OpenStack Podcast #27: Monty Taylor

Few have been involved in OpenStack as long as Monty Taylor, who’s OpenStack path began at Rackspace and continues today at HP where he is a Distinguished Technologist. Watch or download this OSPod episode to hear Monty’s thoughts about:

His love for Duke and his background in theater

Nebula shutting their doors, and what it means for OpenStack

Why AWS isn’t a fit for everyone or everything

Project Shade and varying behaviors behind APIs

The chicken and the egg problem running OpenStack as a public cloud provider

Containers and Project Magnum

OpenStack and the “sophomore slump”

The importance of focusing on stability in OpenStack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihRDs9FxmCs

You can follow Monty on Twitter at @e_monty and on IRC at mordred. Have a show idea? Tweet Jeff and Niki at @openstackpod

See past episodes, subscribe, or view the upcoming schedule on the OSPod website.

For a full transcript of the  interview, click read more below.

Jeff Dickey:                All right. Good morning, everyone. I’m Jeff Dickey from Redapt.

Niki Acosta:               I’m Niki Acosta from Cisco, and we have an awesome guest with us today. I’m really excited. This is kind of full circle because I met Monty a very long time ago, back in the early days of OpenStack. Today, we’re welcoming Monty Taylor from HP. Distinguished engineer. Technical committee, OpenStack Board. What did I miss, Monty?

Monty Taylor:            Rabid Duke fan. Rabid Duke Fan.

Niki Acosta:               Oh, yes. A Duke fan.

Monty Taylor:            Got a … we can’t leave that out today, of all days.

Niki Acosta:               I’m sure you won some bets, I hope? I mean, just kidding. Who bets?

Monty Taylor:            I won some bets that I was going to be able to get off the floor at the end of the game, so that was …

Niki Acosta:               (Laughs)

Monty Taylor:            That’s really all I’m forward at that point. Hopefully, nobody who’s watching or listening is either from Wisconsin or Kentucky.

Niki Acosta:               Sorry. Well, we’re glad you’re up and awake, and drinking your coffee, and here with us today. We typically like to start the podcast asking you your tech story. How did you get into tech? Were you like that nerdy kid with the computer? What’s your story?

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, I was that nerdy kid with a computer. My first computer was a Texas Instruments’ 994A which is so indicated because it had a whopping 4K of RAM, which was a giant deal. We were very excited about that. My dad brought one of those home and set me up with programming tasks for fun and I did them and enjoyed them.

It’s always been there. You might think that that would have led to me appropriately going to school and studied Computer Science and done that entire path, but you’d be wrong.

I did go to school and studied Computer Science for half-a-semester and then … ever since then was a theater major. I have degrees in various theater topics which makes me very well suited to writing cloud’s opera. I hope everybody enjoys their … the theater training background TC member.

Niki Acosta:               I was a theater nerd. What was your most fascinating role that you played that you loved the most?

Monty Taylor:            Fascinating role that I played? Anybody that knows me on IRC, I’m Mordred there, and that actually stems from having played the role of Mordred in a production of Camelot in the … my junior year in high school. That’s been a moniker that stuck for quite some time now.

Then, actually, in college I moved into directing and also lighting design. There’s all sorts of … I haven’t acted in a show for a long time and that’s really better for everybody. We don’t need any of that.

Niki Acosta:               No, you do just fine, helping move OpenStack along. Speaking of which … By the way, did I cut you off from telling the rest of your story? How’d you get into OpenStack?

Monty Taylor:            There’s this piece of software that people may or may not have heard of called MySQL. It’s an open source database package that some people use. It’s got a few prominent users out there. Google, Facebook, Twitter. Yeah, pretty much anybody who’s anybody that does anything in the Internet is a MySQL user. We kind of dominate the world.

Anyway, I work for MySQL in … back in the day. When we got bought by SUN Microsystems, who’s also a company that you may or may not heard of since they don’t exist anymore. We got bought by SUN. Brian Aker, and Jay Pipes, and I, and a couple of other people started working on a fork of the MySQL server, called Drizzle, which was sort of back to the roots kind of effort which is a lot of fun.

Brian, being the amazing human that he is, managed to convince SUN executive leadership that they, after having bought MySQL for a billion dollars, they should also fund the fork of it, which was amazing. Then, we got bought by Oracle.

Almost immediately thereafter, the Drizzle team moved en masse from SUN/Oracle to Rackspace. I happen to be at Rackspace with Jay, and Eric, and crew when OpenStack started. I’ve … I got into OpenStack because I was one of the people that the management at Rackspace asked to help put it together. It’s just been something that I have done, I guess, for as long as it’s been around.

Niki Acosta:               Now, HP … wait. Before we get to the … No, let’s talk about that now. How did you … What are you doing at HP now? You’ve done a lot. You’ve … Actually, you moved a little bit but you’ve always been related in some way, chained, to OpenStack.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah. No, it’s really … Amazingly, so before this … before OpenStack, I’ve had more of a tendency to move around to lots of different places, and that’s not really been as much … I mean, I’ve moved from Rackspace to HP, but that was three years ago. Pretty much, I’ve been doing a lot of the same thing.

I have a bunch of people working on a team that work on the OpenStack infra things, which I couldn’t be happier that HP’s helped to fund to the levels that it has. You know, had a bunch of folks work on the TripleO stuff. I’ve got people working on Ansible things now, so it’s a lot about the automation, testing-automation, deployment automation, all those things that are on it.

Basically, I don’t like doing repetitive stuff myself. I think they’re very boring. Anytime I can get involved with making sure that repetitive tasks go away, then I tend to be happier. Sometimes that will make other people happy, and sometimes it doesn’t, and I’m fine with that. Whichever one they prefer.

Niki Acosta:               One question, and this is the one that’s been burning in my mind to ask you …

Monty Taylor:            Ask the question.

Niki Acosta:               … because we talked a little bit about the show earlier, before the show started. This is an interesting week for OpenStack, and that is because of the sudden news that Nebula was shutting down.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               Which … There’s been viewpoints from all sides on why. Does it mean that OpenStack’s not doing well? There’s just a gazillion and one opinions on that. What is your take …

Jeff Dickey:                Well, Chris Kemp was supposed to be on the show today.

Niki Acosta:               Yeah, he was. He cancelled the day before that news went live. After, of course, it went live it made sense why he cancelled this week …

Monty Taylor:            I know.

Niki Acosta:               … which, you know, bless his heart. I love Chris. What are your thoughts on that? Is it just where were at? Is it telling?

Monty Taylor:            No. I think it’s kind of where it’s at. I mean, first of all, I want to say … and I’ve tweeted this out, but there’s a difference between doing a quick tweet and actually getting to express something slightly in a longer form.

