Personas-page-prototype-Daichi

Daichi Nakamura
What are your main responsibilities? He is responsible for operating an OpenStack based private cloud that provides compute and storage resources to researchers at the university. He loves hiking, watching movies and karaoke.

How do you use Horizon Today?
Hmmmm, I don’t use Horizon all that much, there are a few things that are easy to do in the GUI - like getting an overview of things. For most things, I use the CLI. The end users do use Horizon quite a bit, for things like spinning up instances and uploading files.

How does your company use OpenStack today?
We use it to analyze lots of research data. We’re a university and have a lot of physicists and other scientists working with huge amounts of data that need a lot of compute resources. We’re also testing some production workloads.

Tell us about the users of your cloud.
So, there’s maybe 75 right now? Some of them submit their jobs to an admin, and we make sure it gets done. Some of the other users have access through Horizon, so they can experiment a bit more -- these are the more developers types, not the scientists. People really appreciate the service; those who use it are really starting to depend on it, which is exciting for us to see.

Are you involved in the OpenStack Community?
I wouldn’t say I’m ‘involved.’ I follow the [operator’s] mailing list and some blogs. I’ve contributed code before -- when we found a bug and patched it. But other than that, I’m not all that involved.

What are the key obstacles that you see with OpenStack today?
We’ve had a few bumps along the way with issues that come up that are new to us. There isn’t always documentation, probably because OpenStack is new, so some of the problems we see haven’t been seen by a lot of other people. That means I have to experiment on my own to solve problems, but you can usually get help from the mailing lists. I do wish sometimes there was more documentation of specific solutions, especially around networking.

When do you think your company will adopt OpenStack?
It’s not so much a matter of when, it’s going to be gradual. We’ll run our workloads where they work best for both the technology and the skills we have on staff. As we become more expert in OpenStack, and begin building new apps in a ‘cloudy’ way, we’ll move more stuff into our private cloud and grow that. It’ll be gradual, I don’t know if we’ll ever be 100% OpenStack. We’ll see.