 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Ann McCormick, who is a technical leader, with Cisco, and we also have Sandhya Dasu, who's an OpenStack engineer, with Cisco. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you. So, Ann, let's start with you. Tell us just a little bit about your role at Cisco and what you're involved with when it comes to OpenStack. Absolutely. I've been at Cisco for 11 years. I've been working on OpenStack for about two and a half now. It's been a blast. I've been to six different summits, having a great time. My role at Cisco is I work under the MetaCloud Acquisition, which is basically a managed on-prem cloud solution. And what my role is, is to bring Cisco technology into those deployments. So basically bringing the power of Cisco networking into OpenStack. Great. So just to clarify, you weren't part of the MetaCloud. You were part of Cisco and you're working with that team. We know we actually had interviewed them back before the acquisition. Great to see you. Sandhya, tell us a little bit about your role, what you do at Cisco and with OpenStack. Sure. I have been with OpenStack the last three years and Cisco about the same time as Ann, about 11 years. I've worked in different routing technologies, but in OpenStack, I'm responsible for the Neutron ML2 mechanism driver for Cisco UCS managers. So I've been having a great time in the OpenStack community developing in Neutron, giving a streaming code and stuff like that. We wanted to talk about women of OpenStack, but also the women of OpenStack organization. Can you talk a little bit about what that group is here in the OpenStack community and how you got involved? Yes. Absolutely. Women of OpenStack is fantastic. It's something I discovered at my very first summit in Paris. I was a little leery going in because I wasn't sure what the attitude would be if it's us versus them kind of thing. That's definitely not what I'm looking for, but what I found was an extremely inclusive and encouraging community of women and men. And it basically addresses the need for more women in technology and tries to make the community a more welcoming place. And I think it takes both men and women to do that. And I think their charter is fantastic. They have really great events. Yeah. So I have been involved with women in OpenStack also. Like Anne said, very inclusive community. I have been able to be at different levels of involvement at different times based on the other works that I'm doing. But I also believe that just showing up and doing your work every day is also setting a good example for everybody else to feel welcome. Great. Could you share a little bit? Let me start with Anne. The activities going on at the show, we know just down the row from us here, there's the Women in OpenStack Lounge. I believe there was a lunch you had. What does it encompass at one of the summits? Yes. That's fairly typical that they have a lounge area. Today they had a working session during lunch to kind of go over different things and discussion points. Also yesterday there was a speed mentoring session that I was a part of, which was fantastic. It was my first time doing that, but I really enjoyed it. And they have ongoing mentoring for six month sessions, which I'm also starting to get involved with. And I know I'm missing one, but there's just so many activities that they do. It's great. So I help out mostly with people trying to put their first code out for review. And I think that seems a bit daunting in the beginning because this is a very big community. You get a lot of code reviews from lots of different people. How do you handle all the feedback? So I help out with people with their first upstreaming goal once they enter OpenStack. So, I mean, tech has some diversity challenges, right? It's well known in many, many communities in the technical realm, right? So the OpenStack community, being an open source community, comes out of a particular set of codes of conduct and expectations and participation. What have your experiences been working in the OpenStack community over the years? Does it feel, is it a welcome and egalitarian community, the code of conduct? I mean, last week we just had some, there were some issues in the Kubernetes community, which were swiftly addressed. I think the people's awareness, actually is much higher than it was, even say five years ago, let alone 10 or 20. But how have your experiences been working in OpenStack as a diverse and supportive community? I've found that my experience in the OpenStack community has been extremely positive. So I find that, I mean, before the open source, before I got into open source, I did work with smart engineers but a comparatively smaller number. But now you get to interact with a whole large number of really smart people. And I think you should tap into that portion of your experience more than anything else. So the first time, I mean, I always found that I was happy with the code that I put out for review. But after making all the changes that I got as review comments, I was really proud of the output. So I think there are lots of positives in this environment. You need to make use of that, focus on that. And in terms of the code of conduct, I have only had very positive experiences here. And I find the community to be equally welcoming. When I walk into one of these big rooms with a predominantly male population, I don't go in thinking I'm a female minority. I go in thinking I'm an engineer and this is my tribe, you know? I think it's great. All right, anything in particular that Ishandia was talking about, you know, setting an example as an engineer and as a female engineer and what's your experience been? It's interesting, when I first started out in engineering, I got a scholarship