Nebula battled above their weight class, for a ton of time, in terms of their resources and effort that they put into OpenStack. They’ve been there since, you know, obviously several of the original authors of what is now Nova. They’re the ones who brought us a lot of these pieces in the beginning, but when they started … when they spun off and started Nebula as a start-up company, they didn’t just go off into a corner and worked solely on product things. They continued to contribute upstream.

If you think about a company that has somewhere between ten to thirty people, having any number of full-time people focused on upstream, that a hu- ratio-wise that’s a huge amount of effort. The number … I’ve got forty people doing pure upstream development at HP, but HP is a three hundred thousand-person company.

The relative cost of that for HP compared to what Nebula was contributing in terms of contribution per capita was mind-blowing. I got to give them full respect and full props for having done that for that period of time.

That said, they tackled software and hardware. To get into a business, honestly, where you’re playing hardware … When they started the company … I mean, best I hear, when they told me about what they’re going to do, I was like, “What a … Obviously, what a great business model. What a great business plan.”

Then HP, and IBM, and CISCO, and DELL basically all jumped in with both feet. If you’ve got all of the big players doing this thing in the hardware play and you’re a start-up, it takes a lot of capital to deal with the hardware things.

If you’re dealing with hardware things, and software things, and integration, it’s a really gutsy move. In fact, I think that I’m proud of them for having taken that gutsy move. Gutsy moves aren’t gutsy moves if sometimes they don’t work out. If all of your moves … if all of the moves that you try succeed, then that means you’re not trying hard enough. It means that everybody didn’t take too big of a swing.

I think, as a community, we should really be proud of Nebula for existing. We should be really proud of them for having taken a giant swing at a combined hardware-software play as a start-up, and to know that amongst all of us, you know, some of us have gotten bought, some of have failed. That means as a community, we’re trying hard enough. It means that we have people making gutsy choices and gutsy moves, and sometimes it’s going to work out.

I think that it’s a testament to how many of the big players have gotten really fully vested that a hardware-oriented start-up company is having a hard time making inroads. That’s means that, as an industry, we’ve gotten really good positioning, I think. I don’t know. There’s a reason that I’m not a stock investor, stockbroker person, so I could be very wrong about many of these things. I just hack on Python code.

Yeah, I think it’s a thing of shame. I think that Vish and Chris are both … have done immeasurable things for our community. I’m sad to see them go. I’m sad to see Nebula not be a thing anymore but also good for them for having gone out swinging. I think that’s pretty awesome.

There’s always ways you can figure out how to twist your start-up and do a way to appease yet another round of funding zombies. They didn’t do that. They stayed true to a product vision and didn’t quite work out, and I think that’s great.

Jeff Dickey:                Where does this leave the OpenStack community? I mean, it’s seems like we are all either OEM or Mirantis. It’s … There’s not … I mean, this is very different than it was a year ago, or two years ago, five years ago.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Jeff Dickey:                This is … We’re in a different space, where every hardware vendor out there has OpenStack plug-in or capability. They don’t … It’s all very vanilla OpenStack support, and now there’s all the OEMs. Where are we?

Monty Taylor:            I think … I mean, I think that’s a … I think we’re definitely in a transitionary period, because things have changed. I think we’ve learned some things. Based on what we originally thought we were going to be doing, I think we’ve learned some new truths about that honestly.

I know … I’ve had some conversation with people with there was this original idea, and I know I was a big proponent of it, that we’re going to have fifty OpenStack public clouds that were all seamlessly interoperable. We’re going to take out Amazon and Google by the collective force of all those people.

I think we’ve gone to learn that that’s actually what our value is, and not what it is that we do or not what’s going to be likely. We have some conversation at the Board, the last board meeting, about this. Ultimately, even if you have all of the companies, all of the OpenStack companies, having some Rackspace or HP-like public cloud, each of those individual companies is never going to do price comparisons with Amazon and Google. It’s just not … it’s not feasible because they’re underwriting it for other reasons.

Cloud, for each of them, is an afterthought in terms of like, they’re going, “Ooh, I’ve got some extra data-centers-worth of gear. I might as well throw some cloud on it.” That’s fine. That’s a very commodity play. What the thing that we have though, that they never will, is the thing that I’ve been, potentially incorrectly, complaining about which is the massive of configurability that we have allows us to be suitable for more workloads.

For you to really run your production workload on Amazon or Google’s public clouds, you have to buy into their worldview about what a workload wants to look like. You have to write your app in the Amazon way. You have to write your app in the Google way. You have to buy into this cloud boundary- twelve factor app mantra, and it’s great. If that’s what your app needs to be, write it’s full factor man, go nuts. That’s fantastic.

In the real world, it turns out there’s a bunch of workloads that don’t fit that model. Rather than trying to take your workloads, and take your business, and fit it to some prescriptive model which really only exists because it’s the way that Amazon makes the margins. It’s not because it’s a good design, it’s how Amazon rolls out their sof- their servers.

Rather than trying to fit your workload to that, we got a cloud product that gives you eighty, ninety percent of the things that are the same. You can use the cloud paradigms, but you can actually tune a cloud to your workload to make the choices that make sense for what you’re doing.

You can have per data locality, per regularity region, clouds for your business. You can still have your developers writing things, taking advantage of cloud bins. If you look at my favorite example, which is the thing that I’m doing because I’m narcissistic, I like to talk about myself.

OpenStack infra is running a giant cloud application across a couple of different clouds, and we have each of the different types of things that people say that you either do or don’t want to do in cloud. We do all of them.

We have many special paths in our infrastructure. We have machines that we’ve spun up and we care for like they are traditional IT applications. We’re running them in the cloud. We haven’t transformed them into cloud-native applications because the cost of doing that would be insane.

It doesn’t make … it doesn’t provide any value to anybody for us to do that. It turns out, you can run those things in an OpenStack cloud. It works great. Now, if we’re running our own cloud for that, we might make some different deployment decisions to, say, understand that we’re going to be running really special things that we want to be highly-available and stay up all the time.

And, we might have a second cloud that we know we’re going to run nothing but ephemeral workloads on, but we don’t need the cost of high-availability. Both of those are going to operate in the same way, and that’s a thing that Amazon or Google just flat can’t do. They have to play the numbers game, they have to play the margins game, and we get to play the flexibility game.

We get to say to them, “You know what? We can be the thing that you can customize for your business, and so that you can run the business that you need to run.” Rather than needing to run the thing that we tell you because we just don’t have the flexibility to offer you anything else.

We’re going to backwards invent some theory as to why you should run your application this way. Anyway, I don’t think I actually answered your question there, but I talked for like, at least, an hour.

