 Hi, my name is Mark Collier and I'm the COO of the OpenStack Foundation, Sparky Collier on Twitter, if you're into that, and I would like to tell you all about OpenStack today. Hopefully you already have heard of it and you know some things about it, but I thought I'd give you a quick overview of what the software and the community are all about. And also dive into the foundation we recently established and really try to give you a sense for how the foundation's structured and what the mission is and how you might get involved if you are interested in being part of the foundation in some way and helping to shape the future of OpenStack. So OpenStack is cloud software. It's really many different things. It is a community of many thousands of participants, both users and developers and business folks who are thinking about how they can solve business problems with OpenStack and is of course code, which is the basis of the software. And when we think about what problems OpenStack is trying to solve, the easiest way we've found to describe it is to call it a cloud operating system. And the reason we use this term is if you think about an operating system in a traditional sense on a single machine, whether it's a server or a laptop, it's really kind of there to keep track of all the resources that you're trying to access, whether it's the storage or the computing resources and so forth or the network, which is something you're trying to manage. And when you think about putting together a large pool of resources, for example, many thousands of servers in a data center, you really want to get to a point of automation orchestration where you can keep track of all of those different resources, the physical as well as the virtual. As you virtualize, for example, a server with a hypervisor, you want to be able to look across all of those different machines and understand where all the work's getting done and really abstract away a lot of the hassle of managing a lot of equipment by abstracting that by having this cloud framework that takes a look at all those different resources and pools, both compute networking and storage and oftentimes, of course, in combination. And the way that you would interact with a system like this, once you've used software to really kind of automate your data center, is through either applications of your own that might talk to the APIs or a set of tools you may use. So there are many management tools, for example, like RightScale and Stratus and others that work with the OpenStack API and give you another level of insight into what's happening in your cloud and managing your workloads as you want to move them in and out of this cloud or other OpenStack clouds, et cetera. And so you may see, for example, a spike in traffic to your website and you get that monitoring alert and your system is able to autoscale by talking to those APIs and provisioning more resources. So that's just a very basic explanation of where OpenStack sits in your data center. But another way that people frequently engage with it is through the dashboard. So there's a web dashboard, the OpenStack dashboard that has both an administrative view as well as an end user view. So as an end user, similar to engaging with any cloud out there that you may have used, you can log in, you can provision different resources, you can spin up a virtual machine, for example, of different sizes, four gigs, eight gigs, whatever flavors your particular OpenStack cloud is configured to support. And the administrative view, on the other hand, is actually a higher level admin perspective on that OpenStack cloud where you actually define things like the number of flavors. So whether there's a four gigabyte instance that has a certain amount of storage attached to it, all those different allotments that kind of customize the cloud to the users you're trying to target, those are all controlled through the administrative view on the dashboard. And this is really just a kind of a bulleted list to give you some examples of what the capabilities are within OpenStack. And the compute is really kind of the most self-evident when you think of cloud computing, you think of computing. And that's exactly what this is. It's provisioning pools of resources, typically a virtual machine that's like a physical server in the way it behaves, but it's actually virtualized. And then from a storage perspective, we support both object storage and block storage. Object storage is really meant for very large quantities of data that you want to reliably store, typically at very low cost, not as common for performance application, although oftentimes it's paired with a CDN in a public cloud setting, where you can push objects to a CDN to get that performance you're looking for, for example, images and so forth, that you might have large libraries of stored in an object store, but you want to give performance to a web client and then you would use a CDN. Block storage, of course, is very traditional. Storage has been around quite a while as a format, but there are a lot of different ways you can do block storage. And OpenStack Compute has always supported block storage, but recently it's really been broken out as a separate project or separate effort with a dedicated team, primarily to bring more innovation and faster innovation to play by having a team of subject matter experts, domain experts from across the storage industry. And one of the core tenants of OpenStack is it's very pluggable. It's designed to work with the systems that you want to plug in. So it's not overly prescriptive about a specific type of technology, whether it's on the hypervisor side where with the Compute you can choose to plug in different hypervisors or in this case with block storage it works with NetApp, SolidFire and Accenta. And actually just in the last few days, EMC announced that they are now a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation. So when you look at the who's who of storage out there, there's certainly many ways you can do it. And the OpenStack philosophy is however you want to do it, OpenStack can be that engine in the middle. And through that philosophy of being vendor-neutral and being a pluggable architecture, we have these drivers now from a lot of these different companies that are active in the community. And that's really a great testament to kind of the early architectural philosophy paying off. Networking is no exception. The networking capability within OpenStack, OpenStack networking really is designed to let you plug in the networking technology of choice. Now of course the flavor everybody's talking about these days is SDN or Software Defined Networking and some of the leaders in Software Defined Networking have actually been creating this portion of