Interview with Richard Lee a contributor to OpenStack at GOTO Chicago 2014

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here at GOTO Conf 2014. I’m sitting here with Richard Lee, who is a contributor to the OpenStack project, particularly the HEAT project, which is, well, I’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? So, OpenStack is the platform that allows you to basically host your own cloud. So, it’s especially useful for companies that host, like, internal cloud, maybe your IT group, to allow provisioning without going towards, you know, 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. It’s 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. Is HEAT an acronym, or is that a code word? That is, as far as I know, that’s just the name of the project. Just the name of the project. Just project, codename, HEAT. Yeah. So, how did you end up contributing to that project? Is that something you were doing already with ThoughtWorks, or somewhere else before? 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 . Okay. So, you didn’t have, like, a particular passion for this specific topic. It was just, you saw an opportunity. 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. Has that been a little bit of a challenge in how you think, or how you approach problems? It’s been very interesting, because there’s just 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 Ops-y world. It was like, oh, I’ll just build my app, and I’ll throw it on Heroku. And now, it’s very interesting seeing the way that, I guess, deployments, in general, are moving. With all these interesting tools, along with OpenSt ack, there’s, you know, like, Solve, Docker, all these different kind of things that you can use and leverage. And it’s, the deployment world is very interesting, and OpenStack, I think, is going to be a big player in that. Right. So, it’s an interesting problem that, when you were coming over to Python, though, you know, you described you were part of the Ruby community. You’ve been exposed now to Python community, and the DevOps community. Has that been interesting, getting more exposure to a broader community? So, it’s been, it was very strange jumping in from Ruby to Python. Right. I think, when I think of the Ruby community, at some point, I was like, you know, I think I should start, maybe start writing a blog, or, you know, trying to record my experiences, just for my own knowledge. And, in the Ruby community, everyone has blogged about everything. Fifty 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. Very, you know, 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, you know, these two libraries that are very commonly used together. Right. This is how you connect it. So, that was, that was definitely a driver in me, to start, like, writing a blog, and, kind of, providing, I don’t know, more useful information, the very personal experience of, this is how you use things. Right. And then, the DevOps community has been just mind-blowing for me. Right. It’s just something that’s not, something that I’ve had to think about, so far. Right. So, what was it, in particular, that, kind of, was new for you, when you started looking at that community? Within DevOps, it’s just, how many different ways you can do a deployment. Yeah, there’s a lot of different ones. Just even, you know, a lot of people, I think the, I don’t know, the prevalence of Chef, and PubSense, 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, you know, orchestrate it all, you know, similar to, I don’t know, other options out there , like, Amazon’s CloudFormation is out there, and there’s so many different ways that you can launch what you want to launch. We’re going to need a dev, 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 Heat project, where can they go, and, or check out your work? So, you can definitely just go to the OpenStack website, the wiki’s very, very full-fledged, and especially if you just go onto the OpenStack IRC channels, there’s one for every different project, for Nova, Heat, all the different ones. And people are very active, very, very willing to talk and converse. Okay, great. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak, appreciate it. No problem. User groups with lots to say, interviews and more, no way, sharing great ideas in the tech community. Fascinating conversations, a plethora of information, find out for yourself today at ugtastic.com. . . . . . .