Nika Acosta:              (Laughs)

Monty Taylor:            I think we’re in a good place, because having those things start to come out I think we’re seeing the next generation of OpenStack surge. It’s time for the next wave. Like Akanda and those guys that just spun up, with Mark McClain, and Sean Roberts, and those guys over there. That’s a new thing and they’re a start-up focused on a very specific topic. They’re not out there to be another OpenStack distro. They’re … that space is covered. We don’t really need any more of those.

They’re saying, “Hey. There’s a specific problem that a certain customer segment is going to need that will help enable a certain workload, or a certain profile, and we’re gonna tackle that.” In the OpenStack framework, then people who are … since all of the big guys, the HPs, and the Ciscos, and the IBMs are rolling out OpenStack to everybody, then this gives … This is the ecosystem we’ve been talking about all along.

This is the marketplace where the start-up companies can make these new products and offer them to people into an OpenStack framework. You’re not trying to sell into some giant bank with your end-to-end solutions saying, “Hey. Well, you’ve already gone OpenStack. If you buy our little thing over here, then this will make this particular thing you wanted to do in your OpenStack environment better.”

I think that opens up a whole new set of doors for people, if we’re not trying to solve the one-cloud-to-rule-them-all problem which, I think, ultimately we were never going to achieve in the first place.

Niki Acosta:               Speaking of one-cloud-to-rule-them-all, I think part of the allure and magic in OpenStack is knowing that your APIs don’t really change.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               There is the matter of the behavior of what happens behind the API …

Monty Taylor:            [Inaudible 00:18:42]

Niki Acosta:               … that changes quite a bit. Even though you should expect some level of predictability, that results may vary.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               I know you’re working on some stuff lately that is working to address that. Can you tell us about Shade?

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, I’d love to. I’m going to … just as a warning, I’m going to pick on Glance a whole lot as a place of example just because it’s easy to. I can pick on everybody. Literally, every OpenStack project has some things like this, and I think it’s okay but it’s a thing we have to deal with.

I mentioned earlier, OpenStack infra runs across a couple of different public clouds and the node pool that we use to provide test resources for all the OpenStack developers is an elastic … I mean, it couldn’t be more cloud-native. It just literally spins up and tears down VMs all day long.

Our usual rate is somewhere between ten and twenty thousand VMs a day. It’s a pretty big beast and it runs across HP and Rackspace. It turns out there is a decently large amount of business logic we’ve had to learn to successfully run at that scale and that volume across two different public clouds. In many situations, they’re each doing legitimate valid OpenStack API things. They’re not … Neither one of them, neither HP nor Rackspace are doing bad things.

We’re not working around vendor incompatibilities. We’re … The things we’re having to work around are HP has deployed Neutron, with floating IPs for VMs and that’s how you get a public IP. Rackspace hasn’t deployed Neutron and you get a public IP just by spinning up your server in Nova.

Glance, to upload an image in Rackspace, uses the Glance v2 API, requires you to upload your image to Swift and then do a Glance task create image import command to import the image into Glance. In HP cloud, it’s the Glance v1 API and you upload directly to Glance endpoint using the Glance image upload API call.

These are just two, off the top of my head, differences in how those clouds operate that are completely valid. The APIs are fine. Your discoverability through Keystone is fine. You’ve got to know some things if you got to do those.

What I really want to do at the end of the day is I want to do, “Please give me a server with a working IP address.” I want, “Please upload this image.” I don’t care whether it’s uploading this web-first and then importing, or whether it’s uploading directly to Glance, as a user.

We’ve had to encapsulate a lot of that inside of our own node pool software. A few months ago, I’d started … I guess, it’s been several months ago now, I started working with the Ansible guys upstream, on the Ansible OpenStack modules that … the modules in Ansible that actually operate the OpenStack APIs.

They were a mess, and that’s also fine. I don’t want to pick on anybody there, but they were getting a little long in the tooth. They didn’t support Keystone v3. They didn’t support domains. They didn’t support portable off. Looking at what’s going to take to do that was getting a little bit crazy.

What we decided to do is take the logic that was on the Ansible modules, take the logic that we already had in node pool that we’re just seeing a lot of production usage every day. Combine them into a library that could be reused by the node pool project, reused by Ansible, and could be reused really by anybody else. That’s where the Shade library was born.

It’s doing a lot more than I hoped. At some point in the future, it’d be great if Shade went away, right. It’s filling a need at the moment that I’m a little bit unhappy that it has to be filled, but it’s a temporal need and it’s helpful today.

We’re rolling out patches currently to infra’s node pool to port it to the Shade library. We’ve got Shade doing integration testing in the OpenStack gate, so it’s all based around that idea that there are these resources. I want to get a server for my cloud. I want to get a … I want to upload an image.

There’s basic building blocks you want to deal with. Now, you don’t necessarily always want to deal with the APIs because you don’t necessarily always want to know that this cloud used Neutron and this cloud uses VBA network. You just want a server that can’t talk to the network, like that’s all you … in the basic case.

If you want the advanced things, this is where the vendor things come in. If you want to do some really advanced software to find networking routing things, you absolutely … you’re going to have to directly use the Neutron APIs. You’re not … I’m not going to have a simple one-button click workaround for you. It’s not going to work out.

That’s always going to be there and available, and be the flexibility for people who need those, but for the basic eighty percent things- I want a server, I want an image, I want to boot this image on this server, I want a volume … those are just normal concepts.

We tried to embody those in the Shade library basically to drive the needs that we have in infra, and that … also that we’re seeing in the Ansible modules. If that winds up to be useful for some other programs, or for some other consumers, that’s fantastic. That will be really great if we will be helpful. [Crosstalk 00:24:17]

Niki Acosta:               Is that a service provider play now that maybe might be good for end-users at some point?

Monty Taylor:            I think it’s really more a … At the moment, it’s really more just a developer library piece. It’s a … so, rather than using the python-novaclient directly, you can use Shade and it’ll use python-novaclient better. It will do the right calls for you based on which cloud you’re talking to.

Trying to abstract the way, rather than trying to get each of the clouds that exist to agree on how they’re going to deploy thing, because I do think there’s validity in people making different choices. I’m actually very happy that Rackspace has some servers that give me direct IPs, that’s fantastic. It’s a great difference to exist, but for most of my programming I don’t care about it.

Rather than trying to get everybody to homogenize onto one model of deployment, we can actually mitigate that in some … in helper libraries, and some helper logic. To express to people, to make it easy to understand, “Oh, so you’re on HP cloud. Okay, you need to do three things to get that thing.” “Oh, you’re on Rackspace? Oh, you need to do these three things over here.”

They’re slightly different but they express the same concepts. Maybe one day, we get to the point where that gets back ported into some API for OpenStack itself. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense, because maybe that is just one of those, “There’s four competing standards. Let’s solve it by having a fifth,” adding a fifth standard to the pool. I don’t need to necessarily solved that. This is one of the things that we do a lot at [inaudible 00:25:53].