OpenStack. So it's very well architected and with that in mind so that if you want to be really out there on the cutting edge and you want to really let software take over your data center, well the networking is kind of the final frontier in many ways and you can certainly do that with SDN although because it's pluggable again gives you a lot of choices you could certainly use the networking capabilities and talk to a more traditional network layout with physical gear. It doesn't require to use SDN but that is one of the things that's kind of driving this pluggable capability that was recently added in the Folsom release a few months ago. I talked a little bit about the dashboard, the different roles. Last but not least the shared services really. There's a couple of examples here so there's a multi-tenant authentication system and that's really important because when we first started to kind of pull together a lot of these different components into one cloud operating system if you will we realized that one of the things you want in common is authentication. You don't want to have your users logging into the storage system discreetly from the compute system and particularly in the example of the image service whereby you want to have a library of images and you want to be able to keep track of those whether it's your favorite flavor of Linux or if it's the lamp stack or some you know some whole library of images you may have that when brought together constitute you know your whole app architecture and you may use you know Sheffer Puppet or what have you but when you think about the images being let's say stored on the object storage and of course you're going to move those into the compute service or into the block storage service when you want to actually go into production with it you know having it all working together seamlessly with one authentication system is a requirement we saw early on and so that's part of what we call the shared services. Now the open development process is one that is really interesting I think it's extremely important to how OpenStack has come so far so fast and it's something we're very committed to the process itself as well as the fact that it's open you know those are those are kind of two important points. First of all we release new software every six months there are also milestones along the way so you know you might think of those as a point release or kind of an interim release but but in reality what happens is that kind of as soon as we're done with one release we have a design summit a couple weeks later usually somewhere in the world where we're all the people who are used to working over IRC and mailing lists and over the phone and talking online in various ways throughout the year actually get together in person very important to get to meet the rest of the people in the community as many as we can possibly you know get to these summits and plan out that next release and so what ends up happening is they really start kind of working on the next version right after the summit and you end up with these milestones kind of periodically along the way but most users tend to gravitate towards the big releases every six months and then of course those are upstream to a number of Linux distributions so all the major Linux distributions now support OpenStack and I think that's that's a fantastic testament to all the excitement and the contributions that are coming in from those companies and those communities really is has a lot to do with the momentum we've seen in OpenStack and we just going to be more excited about that and to that end you know we've had over 600 contributors who've actually contributed code to the project and made the software what it is today if you want to become a contributor any time you're looking for information the Wiki's always a good starting point but there's a wiki.open store excuse me wiki.openstack.org slash how to contribute if you want to check that out when you look at the community you know it's hard to put numbers on a community and I think it's easy to to you know lose sight of really where the passion is in the community and what's really driving it if you you spend too much time looking at the numbers but you know the ecosystem the number of companies that are involved in OpenStack is is something we we set out early on to pursue I mean we wanted to see a lot of companies investing in OpenStack and so you know one way to measure that is just how many companies are there but at the end of the day what really matters is what are they doing are they active are they investing are they hiring and so you know very happy to see that they're certainly bringing in a lot of people to our summits and so you'll notice you know the the pattern is quite similar between the number of companies getting involved and the amount of people that are coming to the summits we started with 75 people in Austin about two and a half years ago and in San Diego just back in October we had 1300 plus pretty amazing growth and really again the graphs kind of don't do it justice when you I really encourage anyone who's interested in OpenStack please try to make it to a summit it's such an amazing experience everybody there is invited to be a contributor everyone I hope feels like a contributor and it's a welcoming environment and you know we try to define contributor you know in a broad way or define the community in a broad way and we talk about the foundation mission in a minute to that end but you know the number of developers kind of on a rolling 30-day basis over the last couple of years has continued to grow and so again as we think about more companies getting involved more people coming to the summit is that leading to more development activity and certainly looks like all the trends are heading in the right direction and then you know another data point that is worth looking at is just how much software is being written this is obviously just one aspect of how to look at at the growth of the community but if you think back to the very early origins of this project I mean we had a object storage system which was you know really had just kind of gone into production so was it was reliable but it you know was at the beginning of kind of its capability to go into a much broader set of installations from just one company and putting that out there where new use cases could emerge and the reliability could continue to improve and then on the compute side you know we had an amazing we were amazingly fortunate actually just before launching OpenStack to connect with the folks at NASA who were building this NOVA project the compute project and had already made a lot of progress had a viable prototype that was working that we could see and look at the architecture and determine