{"id":3967,"date":"2013-04-08T14:07:25","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T14:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=3967"},"modified":"2013-04-08T14:09:35","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T14:09:35","slug":"on-ibm-openstack-and-chef","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/on-ibm-openstack-and-chef\/","title":{"rendered":"On IBM, OpenStack and Chef: an interview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently interviewed\u00a0Angel Diaz and Dave Lindquist from IBM about the company&#8217;s decision to deepen the commitment to OpenStack. I include the video below, but also a transcript, in case you prefer text.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/N5YIxOWD3Fo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hi! This is James Governor from RedMonk. We are here at IBM Pulse 2013. I have a couple of guys here that I wanted to talk to because IBM\u2019s has some pretty interesting news. Angel Diaz is in an IBM standard setting role and Dave Lindquist is implementing some of those standards for the company across its portfolio \u00a0<span style=\"font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;\">So the big news this week is about OpenStack. So what is the deal? Why are you putting more word behind the OpenStack arrow, Angel?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Angel Diaz:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With OpenStack we want to create a ubiquitous infrastructure as a service platform for cloud. Just like Apache was the heart of all app servers for e-business on the Web, we want to have the same effect for cloud.\u00a0So when we were looking around what to do, we had a lot of choices, OpenStack had a great community, great following, bunch of end-users, who help stood up the foundation. Right now if we look at it, we are number 3 in code contributions, having a great time.\u00a0We announced today that all of our cloud services and offerings will be built on open standards. The first one is our IBM SmartCloud Foundation which will ship with OpenStack inside. So it\u2019s pretty cool.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Okay, so what kind of pressure you are under, given that it seems like the standard landscape is moving quite quickly, in terms of retrofitting the product portfolio &#8211; is it not kind of a tough job?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Dave Lindquist:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s an exciting job &#8211; the community is very exciting, very vibrant, and if we look at the architecture of OpenStack, it\u2019s very clean with nice separation of compute, storage, networking, a nice plugin system, extensibility to bring in various innovations across each of those domains.\u00a0<span style=\"font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;\">In addition to that, it\u2019s very much a distributed everything, share nothing model, which is great for scale, great for resiliency. So it\u2019s basically the same architecture that we had been investing in, in IBM in our SmartCloud foundations.\u00a0<\/span>So what we are doing is contributing technologies we have into the community, working with the community and advancing some of these designs and then consuming these technologies.\u00a0So yeah it\u2019s hectic, but it\u2019s very consistent with how we are moving forward, so it\u2019s really been a very productive environment, very efficient.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The OpenStack community almost seems like it\u2019s too big, there are so many players, the classic concerns about potential fragmentation, people are going to want to make sure their own models are the ones that are chosen. Do you think you are going to be able to manage that effectively?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Angel Diaz:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s interesting. OpenStack is probably about the second largest open source activity after Linux. So it is pretty big. We haven\u2019t seen any issues. I am on the mailing lists and so on, I haven\u2019t seen any issues. The way that we stood up the foundation, we learned a lot from Apache.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So is it true that the only reason IBM agreed to join was if OpenStack set up a foundation?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Angel Diaz:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No &#8211; they wanted to set up a foundation. We thought that we want a balance between corporate sponsorship to actually run an organization, but also meritocracy. It cannot be dominated by IBM or any other vendor, and so in fact the way the community works is that you got to earn your stripes. The fact that we are number three in code contributions after Rackspace and Red Hat, shows that we have earned our stripes. You can\u2019t buy your way in. We\u2019ve got about an eighth of the core contributors, and that\u2019s how it works. At each design summit, the projects are led by an election, there is a project lead and those folks worked together with the project members to deliver what they do.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So one thing that I am kind of interested in is this question of Chef, which I had assumed had a Tivoli angle, but it almost seems like it&#8217;s just a WebSphere, PureSystems-like edge thing that\u2019s happening in a collaboration with Opscode. But that\u2019s not going to fly: you are going to have to have a unity.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Dave Lindquist:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I won\u2019t think about it as a brand statement of Tivoli, WebSphere or Rational, we work across all across software group as well as with our systems team and &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But IBM is committing to Chef.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Dave Lindquist:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, so we committing. Let me get to the one point and then to the next point. First of all we are working together on a set of capabilities that have different deployment options. We recognize it\u2019s a full stack that has to come together between the infrastructure layers, the management, and how you do collaborative development in DevOps sense along with a lot of the patterns of workloads that optimizations bring down.\u00a0<span style=\"font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;\">So when we looked at what was occurring in the community, and this comes from a lot of our customers is that there is a healthy thriving ecosystem of all being around some of the automation in Chef, particularly with the numbers of cookbooks they have, I think it\u2019s upwards at 800 cookbooks, a large number of recipes, and I think on the order of about 26,000 active users in that community.\u00a0<\/span>So when we looked at the IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator technology what was important is how can we leverage what\u2019s being built in the community with recipes. So what we have basically done is an integration of Orchestrator with the Chef technology so that we, and our customers, can leverage this community of recipes, so that\u2019s the level of the integration that\u2019s occurring now.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So you all are going to be learning Ruby?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Dave Lindquist:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes. We use Ruby, we use Python, we use Java, we use JavaScript.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Okay, well I don\u2019t want to take too much more of your time, but I certainly appreciate the update and it\u2019s great to see supporting open standards.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Angel Diaz:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There you go!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thanks!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>disclosure: IBM is a client, Opscode is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently interviewed\u00a0Angel Diaz and Dave Lindquist from IBM about the company&#8217;s decision to deepen the commitment to OpenStack. I include the video below, but also a transcript, in case you prefer text. James Governor:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hi! This is James Governor from RedMonk. We are here at IBM Pulse 2013. I have a couple of guys<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[21,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ibm","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-11Z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}