Personas-page-prototype carmen


 * Company Info
 * Carmen (IT Director)
 *  Chuck (IT Architect Architect/Cloud admin)
 *  Calvin (Lead Developer/Cloud user)

 How do you use OpenStack and Horizon Today?
I don't personally use it, but our company sees it as the direction that the industry is going. Chuck has set up a test and development environment and is also investigating how we might use it more broadly.

Like OpenStack, Horizon has come a long way, but still has a long way to go. We expect to get there, but we are looking for rock-solid vendor support.

What are your main responsibilities?
I oversee the central IT infrastructure organization. We built a cloud for one of the development groups and are looking at some additional ones.

What do you think about working with the OpenStack Community?
We encourage our employees to contirbute to the community on their own time, but we don't spend much time in the code ourselves. Our infrastrucure is working well now and we have many mission-critical systems running on it, so we are only going to replace that with code that is ready for deployment. If it is not ready, then we can't use it.

Of course, we expect our employees to submit bug reports when they find them.

What are the key obstacles that you see with OpenStack Today?
The general consensus in my team is that OpenStack isn’t a mature technology. We’re interested in tracking its progress, but using it within our own IT infrastructure for noncritical applications. At least right now, in my mind exposes us to too much risk. This is a conservative industry that’s traditionally slow to change, especially when there is any chance of a negative impact on security or disaster recovery. That’s just not something we can afford. And open source is a different ball game for us. We have a lot of clout with our vendors given our size, but when you get to something like OpenStack, the only way to influence direction is through contributing code, and that’s certainly not how I want my team to spend their days, maybe they can spend their nights on it.