wow this is going to really accelerate OpenStack instead of kind of starting from square one and so going from those humble beginnings to where we are today it's amazing you know that 90% of the code that we think of as OpenStack today didn't exist two years ago and yet you know we did have have an inkling of something at the beginning there a spark that really set everything in motion and you know at the end of the day all of the code in the world is kind of useless if you don't have users right so we love our users we have a ton of them they're starting to really come out of their shell and talk about what they've been doing which is something that we're excited about so we've had gentlemen from Cisco WebEx keynote our last summit and when you hear about you know something as large as WebEx who we've all you know we've all used I'm sure throughout our careers you know running on OpenStack relying on that in production it's very very exciting and you know I think one of our biggest priorities as a community needs to be to to really put these users on a pedestal listen to them make sure that we're thinking as a community about how we respond to their needs so that this list continues to grow and you know they feel empowered and they feel like they're a big part of this community because they absolutely are you know other names like PayPal you know probably familiar with eBay I mean these are some incredible leaders in the technology industry that are that are really making big bets on OpenStack and we can be more excited to have them be part of the community you know the international aspect of OpenStack has just blown me away from the very very beginning I mean shortly after we launched OpenStack we went to Japan and there was a Japan OpenStack user group meetup that had hundreds of people just standing room only and we had we had just sort of lit that fuse you know a couple months earlier saying OpenStack is this an idea people are interested in and it's just grown from there if you look at some of these pictures these are from user groups all over the world there is a simultaneous celebration when the foundation launched a lot of people excited and of course I couldn't be there in every one of those given they were simultaneous but I would very much like over the next couple of years to visit as many of the countries with user group says as I can because I love the excitement there's really nothing like it you can certainly see that there was a lot of excited people in this in this particular event about the foundation so you know if there's that much energy in the room you know count me in I'll be I'll be there so talked a lot about OpenStack and the beginnings of it I think you know I don't want to spend too much time on the foundation because there's a lot of information out there about it but I'm happy to kind of explain you know what it's about and why we're why we started it maybe help you figure out how to get involved so the foundation is an independent body meaning it's a nonprofit a separate entity it's not controlled by you know a particular company it's not a subsidiary like that is truly independent nonprofit entity and it makes sense I think to have a foundation because of a project that's as important as OpenStack we want it to remain open so when we think about protecting empowering and promoting OpenStack you know protecting means sort of making sure that it continues to be open that we have the resources we need to make sure it lives on for many many years as the not as the the different players who want to contribute or consume it you know ebb and flow and new people come in we want to have kind of a group that can help facilitate all that and protect it and make sure that it lives for many many years and tends to grow you know empowering is all about the fact that when you look back at those user groups I mean there's you know hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people in all these user groups globally and as a foundation I mean we have eight people a day we'll probably have 12 staff you know by early next year and that's that's about as big as we're gonna get so you know we're obviously not here to do everything we're here to empower as many people in the community to take charge of the OpenStack mission and run with it and define it and take it in the direction that you want it to go and we're just here to help as the foundation staff and you know promoting OpenStack is something we as a foundation are are equipped to do and we have done in the past and we're gonna continue to do and last but not least I just point out that you know we talk about you know what we're protecting empowering promoting it's the community all around it you know users developers the entire ecosystem we have a very inclusive culture I think that's extremely important you know we never want to you know overly narrowly define you know what it means to to be part of the community because if you're a user certainly you may not contribute code or patches yet some do some don't but at the end of the day you know we're all here fighting for the user so we want to hear from you and you want you to feel like you're a big part of the community and this is just really speaks to the approach we took when we were creating the foundation you know creating the bylaws creating a lot of the structures that ultimately became this legal entity and a lot of it was about preserving the OpenStack way so in other words we weren't trying to solve some big problem that we that we saw in the community or in the way OpenStack was was being managed we were trying to really kind of take it to its permanent home and not do too much damage along the way so some of those those key tenets I think are technical people making technical decisions based on merit seems like common sense right I think it is but you know it bears enshrining in the bylaws as it is and you know when I give you a little more background on how the technical committee works and that the project technical leads I mean it's all based on this idea that if you work hard and you present the best idea the best idea wins and that's how the technical direction of this project is determined and we really believe in that and that's a core tenet having dedicated resources that can do community building activities can help throw these design summits bring people together help court more people into this ecosystem who can invest in it and make money on it I mean that is something we've done historically want to continue to do that and that's part of what the foundation you know is staff to do and resource to do and again you know encouraging rewarding contributions in all forms you know that's definitely key so in terms of membership and how it's actually structured