Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/Joe Heck

= Joe Heck =



(also at JosephHeck on this wiki)

I'm candidate for election to the Project Policy Board and as Project Technical Lead to Keystone

OpenStack bio
I've been active in OpenStack since 2010, starting out working around helping with continuous integration, documentation, and some background efforts in the developing dashboard. I've helped with the CI effort, significantly to documentation, both formal and informal docs on this wiki and in informal venues (UnderstandingFlatNetworking, updating Keystone documentation, etc). In the past 6 months, I've been focusing on collaborating with downstream packagers to update Horizon and Keystone, and working with Andy Smith to make Keystone into a stable and sustainable product, and prototyping out the initial vision for what Anne and the doc team released as http://api.openstack.org/

I started out working with OpenStack as a consumer while Director of Cloud Services at Disney; more recently have been working on the side of providing OpenStack to companies working for Nebula.

Questions
'''1a. Since the last elections, what areas have you focused on and what contributions have you made in order to improve OpenStack as a whole?'''

Most of my focus since the last election has been on Keystone and general documentation. I prototyped and helped drive the direction to generate a consolidated OpenStack API page with the Doc team that ultimately was recently released as http://api.openstack.org/. I also added significant documentation to OpenStack in blog posts, on the wiki, and in restructured texts. I also actively help manage Keystone (with Andy Smith and Horizon as a core contributor on both - triaging bugs, coordinating blueprints, and code review and patches for both of those projects. I continue to help those teams with periodic CI work as well.

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

Along with a huge amount of effort by Andy Smith (also nominated for PTL) and a number of other folks, introduced and baselined Keystone to a new codebase. The effort was driven entirely from functional and integration testing with an eye towards dramatically simplifying the codebase and getting the project to where it could be made sustainable moving forward in terms of both object structures and APIs.

I see Keystone not as an identity management system, but as a proxy to an existing identity systems that needs to be a viable baseline product to be support OpenStack's needs. All other projects in OpenStack need to be able to depend on Keystone for consistency, and its API needs to be carefully managed to not introduce unnecessary complexity in order to allow for it to function as a proxy to existing identity and authorization systems.

To be very clear, Andy Smith did most of the heavy lifting of this code changeover, and regardless of the PTL elections I will be teaming up with him to continue to drive Keystone forward.

'''2a. What are the most pressing/important issues facing OpenStack as a whole?'''

The nascent structure of the Foundation is the most important strategic issue, while stability and continued integrated quality improvements across OpenStack projects is the most pressing tactical issue. Beyond that, this question expands into lots of additional questions and ideas. Both need to be addressed simultaneously.

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

Driving to clear, simple relationships for the code structure, API, and exposed resources (through the API) that Keystone provides as a proxy for authorization and authentication.

The project must produce a viable product for running in a production installation, as I expect many implementations of an OpenStack "cloud" will use Keystone; sometimes by itself, sometimes as a configurable shim as additional backends are added. Other organizations will replace it entirely, hence the need for clarity on the API to match the implementation.

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

OpenStack is important to both me and the company for which I work, but I think the more interesting question is why am I involved with this project. I don't work on OpenStack with just hours paid for by my company, although they graciously allow me to contribute a large number of hours to OpenStack. I started using OpenStack while working to drive down the cost of providing computing services for Internet sites across the Disney corporation.

My career has jumped back and forth between development and operations - and driving more automation has been a consistent theme. OpenStack is the first (to me) truly open infrastructure as a service that provides a viable means to push the commoditization of this layer. The value in OpenStack to me is making that layer stable, consistent, open infrastructure as a service, which in turn enables a whole new set of options for making computing resources even more easily accessible and/or cheaper to run.

I think it's critically important that OpenStack not just be an API specification, but a solid implementation (in short, a product) to provide concrete interoperability. Diversity in opinion and focus is critical to our success, which brings together skills and technology that have historically been very separate across almost every organization.

Finally, I've always been a fan of the concept that the individual in an organization is what makes a difference in this world, and open source projects (OpenStack, for me) is expression of that concept.

Links

 * My blog: http://www.rhonabwy.com/wp/
 * Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/heckj