We’re solving our immediate problems for ourselves right now. Trying to do that in a way that could be useful to somebody else but not trying to spend too much time thinking about what might solve the world for everybody. We’re solving our problems, and if our solutions are helpful, neat. It they’re not, that’s okay because they are solving our problems. Oh, wow, that’s …

Niki Acosta:               Yeah, just ignore that chat. Sorry.

Monty Taylor:            [Crosstalk 00:26:19] That’s very fancy.

Niki Acosta:               Sorry.

Monty Taylor:            All of your stuff you guys are doing here. All these images, and talking, and …

Niki Acosta:               Don’t scream crazy, so it’s like, “Jeff, ask the next question,” so I can unmute him. I think he’s in over his head. That bitch! Sorry, carry on.

Monty Taylor:            No, I’m more fascinated by the dog and the maid now.

Niki Acosta:               (Laughs) You know what’s cool? It’s like you guys are doing this Shade thing … I think this is where it’s really cool to see the community at work. You are talking about, before the show started, how you’re kind of bummed that the design summit is separated from the conference.

You don’t get an opportunity to mingle because you’re buried in a room, geeking out with other technical contributors. There’s probably thousands of examples of people doing things like this, that is …

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               Some will make it, some won’t, like the community will decide. There’s some really smart people solving some really interesting problems.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               It’s really cool to get glimpse into that from a technical Board Member’s point of view.

Monty Taylor:            Well, this is actually one of the reasons that I’ve been a pretty strong proponent of all the Big Tent stuff which people may or may not be pleased about. If you’re not, that’s okay.

Niki Acosta:               Can you describe Big Tent for our viewers who are not familiar with Big Tent?

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, I can. The TC made some changes to how we look at bringing projects into the fold. We refer to them as Big Tent largely, I think, because it was the title of a blog post that I wrote on the topic. Something about big tents and cats. The problem is that there is two different … there were two different problems that were intermingled.

There’s a social aspect, who is OpenStack? Who are we? What are we doing as a set of people? Then, there’s the other thing, which is the thing the DefCore has been focused on, which is what is OpenStack? What is the thing we release, and hand to somebody, and put the label of OpenStack on it and say, “This is OpenStack. And, by golly, you should run this.” If you want to say that you’re doing an OpenStack project or product, you need to have his piece.

The problem is we didn’t have a latest, in our previous incarnation of this, we didn’t have a way to express one without the other. We couldn’t move something towards being an essential part of the software without also getting into the, “Are you one of us?” Are you in or out of the cool kid’s club essentially? That wasn’t the thing that anybody was really particularly happy about because it makes it highly politicized.

It makes it, hey, I … this thing is important for my company, I really want it to get blessed in some sort of way. We ran into a chicken-and-egg problem as well, which is we wanted things to be part of the family so that they could grow to be rich and robust, but we couldn’t bring them in this part of the family to help grown them without blessing them.

We wind up with things that … where people were viewing what we were doing as picking winners in a place where that wasn’t really even what we’re trying to do in the first place.

We sort of split this problem, and part of the outcome of trying to deal with this is thing we refer to as Big Tent, which is largely about the floodgate a bit. Saying, “You know what? If you wanna play in our sandbox, if you wanna be one of us, if you wanna be part of who we are, we’re actually a very welcoming and open group.” Come on. Come be part of who we are and let’s all be part of this thing together.

Now, that doesn’t mean that just because we like you, just because we’re all one big happy family, that every piece of software that every member of our family produces … all of that is produced as part of working on OpenStack. That doesn’t mean that every single piece of those pieces of software, all of a sudden, becomes an essential and required piece of the thing that we brand OpenStack when we hand it to people. That’s a different question.

That’s largely what a lot of the DefCore folks have been working on, which is, “Okay, starting very small and very conservatively, what, of all of these pieces of software the technical community is producing, what’s essential at this point? What do we have to have?” What are the things that you just absolutely have to have in your cloud for it to be called OpenStack because anything else would be ridiculous?

Hopefully … The hope is that, in opening it up, we depoliticize inclusion into the family. We reduce the amount of time we’re sitting there dithering about whether or not this idea that somebody had is a good idea and it’s okay for them to work on it. If you want to work on a thing, work on a thing. I don’t care. Sounds great. Go nuts. Write good stuff.

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to bless it in any kind of way. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to … that all of a sudden, because I’ve opened up the door and you’re sitting in my living room on my couch writing some software, that that software is now something that we all think is a great idea. We can deal with those late ideas … Whether a software is a great idea, honestly, we require the feedback from our vendors, from our operators.

I wanted, in this sort of tagging system we’re working, I really want a tag which is “Tim Bell from CERN thinks this is great to run as part of the collider.” If Tim Bell is happy to run it when creating black holes, then that’s a thing that … that’s an emergent property of the software that we all learn.

People figure it out over … give it another six months, whether or not … Congress, which just recently … that we just recently … We just let in a new spate of things. Congress, and Murano and … I can’t even remember because I actually … because it’s actually not all that important.

Dang it, Adrian’s thing, the containers. I’m a terrible human, ah, whatever. We let a bunch of things in and we can start to let the community sort out which things everybody really thinks you got to have. That information can then flow back into the TC. Rather than the TC being the people sitting on high on a mountain, saying, “Thou shall have this, and thou shall also have this other thing,” because we’ve decided before anybody’s had a chance to even try things.

That’s the impulse there. It’s the hoping that we can allow people to try some different ideas, and push some things without, hopefully, descending into abject chaos, which is also a possible outcome. I mean, you’ve removed … remove restrictions and regulation, and chaos can ensue. I’m hoping that we receive so much possible interests.

People have enough problems to solve in front of their plates, and let’s let them solve their problems. Let’s let people do things, and let’s let some winners emerge, or let’s find some place where it’s not important for them to be a winner.

Niki Acosta:               Right, yeah.

Monty Taylor:            It turns up there’s four or five different ways that you could do … like the Ceilometer and the StackTach folks. They’ve been working together really well over the last couple years. They’ve got … each of them have different world views on how you might do metrics collection on your cloud. You know what, why not? Why not. Why wouldn’t there possibly be two different versions. It’s not even user facing things. It’s an operation tool.

Niki Acosta:               Right.

Monty Taylor:            Why wouldn’t there be two? Maybe you want to use statsd/graphite in your thing. Maybe you want to do collectd into influx. I don’t care. Like that’s, “Go nuts.” Like that’s, “Have a good time.” We shouldn’t be in the business of trying to tell people, “Nope. We’re not going to allow you to solve your problems in this way,” because it doesn’t fit some grand plan, or whatever.