there are three types of members there's individual members it's pretty self-evident it's individuals it's you and I it's everyone in the community regardless of you know who you work for don't work for or you know what particular role you have whether you're a developer or a marketer or a user however you're involved in open stack if it's important to you you should join because by being part of this foundation you can help chart the future of it and you have a lot of rights responsibilities to go along with that mean a big one is voting I'll talk a little bit about the upcoming election in a second but you know it's just a it's a way to really be officially part of the foundation is to join so open stack org slash join pretty straightforward the platinum and gold members are really organizations they're providing the bulk of the funding in other forms of support to help that make the foundation a reality so the platinum members in addition to providing substantial funding are also required to have a commitment to having full-time employees that are doing nothing but working on open stack whether it's developers or you know community leadership other types of roles as long as they're you know really dedicated to advancing open stack then that's an indication they're really committed to to the future of open stack in addition to just cutting a check to make it financially possible have a foundation and then the platinum members appoint each appoint a director to the board of directors and then the gold members amongst a larger group of these companies will elect members to the board and so it's set up so there's a third third third so in other words there's eight seats on the board that are elected by the individual members eight appointed by the platinum members and eight elected by the gold members so that's that's basically how we try to keep things balanced and how it's structured this is a list of all of the current platinum and gold members now things are growing very fast so by the time you see this we might even have other gold members but it is exciting to see some of these names I mean some of the biggest leaders in open source who've pioneered in the Linux world and some of the companies that have domain expertise around networking and we're trying to advance the state-of-the-art in networking as I mentioned earlier through the open-stack networking project and having some of the four most leaders in networking you know that are very heavily invested and committed to open stack as the future of cloud I mean it's it's it's pretty exciting and I think we couldn't have a better group of backers and the structure I don't have a ton of detail on this because I don't want to I don't want to lose you all but you can certainly spend many hours reading the bylaws if you're really want to get into the nitty-gritty it's all public online at open stack org slash legal but there's a board of directors very similar to an typical corporate structure they're the legally responsible group of folks I mentioned kind of how that was made up earlier the technical committee is really there to look after the technical decisions as it relates to the project although an individual components or projects within open stack such as compute or object storage you know those each are led by project technical leads who are elected by the contributors of those projects so they're making you know the vast majority of the day-to-day decisions about those projects the technical committee is kind of those ptls plus a few other people that have been elected to look at technical matters at span projects so when we think or earlier I talked about the the need for common authentications that was an example of where it doesn't make sense to have a different authentication system for your users to log into their storage than they did for their compute so the technical committee would be you know kind of the the body of elected folks that are helping to make sure those decisions are made in a sensible way and then last but not least we just formed this user committee Tim Bell from CERN if you haven't heard him speak he's an amazing speaker and if you haven't followed what's going on at CERN well then you know you have really been living under a rock because they're actually finding and creating new forms of matter and apparently according to Tim they're still looking for 96% of the universe in terms of matter so they've got a lot of work to do but some of the stuff they're doing with open stack is really fantastic and just seeing that the impact something you might work on like open stack and have on the future of you know the way we understand the universe I mean I don't know I never thought it could possibly be that impactful you know we sort of kicked it off three years ago and so that's Tim Bell he's leading the user committee but there are other people that he's just starting to kind of pull in and the whole idea there is again if we don't listen to the users then we're in trouble and you know we want to make sure the users of the software have as strong a voice as possible so we put this formal mechanism in place certainly if you are a user and you want to get involved in this way you know talk to Tim Bell so the staff today at the foundation myself Jonathan Bryce Laurencelle who many of you already know Claire Massey just joined us this week as a matter of fact as a marketing coordinator so we're very excited about that Stefano Mifuli the community manager hopefully you all know him online or offline he's always out there he's always active a fantastic resource for the community Terry Carez who's working on the release management of course if you're involved in open stack software development anyway I'm sure you're you're well aware of Terry and Jim Blair just joined us in the past week as well as an infrastructure engineer looking after some of those infrastructure systems that we are responsible for as a foundation to try to help facilitate how the software's developed now he was already doing that job before so like many of us who've been active in open stack moving to the foundation is somewhat of a formality but we're really excited about it nonetheless and if you think it sounds exciting check out open stack org slash foundation jobs because we still have a number of openings it's it's a it's a game-changing project if you think it'd be fun to be part of a foundation working on it that'll be the end of my pitch but last but not least Kathy Katchitori who works part-time for us helps us with events specifically around industry events so if you think about the many many cloud events going on all over the globe you know we want open stack to have a presence there and in some cases you know some of us from the foundation staff may attend but