>> Announcer: Boston, Massachusetts It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, RedHat, and additional ecosystem support. (upbeat techno music fades out) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by John Troyer, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live broadcast of OpenStack 2017 here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, the clouds have been breaking up, a little bit of sunshine here, and it's our third day of broadcasts. We have really a lot of our editorial segment today. Going to be talking to more community members, talking to one of the Superuser winners, a number of startups, and happy to start the day, Lisa-Marie Namphy who is the US OpenStack ambassador. CUBE alum, been on a number of times. Lisa, tell us what's new in your world. >> Thank you Stu, and thanks John and what a pleasure to be here with you folks, and hello, Boston and world, good morning. What's new, well the OpenStack ambassador program is expanding all the time, we just had a great session that Sonia did to kick off the day today to really talk about, you know, how to get involved in OpenStack, even if you're not necessarily a technical person. It's really important to acknowledge how everybody in our community can contribute, and that's one of the things the ambassador program does really well. So we just had a session on that. One of the things that I've done with our user group that is new and super exciting is I've morphed it into a little bit of the OpenStack in Containers user group. So I've been focusing a lot on containers, done 12 or 13 meetups on Kubernetes and or Docker since last summer, and I just had the pleasure of speaking in the CNCF communities track, communities day track yesterday, and that was so much fun, out there in the grand ballroom, so that's kind of some new and fun things we're doing. >> It's great, this is our fifth year doing theCUBE at this show, always a robust community, really. When we started coming, it was the people building it, Now we have a lot of the users, there's different sub-segments, can you speak a little bit to the kind of maturity of the community, and, you know how do people get involved in the ambassador program, how many are there geographically, number wise, diversity, those kind of things. >> Oh gosh, yeah so it's geo, or it's a worldwide program and it's been going a lot, and you're right, you know years ago, here it was the Design Summit, and we sat around and talked about, you know the next six months of the project, and then it morphed into more users, adoption, customers, operators are a really big one too. And now those things are all so big, we have operators, Midcycles, and all and the Design Summit has been, you know sequestered off into, separated out so that we can really focus here on the customers, the community, users, and those type of contributors as well. So things have changed a lot in the seven years since we've been doing OpenStack. The ambassador program is fantastic. The foundation has done a really good job in the last couple of years of acknowledging the contributions of the user community, and so not necessarily the code contributors only, but the people who are also spending as much time contributing in really significant ways to our community, and growing our commnity. Open source doesn't work without a community. So we know that, and we're doing a much better job of acknowledging who those people are and rewarding them. >> John: How many ambassadors worldwide? >> There's about twenty of us. I'm the only one in the US right now, but we're about to change that. I believe my friend Sheila is going to join and cover the East Coast, and I'll be able to do everything west of the Mississippi, but most countries only have one, and... >> And the role of an ambassador, do you do a lot of meetups? Do you go speak? You're there as a, for people to contact as well, right? >> Yeah, we generally recruit or ask people to be ambassadors if they are already doing those things, if they're already running a local user group, if they already have a brand in OpenStack, and they speak, and they kind of already know how to reach out to people, and how to inspire people, or people see them on stage, and that's why the foundation approached me to do it. I had been running the San Francisco Bay area meetup for three years, and speaking, I don't know this is probably my eighth, ninth, maybe tenth OpenStack Summit that I've been speaking at, and OpenStack days and all of that. And so, you kind of see who's already doing it. The cool thing about community is nobody is asked to do it, like you do it because you have a passion for it, because you love it, because it's the right thing to do, because it's helpful to push the technology forward because you have a passion for the technology, because you love people, all these reasons is why people get into it. So you find all over the world people who are doing this. They're already doing it and they're not being paid to do it they're doing it, those are the people you grab, because you know, there is a burnout level to it but those are the people who have enough passion about it and commitment, and believe in community that they're going to be successful at it. >> Can you talk a little bit about the Bay Area OpenStack user group? It's one of the largest OpenStack user groups, and one of the themes we've seen this week is a lot of talk about containers, a lot of talk about, well, Kubernetes, but containers in general, kind of demystifying the sometimes confusing story about where's OpenStack good for, where's the container layer good for, it turns out it's good for a couple different places, you can containerize OpenStack, you can also... A lot of talk about the app layer on top, but you actually, what you just said, you've actually expanded the conversation, you