Niki Acosta:               Isn’t that the pressure, though, that the OpenStack community gets? It’s like people complaining about it not being easy, or not having all the parts they need …

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               … or being really painful to install. That’s where the vendors actually play a huge part in OpenStack. It’s by muddling through all that confusion and making it easy and consumable.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               I think vendors get a bad rep, and I think the community gets a bad rep, of like I am … There’s magic in that model of letting people choose. The flexibility, the fact that you can have your choice and however you want to consume ceilometer is cool.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, it is. Ultimately, some things will emerge. We’ve had, as I’ve been actually arguing, that … In exact opposite of what I just said, I’ve been arguing for the longest time that we should kill our multiple database support, all the main OpenStack projects. Not because there’s anything wrong with both PostgreSQL or any of the rest of the databases, but because it turns out, literally, everybody who’s deploying OpenStack deploys it in MySQL.

The numbers show that there’s two or three people doing it in PostgreSQL. Everyone else … like it’s the marg- PostgreSQL is the margin of error. It’s not I’m knocking them. It’s just how it has happened. It’s what we’ve learned from our operator community is actually happening.

Niki Acosta:               Just like KVM is probably used in most situations.

Monty Taylor:            Exactly. In this particular case, especially with databases and database transactions, when you’re trying to write something in a very generic way, it prevents you from writing more resilient code. That can take advantage of specific operational characteristics of a particular backend.

Niki Acosta:               Time out. You’re talking about MySQL in the context of OpenStack services, not in the context of like Trove. Just to be clear.

Monty Taylor:            No, I’m not talking about Trove at all. Trove should probably, almost certainly, should be offering MySQL in PostgreSQL databases. In terms of running Nova, the complexity that goes into Nova trying to be database-agnostic. As opposed to you just saying, “You know what? We can write better, more easily operatable code that knows how to do rolling upgrades betters if we just stop doing this in an agnostic way.”

I mean, Facebook doesn’t run Facebook on MySQL or PostgreSQL. That would be a ri- like that would be … it would be a laughable idea for the community. Google doesn’t run on MySQL or PostgreSQL. They are on MySQL. Facebook runs on MySQL, and so they’re able to write their code knowing that.

I think that there’s time when … As we learn things from our operator community, as trends emerge from what we learn from all the operators that are doing these, then that can feedback into the technical community. Then we can start to make some culling down choices.

I don’t think we need to start that way. I think that what we’re doing with the Big Tent is great. We let the operators do their things, for the vendors to do their things.

Niki Acosta:               Great.

Monty Taylor:            Now, we see what the vendors and the operators are tending to do. We see, “Oh, everybody, it turns out, is just doing this thing.” Maybe we can stop caring about supporting this second thing over because nobody cares about it.

Niki Acosta:               Put your energy into something that does matter.

Monty Taylor:            Exactly.

Niki Acosta:               [Crosstalk 00:37:33] you see the scale, the rolling upgrades problem.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, exactly.

Niki Acosta:               That makes a lot of sense to me. By the way, I think you’re talking about the Magnum project for containers?

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, Magnum. Thank you.

Niki Acosta:               Which is crazy …

Monty Taylor:            There’s all of the “M” project. Why are all of the projects start with the letter M?

Niki Acosta:               I don’t know. That’s going to change because it’s the same way like we have Neutron, whatever it was before. Then we have Sahara and Savannah name change. I can think of at least two commercial products, unrelated to technology, that have the word “Magnum” in them …

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               … that are probably trademarked and copyrighted. I’m sure that will be changing to something else at some point.

Monty Taylor:            I want you to tell me what those products are, but …

Niki Acosta:               I don’t know. PC today on the OpenStack podcast. No comment from Jeff. He’s over there laughing at me.

Monty Taylor:            This is …

Niki Acosta:               I had a lot of coffee today.

Monty Taylor:            This is the danger you get into when you get the two of us into a talking thing for a period of time. You’re going to …

Niki Acosta:               I know.

Monty Taylor:            Ultimately, the conversation are getting around to Magnums.

Niki Acosta:               Yeah.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               Jeff, surely you have some burning questions because I do that thing that I do so often. I want to give you an opportunity to say what you want to say here because I’m being a really crappy show host today.

Jeff Dickey:                No, it’s fine.

Niki Acosta:               I’ve got a sheet behind me.

Jeff Dickey:                I mean, going back to what you guys are talking about and that, you know, all of that projects. I think it’s great. I think, I agree, it’s great for those projects but are people bored with the DefCore projects-type stuff where they moved on? There’s a lot to do still. I mean, just look [crosstalk 00:39:08] …

Niki Acosta:               People are bringing it that way, don’t you think? I think people are bringing it that way. I mean, OpenStack, with the ecosystem and the way that it’s grown. There’s just … There are things that people need, that they want it to work with OpenStack, I don’t know. What do you think? You’re the interviewee today, Marty.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah. I think … It actually brings to a related point. I’m going to, once again, answer and not answer your question, which appears to be what I’m doing here today. I think, to a certain degree, there’s a sense … you can get that sense of, like, worrying that people are getting bored, or getting burned out, or those sort of things.

I was talking to somebody about this the other day, about us being, sort of, having hit what in basketball would be referred to as a “sophomore slump,” because we’re not the freshman on the … We’re not the new kid on the block anymore. We’re not the most exciting thing out there. We’re actually having a pretty darned good amount of success.

It’s actually … We’re reaching the point where we’re getting a large amount of production. We have production … large production appointments from companies that I’ve never heard of. That’s fantastic. That’s as it should be. That’s actually the mark of a good thing. It’s got some warts, yeah, but MySQL has been around for twenty years and it has some warts.

Everything has things, but we’re getting to the point where we got operators now who understand the warts, and that’s okay, because that’s actually what you want. The tribal knowledge to start to exist in the ecosystems. We only have the operator summits, and then you’re all getting the other, and they’re sharing tips and best practices. This is exactly what the MySQL users sum their words for the year.

These people getting the other saying, “Okay. Well, this is how this breaks, but let me tell you, I can tell you it’s gonna break in this way every time, so you can plan for it. You can plan, as an operator, that you have to do these three things. ” Operators, they’re fine with that. That’s all they really needs, is to … is for that to start to be predictable, and understandable, so they can write your automation around it.

I think that’s gotten us to the place because we’re not the new … the newest, sexiest thing out there anymore. They can make it seem like the steam is coming out of the balloon, that it …

Niki Acosta:               Speaking of steam, what’s happening with Eucalyptus?

Monty Taylor:            I’m not a contributor to Eucalyptus. I really couldn’t tell you much, other than they’ve got excellent software and that they’re all really nice, smart guys.

Niki Acosta:               Sorry to derail you. It was such a funny question.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, I can neither confirm nor deny anything that you might want to ask me about that. I don’t think I have a good basis for comment.

