EfficientMetering/PTLElectionProcess/DougHellmann

= Doug Hellmann =

Personal Bio
Doug Hellmann is currently a Senior Cloud Developer with New Dream Network, LLC (DreamHost). He has been programming in Python since version 1.4, and has worked on a variety of Unix and non-Unix platforms for projects in fields such as mapping, medical news publishing, banking, and data center automation. Doug is a member of the Python Software Foundation, and served as its Communications Director from 2010-2012. After a year as a regular columnist for Python Magazine, he served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008-2009. Since 2007, Doug has published the popular "Python Module of the Week" series on his blog, and that material served as the basis for his 2011 book The Python Standard Library By Example. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

OpenStack Bio
I started contributing to OpenStack just before the Folsom summit this spring. In that time, I have contributed patches to nova, common, devstack, the unified CLI, and ceilometer. Although most of the work I have done has been on ceilometer, I also have core reviewer privileges for common and the unified CLI.

Questions
1. Since the last elections, what areas have you focused on and what contributions have you made in order to improve your project?

Ceilometer is a new project, begun after the Folsom summit. I have been involved at every stage, from requirements gathering, to design, to the ongoing implementation.

Outside of ceilometer I have been working on the new unified command line project. I created the library cliff, which is serving as the basis for creating new command plugins to be run through the common main program.

I contributed some documentation patches to nova, as well as some enhancements to the RPC API based on requirements from ceilometer.

I have done a lot of code reviews for openstack-common, and want to continue finding parts of all of the OpenStack components that can be reused.

2. What are the most pressing/important issues facing your project?

We have been taking a "tracer bullet" approach to implement ceilometer, and are almost at the point where metering data flows end-to-end. Building an API server to query the data store is the last step to having a complete data path. After we have the API server, or possibly even while we are building it, we should work on more developer-oriented documentation so we can increase the size of the team able to build plugins and agents for collecting data and saving it to other databases. That work will involve collaborating with the other OpenStack projects, and we have already begun approaching them to discuss integration in general terms. We also need to develop some integration testing plans and create installation and administration documentation for end-users.

3. What is your relationship to OpenStack & why is its success important to you and/or your company?

I am a developer at DreamHost, an OpenStack Foundation Gold Level founding member. We are using OpenStack to build a public cloud offering as the next phase of our evolution as a hosting company.

Links

 * DreamHost: http://www.dreamhost.com
 * blog: http://blog.doughellmann.com
 * Twitter: @doughellmann