don't just sit there and say "this month we're talking about Neutron," you talk about a lot of different topics, and you bring people to the table. >> Yeah, San Francisco area, you are correct, it is the world's largest OpenStack user group, we have over 6,000 members. Not all of them are located in the Bay Area, I think people like to join the user group because we provide a lot of really good content, and we live stream our meetups, we have Google Hangouts, I record them all, they're all on our calendar, if you go to meetup.com/openstack, you get to us because we were the first one. So we do get a lot of people from around the world, and I write newsletters with lots of interesting information but it is a local community and we do encourage people to participate, so the meetups are super important and the only way to make sure that you keep your community strong and keep people coming back is to have phenomenal content in your meetups. So I work really hard to make sure that the content is interesting, that it's relevant, and the most exciting, most relevant conversation since last summer has been containers. The year before that it was networking, and it still kind of is and always will be. So we do a lot of meetups on networking, too, but containers has been what people want to talk about. They're trying to figure this out. OpenStack has reached a maturity level where people, you know, they're not necessarily learning or if they are they can take an OpenStack 101 course and those exist all over the place. So we've gone to the next level, and whether it was Cloud Foundry or now Containers we do like to talk about what else you can do with this fabulous technology, and how you should do it. So we've had meetups where we've presented OpenStack on communities, communities on OpenStack, where I personally came in and did a whole meetup on Kubernetes as the underlay, and Rob Starmer came in and did a whole workshop and hands-on about how to run OpenStack on containers. Yesterday our panel, you heard Dan Berg talk about just simplifying it, run everything in a container, but keep it as simple as possible, so what pieces do you need? So these are the conversations that we like to have in our user group, and people keep coming back because it's an exciting conversation. >> Yeah, expanding on that, you talked about just people are always coming, new people to the community that don't know it, people that are changing jobs all the time, new technologies, I mean, we all know community building is a constant, you know, reinvention in something, you keep needing to work How do the ambassadors, how do stay energized on it, how do you keep the momentum and the energy of the community going? >> Yeah, well the cool thing about an open source community is no matter where you're working, you're still part of the community. So I've worked with so many other people here, I don't even know where they are sometimes. I mean we don't tend to talk about what company we're actually working for, or who's paying your paycheck, and especially in the early days of the project that was definitely true, and so some of my good friends have been at four different companies in the time that we've been doing this OpenStack thing, but we're all still working on OpenStack, and I suspect Kubernetes will be very similar, or Docker. You know, how many people are working on Docker? But there's only 200 people that work for Docker, right? So these technologies kind of take on these lives of their own, and people do switch jobs a lot, but people come to meetups because it's a constant thing, and it's also a good place to keep networking and keep looking for work, so we got a lot of that. The beginning of every meetup, I ask for a show of hands of who's hiring. If I ask for who's looking, not everybody raises their hand but if you ask who's hiring, there's a lot of people hiring all the time, and so then the people can look around and say "okay I'm going to go talk to those people," so yeah, the networking is an important part. >> On that point, are you seeing any trends as to what are the roles that they're hiring for, or you know, companies or industries that definitely have changing skillsets, you know John spent a lot of time helping all those virtualization people moving to that next thing, what are you seeing? >> Engineering is the big one, and people are still looking for OpenStack engineers. I mean people ping me all the time, saying "do you know any OpenStack engineers?" So that's usually the number one thing, developers to help build out these things, and then also the companies that, you know, that aren't OpenStack companies, you know companies like GE that are trying to hire what, 20,000 developers in the next couple years, and Mercedes and Tesla, and you see all these companies that are trying to build out their software developer programs. So another role that is interesting that people are hiring for is these developer, DevRel, Developer IVC community roles to try to figure out, you know how are we going to build our developer community within our company? If these are really large companies, or you know, companies like IBM which have interest in things like the Apache Spark community, or you know, you find these pockets in these large companies as well. Or there's a lot of startups, you know unlike, probably not like Docker as much, but Kubernetes is going to have this ecosystem of partners that build around it, and these companies are popping up out of the woodwork and they're growing like crazy, and there's like 30 of them in the Bay Area, right? So they're really trying to expand as well. >> I wanted to ask about the general mood of the summit. My first summit... You know, it happens every six months. I've been impressed by how grounded people are, I see a lot of first time attendees, people starting new