Niki Acosta:               Media contact over there.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, let me … yeah. Oh, boy. I think we’re getting to that point where, similar to, we’re going to have a new set of start-up companies, and new set of things coming out like that. It’s time for yet another generation of folks who are interested in … There has been some folks who have been battling the early-stage OpenStack problems for several years now. It’s been a consistent set of people.

We always need new fresh blood, but we need the people right now who are less interested in new features and more interested in the stability work. Stability work is … can be boring, if you’re not into it. If you are like … if you’re the write-the-new-software person, then stabilizing work is … it can seem like you just spent six months working on nothing. You’ve actually spent six months doing really important work, and that’s the work that our community wants out of us at the moment.

People will stop asking the question every six months, “What are the great new features in OpenStack this release?” Actually we don’t want any new … written new features in OpenStack this release. We want to be able to say, “In OpenStack, this release, we’ve increased our reliability by this number, and we’ve become more performant in this particular metric, and look at how we’ve tightened the product.”

Those are the things that we should start getting excited about. They’re a different tone. They’re a different vibe, and a different feeling for people.

Niki Acosta:               You mean tighten the project, not the product? Big distinction.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, on the project.

Niki Acosta:               Right.

Monty Taylor:            Tighten the things, learn … that maybe, that we learn a thing about, like, what Nova’s been recently doing with API microversions, which Ironic is also doing with their API. As that starts to be successful, that may be the type of thing that we need to spread across all over the OpenStack project.

Just say, “Hey, we’re not gonna tell you have to do this API microversioning thing because there’s a hundred of new projects now. But, check it out. We’ve developed this best practice over here at Nova that all of our operators really like. So, probably, you want to implement this.”

Then we can start to see over time, if people want to be operator-friendly, then they’ll … as we get that feedback from the operators, then the projects will either implement that or people will avoid them. We’ll see this natural progression of things that operate in the way that operators expect them to operate, so that … because you, eventually, will get to that point where an operator can try a new OpenStack service to see how it works out without having to relearn everything about how to do that.

“Oh, it’s a policy engine. Great.” Click, there’s a new API service. It fit all of the rest of my chef, puppet, Ansible, salt models that I already had for how I deploy OpenStack things. I didn’t just spend four new weeks figuring out how to do a trial run of something. It lowers the cost to our vendors and operator ecosystem for experimenting with the new projects to see whether they are any good or not.

Then if the cost to them is lower, of trying these things, then they can give us better feedback about what shape they’re in and whether we should be giving them more attention or less attention, or things of that nature. I think I rambled back off …

Niki Acosta:               No, that’s good. There’s magic in a lot of what you say but in a lot of ways too, I can’t help but think that it also somehow slows the project down. It slows products down for sure. I know we both saw this at Rackspace. You probably see it at HP. I see it at Cisco. You want to do some cool new feature, value-add, whatever, and it’s going to take some core changes to OpenStack so that you don’t have to fork OpenStack, because nobody wants to fork OpenStack.

How do you solve those problems? Are you supposed to wait to roll your feature out, even though customers are asking for it, until OpenStack catches up and gets released officially? Or, you working on an extensibility model? How are people supposed to [crosstalk 00:45:52]?

Monty Taylor:            I think [crosstalk 00:45:52] thing. I think, honestly, some of these things are … There’s about four different issues in there. One of them is, and this where I’m really hoping that the wor- the Product Management Working Group … I’m excited about the existence of that, even though I have to admit that I don’t think I ever would have imagined that I would have said the words, “I’m excited of the existence of the Product Management Working Group.” It’s not a sentence that I would have predicted for myself.

One of the things that I think that we really need … We’ve got a really big tragedy to commons problem in OpenStack. I’ve had a great conversation with a guy, watching a Dukes game a couple of night ago, about … He’s a government policy-side lawyer type that work, he’s from D.C., and all that. We got into policy-geek type questions.

We were talking about organizational dynamics, and he brought up … I need to go follow-up with him to find where the numbers are, so I can make a better reference, rather than, “There was this guy in a bar who said this thing,” and actually give you the real research label.

He was talking about the tragedy to commons problem coming out at around a hundred and fifty people in an organization because that’s around the level where you stop being able to know everybody. You stop [crosstalk 00:47:16]

Niki Acosta:               How many is that?

Monty Taylor:            A hundred and fifty.

Niki Acosta:               A hundred and fifty.

Monty Taylor:            Hundred fifty is … he was saying, in governance mo- government models, hundred fifty is the point where you stop implicitly trusting other people who are in, to all be working on the same common good. Then, that once you get into that point, then you start having people who will take selfish action because they don’t trust that the other people are going to take care of them.

They start having to take care of themselves. Once you have one set of actors start to do that, then everybody has to do it because they have to cover their own backs, so there is this waterfall-effect that happens.

Obviously, with two thousand contributors and two hundred fifty, three hundred companies, involved in OpenStack, this is one of the problems we’ve seen, which is that nobody is actually … very few people are working on the core clean-up, make it more stable, make it so we can iterate more quickly on features. Everybody’s focused on their feature and nobody wants to do the enablement work to make sure that people can land features in the first place.

Niki Acosta:               Who’s job is that? Is that vendors need to employ more core contributors to fix those core stability issues? Is it community members that just need to buck up and do the boring work? Do we need to recruit…?

Monty Taylor:            No. Well, here’s the thing. There are no community members that are not employed by vendors.

Niki Acosta:               True.

Monty Taylor:            This is not … The myth of there is a community out there is completely false for OpenStack. OpenStack’s contributor base is one hundred per- there’s a couple of … there’s always an exception to the rule.

Niki Acosta:               Ninety-nine percent.

Monty Taylor:            Ninety-nine percent of OpenStack contributor bases are employed by people in the vendor ecosystem to make OpenStack better.

Niki Acosta:               If you’re not employed, you’re getting recruited to work for one of the vendors.

Monty Taylor:            Exactly. You’re going to be employed by one of them really quickly. The thing is that most of … There’s a few of us who have carved out enough clout that it’s not a problem for us. There is a core of people who are working on these, but they’re working against the pressure from three hundred companies-worth of people who want to land feature.

One thing that I’m hoping comes out of the Product Management Working Group is each of those product managers at those vendors, is having to play that organizational role that I spoke about of the first person doing the self-interest piece outside of the a hundred and fifty person thing.

If we can get those product managers as a smaller group of people … because if you get rid of the tech community and you just think about the product managers in our vendor ecosystem, you’ll actually probably get a set of people below a hundred and fifty, right?

Niki Acosta:               Right.

Monty Taylor:            If we can actually get that set of people to start talking. They’ll all get in a room and say, “Listen. These are all the seven thousand features that we all collectively want. None of us are getting any of these features in because it’s … because we’re all battling each other for the bandwidth to get any features in.

If we actually work together and made some priority lists so that, in any given cycle, we’d all know these are the next twenty features that are gonna get in. And, we’re all committing to also work on some of the enablement things.”