to an engineering school. That was my first, when I started out on the road. And I remember being so proud and going up to receive this scholarship and I heard somebody next to me say, oh, what a waste, they're giving it to a girl. And it's funny because it had never until that point occurred to me that there might be any kind of perception like that. So my first knee-jerk reaction was, well, I guess all the dinosaurs didn't go extinct. But after that, but I mean, I could easily have been bitter about it, but instead I kind of saw it as an opportunity to set an example and to lead with my work and with my competence and to help to change the perception that gender matters when it comes to what you do for a living, because I don't believe it does, so. I study in engineering. I know when I had group projects and had women on the project, it helped. You need diversity of ideas, you need diversity of background and skill set. Is there any comments about just diversity in general that you'd comment from the engineering standpoint? I think, like Anne mentioned, once in a while you do get, you are conscious of the fact that there are very few other women in the room, but that's really, that should not be hindering your progress in any way. Just focus on being an engineer. And I think after a point, everybody starts looking past the gender thing and just look at your work. Once you're around the table or working on a shared whiteboard or Google Doc, right? Gender falls away, you're working on the project. Exactly. Absolutely. And the same thing applies to IRCs too. It's a very democratic channel where everyone has an equal voice. And then in the end, it turns out to be a mediocracy there. And if you have a good idea, people will take it. Otherwise, like everybody else's, you just have to work on tweaking it. The concept of mentoring has come up a couple of times in this conversation already. As people look at the diverse workforce and diverse workforce in tech, people talk about things like the pipeline problem, but from what I understand and have read, a lot of it is supporting underrepresented groups within their careers and in their career growth. And so a lot of that comes down to setting examples and mentoring. Can you talk a little bit about women of OpenStack and how you talked about speed mentoring maybe, and how one, let's talk about women of OpenStack and mentoring, and then maybe even how you're doing mentoring in your own personal career at Cisco. Absolutely, mentoring is something that I'm kind of new to, but it's becoming a passion of mine. As a way to both give back and to help encourage other people, but also I get something out of it. I get inspired by the energy that people bring to things by the enthusiasm. Yesterday at my speed mentoring session, one of the women that I talked to was very, very qualified and very excited about OpenStack. She has a full-time job that doesn't involve OpenStack, so she was involved in OpenStack on the side, because that's fun to do on the side. But basically she was telling me that it was hard for her to break into the community and she was a little bit shy about handing off her resume and stuff. And I think, I kind of said to her, you're selling yourself short. You've got a lot of enthusiasm and I think companies would be inspired by that and want to include you. So it was just kind of a nice way to help inspire people and encourage them. Have you done any mentoring yourself? Yes, so I find that while I'm mentoring someone, there's something that I get out of it too, because whenever you talk to a new grad, you get this enthusiasm, this burst of enthusiasm that helps you fuel your own work again. But I have heard a lot of people discouraging each other from entering this field because they say it's not set up for their success, but then I think that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the more of the men that are in this field, the better it is for everyone else. So that should not be a reason for not getting into this field. Sondra, could you talk to us a little bit about your upstream contributions? What things you've been proud of and excited about when it comes to OpenStack in general? Yeah, so I have been active in the neutron community, mostly in the ML2 area of neutron plugins. What I'm working on is the Cisco UCS mechanism driver for the neutron ML2. What it helps you do is just use the Cisco UCS manager to set up virtual networks, neutron virtual networks, and configure SRIOV ports and basically use the entire UCS ecosystem in context of OpenStack. Great, and you've been to six of these summits. Anything as you reflect back just the maturity of the project, the maturity of the community, or one of the themes this week has been kind of resetting expectations about what OpenStack is and isn't. What's your take on the community? That's interesting, I feel that there was a bit of a bubble perhaps, maybe a year or so ago with OpenStack, but I don't think we have to reset expectations too far. I do think that it's necessary, I don't think it's going anywhere, I think it's evolving, and I really do see it as the second wave of the internet, so we need it, and I think it's great. And Sandhya, really appreciate you joining, sharing your perspectives. We always love to have the diverse experience in OpenStack, actually one of the better shows in making sure we have smart, energetic, contributing women participants to the community, we've had a number on, have a few more, so thanks so much for joining us, and thanks for all of your contributions in the community. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. John and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from theCUBE at OpenStack Summit, Boston, Massachusetts. Thanks for watching theCUBE.