Open Stack

Hey Folks, thoughts inline…

From: Nate Gandomi <nate at jones-dilworth.com<mailto:nate at jones-dilworth.com>>
Date: Thursday, May 22, 2014 at 7:37 PM
To: "superuser at lists.openstack.org<mailto:superuser at lists.openstack.org>" <superuser at lists.openstack.org<mailto:superuser at lists.openstack.org>>
Subject: [Superuser] Editorial Advisory Board, meeting notes, how to get involved

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the Superuser editorial advisory mailing list!

The purpose of this list is for coordinating among ourselves and to get your input. It’s a public list to which anyone can subscribe or send feedback/ideas about the publication, but we expect it will primarily be the editorial team and advisors.

Thank you for volunteering to help and for those of you that attended our first meeting at the Atlanta Summit. The editorial team came away with a great deal of insight from the discussion, and we want to continue iterating and building out plans for the publication with your feedback.

For those who are new or were unable to attend in Atlanta, we've captured notes from the meeting below. We are also sharing a few collaborate documents for your input, and have a few specific follow up questions and areas that we think warrant continued discussion.

Primary Takeaways from Atlanta
​- Consider two audiences: We had originally scoped the Superuser publication to focus on the operator community, folks who are setting up and running cloud infrastructure. From the meeting, it seems like there is interest in expanding that scope to also include the app dev / API consumer audience. We are certainly open to this feedback, but need some help setting the editorial direction and identifying the best resources to get involved.
If you look at the personas of OpenStack, this is supporting what we recommended… there are three personas (if I recall correctly) - developers of OpenStack, the Operators, and the users.  The SuperUser term is actually targeting Operators, but in groovy DevOps fashion there is nothing wrong with saying the Users (which are the real Developers consuming OpenStack to run apps) and the Operators are both together the “SuperUsers”.  With that said, I would suggest as fast as possible we have a story on how I use all of the cool APIs in OpenStack to run my app.  This preferably would include Heat and potentially even show a sample template on how the app did auto-scaling to handle customer demand increase.  Another could be how a developer uses Swift to host their content (could we get Concur to write up how they use it for expense receipts?).  So, to me it is imperative we hit the Users now – the people that will really cement OpenStack is the people that consume the APIs to build their apps – why don’t we have a community (or do we) for Heat templates?

- Highlight release development progress: There were several people who wanted the publication to report on the software development progress, especially highlighting issues where operators may want to weigh in or get involved, possibly driving users back to the appropriate mailing list conversations. What’s the best process and format for these updates? We need to highlight the important conversations that are happening on the mailing lists, in IRC, and other channels. How do we capture conversations and bring them back in ways that the broader community can consume them?
I think for each Milestone we have the PTLs make a pitch of why the Operators should care, or the Users.  We can pick a few to talk about, to show the progress between releases.  Another thought is after we make a little more progress on the Enterprise Working Group… like here are the gaps we had, and here is the progress we are making.  Progress is a great story, some people don’t want to jinx it (just in case it gets dropped) - but that is a good story too… like why didn’t Docker get into Icehouse through Nova?  And then how will it get in the next release?

- Developer and user feedback loop: How can we build empathy between developers and operators? Focus on the combined effort as the solution rather than the problem itself, or the dichotomy of users and/or developers. For example, Developer and Operator interaction and "success stories.” How can we discover these interactions?
DevOps is a well understood not really that new paradigm, I know our Intel IT team would be happy to talk about the teamwork we have seen since we created a DevOps culture around OpenStack, and why carrying the pager leads to better solutions for all.

- Consider product and vendor reviews: Several saw the value in sharing their experiences with vendors, but we discussed whether this was appropriate and how we would need to approach it in a very balanced way (like giving the vendors a heads up if there was an article appearing about them for a chance to comment). It’s not something we need to settle on right away, but can see how the content evolves and what makes the most sense.
I would hold on this, based on my experience publishing material for the ODCA that was contentious, we should do this when we are really ready… one option could be to focus on big problems like once DefCore/RefCore is working we can talk about interoperability or the lack thereof with proof.  Constructive confrontation is healthy but we should use it at the right time, for the right topics.