in other cases we just simply want to be a coordinating point to help make sure that if there are stackers in a particular region where there's an event going on there's a speaking opportunity we connect connect that together and connect those dots so really great to have Kathy on board she has a lot of experience from IBM and and now she's with us helping on those events so the priorities for the foundation really for 2013 or in a few areas adoption is always king we're always trying to figure out what can we do to drive more adoption because at the end of the day we want this to be ubiquitous and you know we also want user engagement so as we have more and more people using it we want to again make sure we're hearing from them getting them involved in the user committee and so forth and and when it comes to delivering the best cloud software it's important to understand kind of how open stack is developed so you know the foundation staff if you look back at the previous slide you'll notice that we don't have an army of developers the foundation is not actually employing the developers that are developing the software that's you know hundreds of developers that are employed by you know 50 plus companies out there and what we're trying to do is really just facilitate that help with the testing with the release manage it we're really trying to make sure it's a smooth development process it's well documented that we're facilitating again and that it's reliable we know we're producing quality software by increasing the testing coverage and so forth and that's where people like Jim Blair and Terry Perez play a very important role and it's great to have them be in the foundation so we can play our part in delivering you know better cloud software with every release and then in terms of how we strengthen the global community you know we are hiring another community manager love to to expand that team and we're also hiring a business development person to really try to make sure that if our users really want a certain tool that maybe is a management or monitoring tool or what have you they're used to having in their infrastructure and they want any cloud system they used to support it what we want to make sure those companies know about OpenStack they're using the OpenStack APIs and really you know encouraging that that aspect of the ecosystem to grow so that's something we we want to make a priority we've done that to date but we want to continue to do that and so what's next on the horizon we have the elections so we just finished the individual member nominations so we have candidates now if you look on the website you can take a look at the candidates OpenStack.org slash election has kind of the overview the dates and then on the right-hand side you'll see a bunch of links and you can look at the candidates you can look at kind of you know number of different aspects of the election educate yourself if you are not a member I recommend you join of course but if you are a member being engaged is really important and so those elections will actually be taking place in middle of January the 14th to the 18th so be prepared get educated on that the next release of software is Grizzly personally I'm a big fan of this name I know it's you know like anytime you name something some people love it some people don't but I think Grizzly is a pretty cool name so Grizzly will be out in April there are already there's already one milestone released another one will be coming right around the corner so if you want to get an early look at Grizzly you can actually do that today and of course the summits so there are two summits next year we have two every year one will be April 2013 summit we are a few days away from finalizing the location and the venue for that so please you know look back on OpenStackUp.org soon and you'll find more information on that of course we'll be blogging and tweeting about it but we're really trying to lock that down as well as something I'm very very excited about which our first ever international summit so we're finally going to have one outside the US a lot of people asked for it our community definitely has hit the point of diversity geographically where I think this makes a lot of sense so we have not selected a location will be in October so if you have a particular region or city that you're passionate about that you are sure is the best possible place to have the OpenStack summit let us know you can certainly drop me a note mark at OpenStack.org or Lauren's cell Lauren at OpenStack.org but a lot of people I know have have strong preferences we're also looking for local contacts whether it's a sponsor our government agency that would like to help us enter that region in a big way you know we've we've already heard from from some folks and a few of the different regional offices of some governments that that are very interested in seeing OpenStack investment in that area so if you have contacts like that send them my way I want to make sure October we have a fantastic first-ever summit outside of US last but not least the foundation is not the only place that's hiring if you have OpenStack skills you can get a job today I guarantee it we have over a thousand jobs in the OpenStack community and you can see many of them on OpenStack.org slash jobs so we see so many companies hiring and on the one hand it's exciting but it's also something that we want to rise to this challenge and fill those positions with new people and by growing the community and one of the ways to do that is through training I think there are a number of companies that offer training as a foundation we're starting to think about how we we help you know drive a more awareness around training and help develop more and more training whether it's paid training or online training there are a lot of different resources that I've actually been hearing more and more about different universities that are creating curriculum specifically for cloud or in some cases that whole course is just on OpenStack so if you have information on that that's another thing I'd love to hear feedback on we want to promote more and more education so we can fill those jobs and in a time when jobs are scarce we have a thousand openings so there must be a way we can bridge this gap together and I think OpenStack is a job creation engine which you know is certainly something we all are excited about at this day and age so with that I will just say thank you very much again I'm Mark Collier Sparky Collier on Twitter COO of the OpenStack Foundation and you can always reach me on email mark at OpenStack.org thank you so much if you haven't joined the foundation by now please do it OpenStack.org slash join and get involved and I will see you at the next summit thank you