Contributor To Openstack At GOTO Conf Chicago 2014: Mike Hall Interviews Richard Lee | GOTO Conference 2014
Interview with Richard Lee at GOTO Conference 2014 on contributor to openstack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014. This recording captures practical lessons and perspective for software teams and technical communities.
🔗 Read the full structured forensic transcript with durable insights at: https://just3ws.github.io/interviews/richard-lee-goto-conference-2014
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at GOTO Conference 2014. I'm sitting here with Richard Lee who is a contributor to the OpenStack project, particularly the HEAT project, which is a, well, he'll explain what that is. Well, first, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. So, what is the HEAT project and also what is OpenStack and how did you get involved with contributing to it?
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So, OpenStack is the platform that allows you to basically host your own cloud. So, it's especially useful for companies that are hosts like internal cloud, maybe your IT group, to allow provisioning without going towards external cloud providers. So, I guess the HEAT project in particular is the thing that kind of orchestrates everything. It's the orchestration engine. So, within OpenStack, there's a service for all of that. So, there's a service for all of that. So, within OpenStack, there's a service for all of that. So, there's a service for all of that. So, within OpenStack, there's a service for all of that. So, there's a service for all of that. So, within OpenStack, there's a service for all of that. So, within OpenStack, there's a service for all of that. So, within OpenStack, there's a service for compute. So, you can launch your compute nodes for load balancers, databases, and HEAT is the thing that kind of binds it all together. It's okay, I want to launch a load balancer and I want to make sure that load balancer is connected to my server and my server is connected to my database and provides kind of the whole mapping of it all.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Is HEAT an acronym or is that a code word?
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
That is, as far as I know, that's just the name of the project. Just the name of the project. Just project, code name, HEAT.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. So, how did you end up contributing to that project? Is that something you were doing already with Outworks or somewhere else before?
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So, I kind of got dropped into it just from project work. I'm actually previously working primarily in Ruby on Rails and then just started going into Python. OpenStack's pretty much entirely in Python. And just from project work, I started working on OpenStack, got jumped into the HEAT project and that's where I am now.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So, you didn't have like a particular passion for this specific topic. It was just you saw an opportunity to contribute and do something and you've come from being more of an app dev now to being working in this open source.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Has that been a little bit of a challenge in how you think or how you approach problems?
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
It's been very interesting because there's a lot of pieces that I just didn't think about before, especially like Ruby on Rails. It was very easy to kind of ignore the entire Opsy world. I was like, "Oh, I'll just build my app and I'll throw it on Heroku. " Yeah. And now it's very interesting seeing the way that I guess deployments in general are moving with all these interesting tools along with OpenStack. There's like Solve, Docker, all these different kind of things that you can use and leverage. And the deployment world is very interesting and OpenStack I think is going to be a big player in that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So, it's an interesting problem that when you were coming over to Python though, you described you were part of the Ruby community. You've been exposed now to Python community and the DevOps community.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Has that been interesting getting more exposure to a broader community?
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So, it was very strange jumping in from Ruby to Python. When I think of the Ruby community, at some point I was like, "I think I should maybe start writing a blog or trying to record my experiences just for my own knowledge. " But in the Ruby community, everyone has blogged about everything 50 times. You can find everything written in every different way. And when I jumped into the Python community, it felt more like it was very much more academic and it was very, very document-based. You're trying to learn something, go read the docs for this library, for that library, and there weren't as many people writing about, "This is how you use these two libraries that are very commonly used together. This is how you connect it. " So, that was definitely a driver in me starting writing a blog and providing more useful information, the very personal experience of, "This is how you use things. " And then the DevOps community has been just mind-blowing for me. It's just something that's not something that I've had to think about so far.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
So, what was it in particular that was new for you when you started looking at that community?
Richard Lee
contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Within DevOps, it's just how many different ways you can do a deployment. A lot of people, I think the prevalence of Chef and Puppet have been big in deployments, and then people are starting to shift to... I was talking to Randy Shoop, who was saying their deployment process was they write Puppet manifests, and then they use Packer to create an AMI, and then they deploy the AMIs. And then I know the people that are using Docker for their deployments, and then there's this key project for how you orchestrate it all, similar to other options out there, like Amazon's CloudFormation is out there. There's so many different ways that you can launch what you want to launch. We're going to need a DevOpsOps dev kind of thing, so that way we can start to put these operation DevOps tools so we can deploy those, so that way we can eventually deploy an application. So, if people wanted to learn more about OpenStack and the HEAP project, where can they go or check out your work? So, you can definitely just go to the OpenStack website. The wiki is very, very full-fledged, and especially if you just go onto the OpenStack IRC channels, there's one for every different project, for Nova, HEAP, all the different ones, and people are very active, very willing to talk and converse. Okay, great.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak. Appreciate it. No problem. [Music]