- Business case also important: Another role several of you see for this publication is to help provide the business value content needed to help sell OpenStack internally (or to users/customers). We may even want to tag this by industry over time.
Most of us probably break down all IT activities into two major buckets…. Lower my cost (by unit), Increase my business agility.  My major goal is agility for the business – so focus on true self-service for all infrastructure (and how app developers used this to get faster time to market) is an important business aspect.  Showing the cost reduction while increasing feature set, and increasing scale is also important – however most of us can’t talk about this one openly.

- Help users along the journey: There should be content for beginners, as well as more advanced users, and we should find a way to tag that appropriately and help drive people to the best resources or next steps.
Note, that many shops still do not expose self-service to their end users… while their end-users can swipe their credit card and get self-service through many methods today.  So here there are two things I want to focus on… the Real transformation to Cloud computing – I have slides and lots of documentation that we have done in the ODCA and can reuse freely.  As well the transformation of a single person from “next-next-finish” to being a scripting wizard that is building the skills to be relevant for the next 20 years.  So two journeys – the transformation and maturity to a federated, interoperable, open cloud… and the transformation of the individual (this is probably a cooler story, and we should pick someone that can talk about this – I can get a volunteer for this).

- Video is an important medium, especially for the business value content and shorter attention spans :)  We will of course have a significant amount of video content from the Summit that we can curate/summarize/tag for the publication.
Short videos, and curated lists… yes!  Also we need the summit videos to have links to the slides.  I could get our CIO to talk about why we are doing OpenStack from a business perspective, and we should do the same with a few others – the business reasons and why a CIO would care in 2 minutes or less.  Also who is working on the Sweater as a Service video animation????

- Users that came to the Superuser booth expressed the need to have more basic how-tos and guides. We may play a role in helping market appropriate documentation and guides that the community has already developed.
We need better pictures, and sample deployments – I have a couple of friends that would want to show this.

- If you attended, please feel welcome to add your notes or thoughts here​

​Next Steps​
- Please weigh in on any of the comments and takeaways above. We specifically need more input and help scoping out how we’ll highlight release development process, dev/user feedback stories and whether we should target end user / app developers initially.
- We are planning one major/topical feature story per month. Please help us review the editorial calendar and provide input on the topics, whether you like it, think we should skip it, or have ideas about a specific angle we should take:
https://docs.google.com/a/openstack.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Atf9_ocTTlmLdDFVTTRoTTlNUFFCYkxlLXJKMjZwUkE&usp=drive_web#gid=4
- We have one feature article in flight about best practices for building OpenStack skills and career development. If you have any ideas or know of anyone we should speak to, please let us know.
I can have someone that went from a Gui Next-Next-Finish person to be a full blown OpenStack DevOps person.  We did a massive effort across 350 people to drive a skill set change in Intel IT, so we can talk about from an individuals perspective, as well as from the Director of Hosting’s perspective on the transformation.

- Based on the feedback from the first meeting, we’re considering re-working the navigation. We’ll wait a few weeks to gather more feedback and see how the content develops before making any major changes, but we’re open to feedback and will circulate some ideas to the mailing list.
- We are always looking for more contributors and and guest authors. Do you know of anyone that is blogging about how they use OpenStack?  Do you relationships with any technical writers or even journalists we might hire for a feature story?
Yes, I am building a list for us.  Remind me offline.

One quick note on promotion. We launched the publication at the Summit so we could start getting the community involved and capture content at the event. While we would definitely like to start building a core audience and promoting great articles, we have deliberately held off on bigger campaigns to amp up readership until we get our feet under us. We’d like a chance to incorporate the feedback you’ve provided and build up a good base of content over the next few weeks, and then we’ll start to put more marketing muscle behind it.

Our next in person meeting will be at the Paris summit. In the meantime, please share your ideas, comments, feedback, questions about Superuser on this list. Let's keep the conversation going.

Thank you again for taking the time to participate in what we hope will become a valuable resource for the OpenStack community!

​Best,
Nate​


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Nate Gandomi // Jones-Dilworth, Inc.
M: 510-999-6283 // @ngandomi<https://twitter.com/ngandomi> // Skype: ngandomi