Then, you’d actually probably see over three or four cycles. More vendors get in more of their features than is currently happening. Right now, it’s just all, everybody, slamming the thing altogether, all at the same time.

Niki Acosta:               Trying to get their stuff in so they can launch their product, or whatever.

Monty Taylor:            Exactly. The net result of that is that nobody’s things are getting scheduled. Schedule our priorities, right?

Niki Acosta:               The PTLs are pulling their hair out.

Monty Taylor:            The PTLs are pulling their hair. You get people saying the OpenStack community needs to focus more in stability. The people who are full-time only focused on upstream would love to spend more time on stability. They spend most of them … You look at the Twitter storm and the mailing list when Mike Perez kicked a bunch of storage drivers out of cinder. He put the stake in the ground a long time ago. He said, “Listen. You’ve got to have a quality bar, third-party CI system hooked up. Here’s how you do it. Here’s the deadline.”

Nobody did it, a few did, and he kicked out the people like he said he was going to. Of course, they were like, “Oh, my God. My product.” We’re like, “Well, we told you.” You’ve all been screaming that things needed to be better quality, so we put a line in the sand saying this is how we’re going to get better quality. You can’t yell at us then for having put the halt on crap. This is the thing … This is where it has to become a conversation and not a confrontation.

The product managers, if they can coordinate with each other, come up with some party-list, then they’re the ones who are directing most of their engineers’ work. If they can come out with a plan amongst each other, then that would actually free up bandwidth from that collection of humans to work on some of the enablement things, so that we can accelerate the … our ability to land more and more features.

Niki Acosta:               Or we could get, like, Mirantis to do it all?

Monty Taylor:            (Laughs)

Niki Acosta:               Come on, Boris. Are you listening, Boris? Just do it all, fix stability.

Monty Taylor:            They’re doing … they’re actually doing a pretty …

Niki Acosta:               It’s such a ton.

Monty Taylor:            I’d say they’re pulling probably more than their fair share of actually working on that.

Niki Acosta:               I love that. I love that about Mirantis.

Monty Taylor:            That’s the great thing. I think we’ve got so many great engineers. There’s so many exciting people at these companies. The more I go and sit down with people at HP, at Cisco, at IBM, Rackspace, all of these that are involved, there’s just a bunch of really sharp people. We don’t have a problem on not having great developers in our view. We have so many of them. The biggest problem is that we have so many of them …

Niki Acosta:               Focus.

Monty Taylor:            … and that fires coordination, right?

Niki Acosta:               Yeah.

Monty Taylor:            None of our companies would we assume that single product could have a hundred product managers that don’t coordinate with each other as to what’s going to go into the product.

Niki Acosta:               Maybe we … Here’s the problem. Maybe we need more women involved in that, don’t you think?

Monty Taylor:            We do!

Niki Acosta:               … to settle up communication.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, absolutely.

Niki Acosta:               Just saying.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, absolutely. I’ll try and to hire as many as I can …

Niki Acosta:               Ye-hey!

Monty Taylor:            … and do what I can to enable the rest. Of course, the thing is this gets into a much longer topic which is how do we enable women int he STEM, in general, in the western world. Although, I got to tell you. When I get down to … There’s a company that I used to do consulting work for in Brazil, and their engineering group was fifty-fifty, male-female.

Niki Acosta:               So killer.

Monty Taylor:            Hundred … like, just right down it … I’m sad that I was shocked and surprised. I walked in, and I was like, “Hang on. This is just a completely … like your balance of humans is about what it should be given the demographics of your …”

Niki Acosta:               Populace.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, maybe we should start hiring more people in Brazil.

Niki Acosta:               Yeah.

Monty Taylor:            They’re doing a good job for it. Also, if anybody’s out there and listening, I’ve got a multiple-entry Brazil visa. I’m always happy to come down and visit. If anybody wants me to ..

Niki Acosta:               (Laughs) Just saying.

Monty Taylor:            To help arrange that. I’ll be more than happy to pitch in.

Niki Acosta:               We are almost at time, and two questions. Number one, in a minute or less, what are you excited about? It could be, just in the realm of technology as a whole, it could be whatever. Mine is home automation, as an example. What are you excited about?

Monty Taylor:            This is going to sound like the dorkiest thing. I spent all weekend working on a ridiculous programming project in the programming language Rust, which the Mozilla folks have been developing. I just think it’s a … I think it’s a … it hits the sweet spot between C++ and Python for me. I think it’s got some real legs and able to … in order to enable some things like the high-scale media processing for projection design-type things …

Niki Acosta:               Oh.

Monty Taylor:            … without having to learn Computer Science theories. I’m very excited where that’s going and that’s possibly the geekiest thing I’ve … Also, Duke won the national championship yesterday.

Niki Acosta:               (Laughs)

Monty Taylor:            I’m pretty excited.

Niki Acosta:               3D mapping for lighting is getting insane.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, it really is.

Niki Acosta:               I keep seeing videos pop up where they’re mapping on buildings and they’re making the buildings look like they fall down. Just crazy stuff.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah. One of my best friends here in New York, Andrew Lazarow, is a projection designer and that’s his … that’s one of his areas. It’s the 3D mapping, so you’re projecting onto this buildings, or onto a set, in a thing and having the projections do the right things with that. He also …

Niki Acosta:               I want you do that on an OpenStack party. I’m just going to throw it out there. You want to get people talking about your party, bring in a 3D mapping projection mapping to do something really cool.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah. Well, I’ve … if anybody, that’s out there listening, wants to do that for your OpenStack party, I know a absolutely top-rate projection, interactive projection, because he also does the computer vision interactivity pieces. His projection design stuff is reactive to human interaction.

Niki Acosta:               Oh, so cool.

Monty Taylor:            Mapping that into Broadway stage stuff, so that you can actually have actors on stage affecting how the projection actually works.

Niki Acosta:               That is so cool.

Monty Taylor:            If people want that in their party, I know the guy. I can introduce you.

Niki Acosta:               Just saying

Monty Taylor:            Yeah!

Niki Acosta:               Jeff was supposed to name drop my post in Superuser this week, the Women of OpenStack Open Mic Series on Superuser, and he didn’t do that. I guess I have to shamelessly plug that. Interesting thoughts on women in tech, and OpenStack careers and all kinds of that stuff.

Monty Taylor:            Hey, everybody, Niki is on Superuser that dropped this week. You guys should all go check it out.

Niki Acosta:               Aren’t you sweet, Monty.

Monty Taylor:            (Laughs)

Niki Acosta:               Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Dickey:                Sorry.

Niki Acosta:               No, it’s okay. Jeff, you look dashing today by the way.

Jeff Dickey:                Oh, thank you.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               Your hair looks great.