OpenStack installations in 2017 right now, here to learn... I'm just kind of curious, over the last couple summits is there anything different you see about here in Boston, anything you're looking forward to going to in the next one, in terms of kind of mood and how people are, are people feeling good, are people, you know, are people still puzzling out this container issue, or are people still talking about public versus private, or what are kind of the mood and conversations you hear from other community members? >> I think people are talking about public versus private again, not still right? I mean is it, that was kind of an interesting one, and I think Johnathan brought it up on main stage on the first day about that kind of readoption of private cloud, and that you know, we knew that was a sweet spot for OpenStack particularly in the US. You know, lots of public clouds running on other parts of the world, but that's a fun conversation, and it's containers of course, but not just containers. I think it was maybe Lauren Sell who put the slide up of all of those other technologies that are, you know affiliate now, and... >> Another ecosystem of open source projects >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah >> that can all interoperate with openstack. >> With Cloud Foundry, and Ansible was up there, and Ceph, and you had a slide full of technologies, OpenDaylight, that are all playing a role here and that the conversation has been about, and I just encouraged in the ambassador session and in the meetup sessions to do that with your meetup. Our meetup has been really successful and the people have loved it because we started bringing in this other technology. People want to talk about IoT, they want to talk about AI, they want to talk about machine learning, so there's those, they want to talk about, you know what are the best use cases for OpenStack so we showcased to GoDaddy what they built with Docker on top of OpenStack. So there's a lot of fun conversations to be had right now, and I think there's a buzz around here, you know that, what, day one when Johnathan put the slide up saying, you know, people have predicted the end of OpenStack and that was like four years ago or whatever, that was an awesome slide, right? I'm sure talked to him about it. >> Yeah, I absolutely traded notes, and caught opinion about it, too. Lisa, you live in The Valley, I'm curious about perception in The Valley, you know, OpenStacks now been around seven years, it's kind of, you know, it's matured, it's moved on, some called it boring because we fixed some of the main issues, you know We mentioned all the OpenStack days with you know Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, all these software pieces on top, what do you hear in The Valley when people talk about OpenStack, any misperceptions you'd want to clarify? >> Yeah, yeah it's not boring. It's funny when you say to a California girl "you live in The Valley," I'd be like, "let's just say The Silicon Valley." Not the, not the other Valley. >> Stu: Not the Valley girl >> Don't make me start talking like that, right? >> Stu: Oh my god! (laughs) >> Right, so, no. It's never boring, it's never... It hasn't been boring from day one, and there's been times where I felt like okay we've been talking about infrastructure for years now, let's talk about some other things, but I love the way at this conference they're talking about, they're calling it the "open infrastructure conference." You know, this is what OpenStack has become, and that just opens the conversation. You know, I love that shift. There's always something exciting to talk about, and I don't mean the little inside baseball things, like should we have done Big Ten, should Stackalytics go away, I mean, you know people like to talk about that stuff, but I don't find that customers or the people at the meetups are talking about that stuff. People at the meetups are talking about you know, how should we run this with Kubernetes? How do these technologies fit together? You know, lots of different things, you know where does Docker play into it? Networking is still a conversation and a problem to still be solved, and how are we going to do this? We had OpenContrail do a meetup with us a couple of weeks ago. There's still a lot of interest in figuring out the networking piece of it, and how to do that better. So we're never going to run out of things to talk about. >> Alright, so how do more people get involved, how do they find their meetups, where do they find resources? >> Most of, openstack.org has a list of all the communities, but most of the communities use meetup.com, almost globally, so if you go to meetup.com, and you put in your geo, you'll find one. You can contact your local ambassador. If you want to get involved, I say just go to a meetup. I mean you can't start leading communities until you participate in communities. There is no way to phone this in. You have to, it's hands-on, roll up your sleeves, let's get to work and participate, and have some fun. So go to a local meetup, and meet your meetup organizers, volunteer, help, and it's so rewarding. Some of my best friends that I have, I've met through OpenStack or open source projects. It creates many opportunities for jobs. So just start going to meetups and get involved, and if you want to be an ambassador, there's a list on the website of how to figure that out. Tom Fifield runs the whole program with Sonia's help out of Australia, but regionally we're always looking for help. There's no shortage of roles that people can play if people really want to. >> Definitely a vibrant community here, doing well, Lisa-Marie Namphy, always a pleasure to catch up with you, and we have a full day of programming coming, so stay tuned and thank you for watching the cube. >> Lisa: Thanks Stu, thanks John. (upbeat techno music)