Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/Andrew Clay Shafer

Andrew Clay Shafer

I'm asking for support on the Project Policy Board. I'm known as littleidea in IRC or on twitter.

As a co-founder of Puppet Labs and former VP of Engineering at Cloudscaling, I believe I have a unique perspective on the OpenStack ecosystem, open source communities and cloud computing. As a member of the PPB, I would advocate actions that balance this wide range of concerns.

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

Since the last election, my involvement in OpenStack has primarily been helping projects in the ecosystem evaluate deployment options, automate deployments and implement ongoing monitoring and management of running services. I've been involve with a number of OpenStack projects working on related products and services. I'm recently getting involved in the implementation details of Nova and Keystone expecting to make more meaningful contributions in Essex and future releases.

"What are the most pressing/important issues facing OpenStack as a whole?"

Balance and Alignment

OpenStack has a huge opportunity, and the only thing that stands in the way is the same thing that provides the opportunity.

OpenStack has seen amazing interest and the community of developers and user has ballooned, but there are many different perspectives.

From my perspective, this will manifest in two primary ways in the near future. One is in aligning at the organizational level represented by the OpenStack foundation, the second is aligning at the technical level in the various projects.

The key is finding a balance between the various needs and agendas in the community. In some cases that may require saying 'no' and being more discerning, especially in the technical implementation with the goal of high quality operable services as the core focus of the OpenStack community.

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

I'd been involved with open source software and system automation for a few years before the Ops Camp in Austin where there was a conversation that I believe had a strong influence on what OpenStack has become. By the time of the OSCON announcement of 2010, I'd been evaluating and deploying other open cloud frameworks.

Since OpenStack was first announced, I was involved in projects attempting to deploy and/or productize various parts of OpenStack. I have personally been an evangelist for the OpenStack project and for open source infrastructure projects and processes, being involved in what most people refer to as 'devops' (but what I think of as 'doing it right').

The world wants and needs there to be an open solution to this problem that OpenStack had the ambition to take on.

I want to make sure that solution is OpenStack.