We are well into OSCON and the events have been plentiful! I met up with our very own Eric Day, one of our Sr. Architects for OpenStack, to discuss his impressions about the events and the collective thought among the crowd.
What follows is a Q&A with Eric:
Q: Tell us about your role at Rackspace.
A: Previously, I was on the Drizzle project. Recently, the opportunity came up to get involved with Rackspace. I’m currently working as one of the Architects on OpenStack and I’m based out of Portland, OR.
Q: What are you doing while at OSCON?
A: I attended the Community Leadership Summit that was held the weekend before OSCON and was able to get a lot of valuable input around what it takes to run a successful open source community. I also gave two talks about open source projects I had been involved with – Drizzle and Gearman. Other than that, just talking to people about OpenStack, our plans and how people can get involved.
Q: What have been your impressions of the event so far?
A: Very positive! I’ve been really excited about the response we have received over the OpenStack release on Monday. During the Cloud Summit on Tuesday, we were helping answer a lot of the questions around what the open source cloud would be. Developers seem to be eager to get involved and find out where the project goes.
Q: What sessions have you done so far?
A: I gave a Gearman tutorial focusing on how to design distributed architectures. I also gave a talk on how developers and administrators can begin using Drizzle. You can check out the slides on my site within the presentation section.
Q: Any particular takeaways that you care to share?
A: During the Cloud Summit on Tuesday, there were certainly a lot of requirements that we learned about due to people coming from a variety of technology environments. For example, you have everything from government to enterprise to web applications and they all have a separate set of use cases for their clouds. The knowledge share from the conversations will be great to keep mind as we move forward in developing OpenStack.
One other important message, delivered by Tim O’Reilly, was regarding the possibility of one single entity controlling the way that we interact and consume information. Tim was suggesting that we move towards adopting open standards in as many areas as possible so that we can have multiple companies and organizations participating in this evolution. Seemed like interesting advice and something OpenStack and Rackspace as a whole can be a part of.
Thanks for taking time out to chat Eric!
Feel free to connect with Eric Day on Twitter.
In 2010, Michael joined Rackspace Hosting in San Antonio, TX to head up global employment branding initiatives. Since becoming a “Racker,” Michael launched RackerTalent.com and has brought together internal bloggers from five continents to share the authentic culture of the organization.
Michael is a graduate of Georgetown University with a degree in International Relations. He has lived multiple years abroad in both Guatemala and Argentina. In his spare time, Michael enjoys guitar, photography and exploring the social web.