Jeff Dickey:                Thank you.

Niki Acosta:               It’s because you haven’t traveled in a couple of days, isn’t it?

Monty Taylor:            Cool thing.

Jeff Dickey:                I know. It is, really. I slept.

Niki Acosta:               Last two questions. Jeff, do the honors.

Jeff Dickey:                Okay.

Niki Acosta:               Last one question, sorry.

Jeff Dickey:                Last question, and we didn’t actually prep you in this question.

Monty Taylor:            Oh, no.

Jeff Dickey:                Who are two people you’d like to hear on this OpenStack podcast?

Monty Taylor:            Oh, gosh. Yeah, that’s … you should have given me a slightly more … Honestly, you should … this is going to sound I’m just plugging my people. You should get Devon onto on here. If you haven’t … I don’t think you have yet.

Jeff Dickey:                No.

Monty Taylor:            He and I agree on some things, and disagree on some things, and so that’s great. We enjoy that. He’d be a fun topic for you to … or a fun human to have. Second person?

Niki Acosta:               Anyone from Ansible, or the Product Management Working Group, or … I think someone is part of that but not like leading it.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah. Well, so actually you should … so, in terms of Product Management Working Group, and just the person that I know that might be an interesting, and maybe not as directly well-known to our broader OpenStack community yet, is Allison Randal. Do you know her?

Niki Acosta:               No, but I need to. Oh, actually I’ve met her.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, you’ve met here probably. She has been working on helping with the Product Management Working Group, helping put that together. She’s been involved in the Perl and Python communities for ages. All sorts of things and into this long-term open source … In fact, she got elected to the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative, so like involved in that side of things.

And, is very much helping … trying to help bridge that product management-open source divide that we’ve got, and helping in all of that. Also, furthering women in tech. You can’t be much more badass than Allison.

Niki Acosta:               Yeah, I know. Her blog, her personal blog, is it Allison, A-L-L-I-S-O-N, Randall, R-A-N-D-A-L, dot com. It says, “Allison Randal, here be unicorns.”

Monty Taylor:            Yup.

Niki Acosta:               Love that.

Monty Taylor:            That would be her.

Niki Acosta:               Love that.

Monty Taylor:            That would be her, yeah.

Niki Acosta:               Cool. Well, Monty, I am going to bring you a super, ultra, limited edition HP Cloud Services vintage OpenStack Boston Summit mug. At the summit. You need to remind me though.

Monty Taylor:            I will. I’ll remind you about that. Oh, by the way. My extended family all enjoyed the playing cards.

Niki Acosta:               Oh, cool. Very cool.

Monty Taylor:            That was Christmas presents for everybody.

Niki Acosta:               We should do that … I want to do that again. Maybe for OpenStack Tokyo, or something. It was really fun to do, really fun.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, those are really cool. I thought those are really great … I’m excited about getting the HP mug that I don’t have.

Niki Acosta:               It’s such a good mug. I have two of them, and it’s the biggest, most wide-mouthed. It keeps the coffee warm for a long time … like high-dollar coffee mug. It’s my go-to for sure.

Monty Taylor:            Nice. I should pass along that we need more … we need to come back to coffee mugs.

Niki Acosta:               Yes. Coffee mugs are great, don’t you think. I mean, they’re kind of a pain to take home but they’re so cool to have.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, when they’re high quality.

Niki Acosta:               It’s something that you used every day.

Monty Taylor:            If they’re high-quality and not crappy mugs. If they’re good mugs.

Niki Acosta:               Yes.

Monty Taylor:            Give me a crappy mug, and I’m going to get lead poisoning or something.

Niki Acosta:               Give me a good mug, like in a box, that I can take home easily. Agree.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, absolutely.

Monty Taylor:            Cool. Well, Monty, always a pleasure. I know you don’t have any super public sessions at the OpenStack Summit, but we will be doing a little bit of the OpenStack podcast/broadcast there. We’d love to have you on for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, love to be there. I think I do have … Yeah, I’m normally over just in the bowels of the design summit, but I do have a … we’ve got a … HP is sponsoring a track and I’ve got a keynote thing in that. I don’t remember which day it is.

Niki Acosta:               (Laughs)

Monty Taylor:            All of the event planning people at HP just started crying because, here I am, not pitching the things appropriately. If you look around, there’ll be my name on something. You should come to that, and you should also stick around for the people who’ll talk after me because they’ll be great.

Niki Acosta:               If we can find you on Twitter, @e_monty, M-O-N-T-Y, on IRC, @mordred. Your blog is inaugust.com, correct?

Monty Taylor:            That is correct.

Niki Acosta:               Yes.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               Follow Monty, harass him.

Monty Taylor:            Harass me. Harass me anytime.

Niki Acosta:               Ye-hey!

Monty Taylor:            Ye-hey!

Niki Acosta:               Thank you so much, Monty.

Monty Taylor:            It’s my pleasure.

Niki Acosta:               This was a ton of fun.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               There was a pretty lady that walked behind you. At least, I think it was a lady.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, that was my wife. That’s my wife, Sandy.

Niki Acosta:               Hi, wife. Hi, Sandy.

Monty Taylor:            She’s over at the other room now

Niki Acosta:               Thanks for putting up with Monty, and keeping him happy!

Monty Taylor:            (Laughs) Yeah, she got to experience me screaming and yelling at the television, and rolling around the ground like a dog.

Niki Acosta:               (Laughs)

Monty Taylor:            That she’s still here is amazing.

Niki Acosta:               That’s great. Thanks, Monty.

Monty Taylor:            Thanks a lot.

Niki Acosta:               Who do we have next week, Jeff?

Jeff Dickey:                Next week, we have John Dickinson from SwiftStack.

Niki Acosta:               Ye-hey, John!

Monty Taylor:            Ye-hey!

Niki Acosta:               Big Swift contributor. Also, a former Racker.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah.

Niki Acosta:               With you back in the day, so definitely looking forward to having him on. IF you have any question about Swift, definitely hit us up on Twitter. Hit John up … what is his Twitter name? It’s like …

Monty Taylor:            @notmyname.

Niki Acosta:               @notmyname, thank you. I was going to say not John but I knew that wasn’t right. @notmyname on Twitter. Hit us up. Follow the show. Tell us what you like. Tell us what you don’t like. Tell us who we should have on the show. If you are an OpenStack user, we would love to have you on the show. I’m talking about you Walmart, that’s right. Make some time, it’s one hour. It’s the best one hour of your week. Just saying.

Jeff Dickey:                Awesome. Well, thank you guys.

Niki Acosta:               Too much coffee today.

Monty Taylor:            Yeah, right.

Niki Acosta:               Well, everyone have a good week, and we’ll see you next week.

Jeff Dickey:                All right. Bye, everyone.

Niki Acosta:               Bye.