and thank you for watching theCUBE. Thanks too, thanks John.