CloudStory.in Exclusive - An Interview with Jonathan Bryce, Director of OpenStack Foundation!

CloudStory.in met with the OpenStack Foundation Staff members - Jonathan Bryce (Director), Mark Collier (COO), Lauren Sell (Director of Marketing) and Heidi Bretz (Director of Business Development) for an exclusive interview during Structure 2013. We talked a lot about the foundation’s vision, current status, opportunities in India and more. Here is the summary of our conversation.

Vision and Mission

The OpenStack Foundation’s (henceforth referred to as the Foundation) vision is to make OpenStack successful globally. Its mission is to enable this by working with everyone involved – users, developers, service providers, sponsors and the community as a whole.

Foundation's Role

The OpenStack project is a rapidly growing, developer driven and community built open source project. The Foundation acts as a facilitator to bring them all together. It also ensures that no party subverts the common goals through its own agenda. Foundation ensures that the community grows as fast as it can without derailing the project's momentum. It also ensures smooth transitions between various stages of the features (incubation, main line etc.)

User Committee

The User committee represents a broad set of users consisting of enterprise, academia and service providers. This is the one that aggregates user's feedback through various mechanisms - deployment trackers, direct customer feedback etc. The User committee then works closely with the Technical committee to get these features included in the product roadmap.

OpenStack in India/ Asia

The Foundation is also incredibly positive about the opportunities in Asia and in India particular. OpenStack India User Group is the third largest user group globally and one of the most active groups. The Foundation considers India as an important market, so much that it is sponsoring the second OpenStack day in Q3 (schedule TBD). Foundation members will be attending the event and will be reaching out to Indian service providers.

Enterprise Adoption

OpenStack adoption in India has been a gras roots movement, with developers carrying the momentum so far. With the participation from enterprise giants like RedHat, IBM, and Canonical, more and more enterprise customers are considering OpenStack. Acceleration in Private Cloud space is fuelled by the trust on such big players.

Global Adoption trends

There is a lot of awareness about OpenStack globally - across countries and continents - in Paris, UK, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary etc. Major users around the world speaking up, such as Best Buy, Bloomberg, CERN, eBay, Fidelity, NeCTAR, PayPal and Sina. However, real adoptions outside of US can be more. You can read more about OpenStack users on the website.

Resources/ Training

OpenStack documentation has been significantly improved in the past year. The Foundation sponsored a community written operations guide which was put in record time (1 week) and is available for free. You can also buy a paperbound here.

Some universities (like CSAIL of MIT, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) are using OpenStack for their research. Many companies (Mirantis, Rackspace, Hastexo) are also offering training/ boot camps for OpenStack

If any of the Indian Universities or private parties are interested in offering OpenStack training or as part of curriculum, there are efforts underway in the community to create freely available resources that may be leveraged, and the Foundation will be very happy to connect them with other companies in the ecosystem or help promote their offerings. (however, please note that the Foundation's resources are limited)

Message from the Board

OpenStack is incredibly global, with members across 121 countries. All you need is get involved. What you get out is what you contribute. It is an incredible engine for opportunities, get involved!