OpenStack works here… and now, I do, too!

OpenStack works here. I intend to make you think about a double meaning: OpenStack is both people and platform. We work here, and the platform works great here at Cisco.

At the OpenStack Summit in Austin this week, I see a compelling need for OpenStack and the many private clouds springing to life. I want to build bridges to enable application workloads on OpenStack infrastructure, platforms, even when it requires microservices and containers.

As a long-time OpenStack advocate, I want to take a pivot in my career path, and Cisco lets me do that. I create the connections between developers, their workloads, their needs, and OpenStack clouds with an eye towards the rise of containers. Cisco enhances the experience through both DevNet and Cisco Metapod outreach and community efforts with a trusted set of OpenStack leaders. I’m only in my first week here, and I keep finding fellow community members, such as Josh Kleinpeter who first went to lunch with Jonathan Bryce and me in 2011 to ask about the reality and promise of OpenStack for AT&T, who this week won the Superuser award. And Rainya Mosher, who glued together one of the first public cloud operations group running OpenStack. Plus Niki Acosta whose bright mind and enthusiasm for the cloud is contagious. We were able to record a podcast this week for ospod, have a listen!

Cisco DevNet is the Developer Program for Cisco. Metapod is the Cisco OpenStack cloud offering. By bringing me on board, I want to enhance that experience with Cisco APIs and developer tools. Let’s bring it all together — managing Cisco networks, connecting the Internet of Things, and envisioning the data centers of the future. Plus we can bring more understanding of the OpenStack Networking APIs and software-defined networking by continuing my work in upstream.

Who am I anyway? I’m one of 13 influential members of the OpenStack Technical Committee, an elected position, with 6 months remaining in that position. I run complex systems architected for multiple contributions with over 300 contributors in the last six months, grown from 79 docs contributors two and a half years ago, closing over 2,000 doc bugs in a year. I have presented at the Grace Hopper conference in the Internet of Things track, recounting my experiences using an open source project, NightScout, to read my son’s continuous glucose monitor (CGM) using OpenStack infrastructure, REST APIs from the CGM provider, and MongoDB. I’m a book author and inspire others to innovate in collaborative documentation through adopting developer methods such as using GitHub for tutorials and sample code. I’ve been to multiple hackathons in the last couple of years either serving as a developer support person or hacking on a team myself. In OpenStack, we run automation for both doc builds and testing efficiencies, across hundreds git repositories for more than 30 projects.

At Rackspace I was accountable for developer support through email, tickets, StackOverflow, community forum posts, and Github or JIRA issues tracking. We consolidated these various channels to listen where the devs are. To hear more about what I’ve learned from listening to application developers in the OpenStack community, see my talk from the Paris OpenStack Summit.

This week I’m attending the OpenStack Summit here in my hometown, Austin, Texas. Last week I attended the first Cisco DevNet Women in Technology event. I love being a part of these events.

I aspire to lead by example and influence and inspire others to solve technical problems. I put customers first and leverage the power of community for the best outcomes for application developers and their needs. I’m also simply happy to be here. Please, reach out on Twitter (@annegentle) or in the OpenStack upstream community to let me know what is important to you.