Podcast: Diane Mueller taks OpenShift and open source

Diane recently joined Red Hat as our Cloud Ecosystem Evangelist, initially focusing on our OpenShift Origin Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In this podcast, Diane discusses why open source has become so important for PaaS (although PaaS didn't get started that way), how community-driven innovation benefits even those who never look at a line of source code, and what's in the works for OpenShift Origin. Diane also touches on some of the development efforts underway such as making OpenShift Origin easier to install and easier to use in concert with Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

Links of note:

OpenShift Origin (with lots of pointers)
OpenShift Origin Community Day (April 14, Portland OR)
Podcast with Mark Lamourine: Working with OpenShift Origin
Podcast with Matt Hicks: OpenShift Origin and the Community
Diane on twitter: @pythondj

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[Transcript]

Gordon Haff:   Hello, everyone. This is Gordon Haff, cloud evangelist with Red Hat. I'm sitting here at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara with Diane Mueller, who recently joined Red Hat to be our cloud ecosystem evangelist, focusing on our open‑source OpenShift Origin product. Welcome, Diane, and welcome aboard.

Diane Mueller:  Thank you very much. I'm very, very pleased to be here and to be leading the community development initiatives around Origin as it feeds upstream products at Red Hat, such as OpenShift.com, our online public PaaS, and OpenShift Enterprise. I think there are lots of possibilities here, and I'm really, really pleased to be part of the Red Hat team now. I'm looking forward to doing lots of interesting things with all of our other open‑source communities as well. The OpenStack folks will have a very big presence shortly at the OpenStack Summit, coming up the 15th of April through the 18th in Portland, Oregon. We're going to be hosting our very first OpenShift Origin open‑source community day and mini hackathon. If you're around, please join us on the 14th of April. Go to Eventbrite and register for that, because I think that'll be pretty exciting, to have some of our customers, a number of the contributors, the Red Hat engineers. Dan Walsh, who's one of the SELinux guys, will be speaking. We've got a couple of really cool folks coming to do some hacking and creating some V2 cartridges. It's just very exciting times to be part of the open‑source team here at Red Hat.

Gordon:  Great. That sounds like a great event. Sign up quickly, because I understand it is filling up in a big hurry. Diane, you've been in the PaaS space for a while. As you know, it's interesting that PaaS started as these very non‑open‑source online services. Why does open source matter in the context of PaaS? Why are people so interested in having an open source based PaaS?

Diane:  I think that's a really awesome question. Proprietary closed source systems, whether they're PaaS or other types of applications or operating systems, really have a limited value when you're working with such a large ecosystems of providers, whether they're cloud providers, SaaS service providers or other folks. The idea that you can get true inter‑operability with a closed source or proprietary offering is really from a bygone era. I think what we've seen is the collaboration in the community development. We all understand that open source is creating the cogs in the wheel that we all need to use. When you build a platform as a service, which is an integral part of any cloud, whether it's public or private strategy, you don't want to be reinventing the wheel at every new company you go to or every new vendor you work with, having a ubiquitous, inter‑operable community driven project such as Origin which feeds not just the Red Hat community but many, many other companies that are using that product in their production environments.

Where closed source fails is that regardless of how big you are, whether you're Apple or Google, you can never hire all of the best and the brightest to work on your project and continue to keep them interested in maintaining that code base forever or for the life of that technology.

Where open source is great is what you do is you have people who are committed, who are interested, who volunteer their time. Some of them are sponsored by their companies to work on it. Some of them are sponsored by vendors to work on it, because they need this very important cog in order to have a marketplace to make money in, and to build applications in.

Gordon:  Of course for Red Hat's enterprise customers, even if they want to look at source code as a benefit as well, because we have OpenShift Enterprise which is our enterprise on premise offering as well as our online service, the community development model that contributes to OpenShift Origin of course feeds into those other things as well. All of our customers, even if they don't directly care about open source, benefit from this collaborative development model.

Diane:  I think what a lot of people are seeing Red Hat do is make all the right moves in terms of creating a converged, open cloud play. When I say converged, we're now playing a very major role in supporting the OpenStack development. I think probably we're the number two, maybe the number one, not quite yet number one, contributor to OpenStack. Origin gives us a platform as a service layer. We're becoming a major player in providing cloud infrastructure, and that cloud infrastructure, combined with a platform as a service, really makes us able to deliver to our enterprise customers and to the open source community of collaborators, a service that is truly open. It really is the next generation of open cloud, which is going to be, in my humble opinion, the convergence of both the PaaS and the IaaS.

I would suspect, and this is my theory and I'm sticking with it for a while, that in another year or two you won't hear me saying PaaS or platform as a service anymore. Because it will become part and parcel of an open cloud, hybrid service model, and you will be seeing Red Hat be able to deliver on that promise and on that vision because we are now doing so much work in the open source world and collaborating with our brethren and our sisters at all of the other companies that are actually working toward that vision too.

I think that's one of the amazing things, to be here at Red Hat at this time and this moment in time is because we're seeing that tipping point where everybody has realized that an open cloud, a federated cloud, and inoperable cloud is really where we're going to be at for the foreseeable future.

There's no room for proprietary cloud anymore.

Gordon:  If somebody wants to get involved in OpenShift Origin development, working with the code, thinking about how they can stand things up at their own companies or just for their own avocation, what's the best way to proceed?

Diane:  Well, I mentioned it at the beginning. We are having a community day in Portland on April 14th. If you can get yourself there, especially if you're coming to the OpenStack summit, we're going to be doing deep dives into the architecture of OpenShift, into the security, into OpenStack and OpenShift integration. We'll be doing some Origin internals work. We're going to take a deep dive with a SELinux guru from Red Hat engineering team, Dan Walsh. We'll be teaching everybody how to extend OpenShift Origin by building their own cartridges.

We've got a new architectural model for cartridges, so we're going to be diving into that. If you cannot come to the April 14th, come visit us either at github/openshift ‑‑ you can find lots of the information, the documentation there ‑‑ or come to redhat.com and just do a search on OpenShift and Origin and you will find all of the resources you need to get started.

There's a great wiki out there, how you can become a collaborator with us on this project, and we're happy to have you come on board. Just give me a buzz or follow me at pythondj, which is my Twitter handle, and I'll get right back to you.

Gordon:  Diane, I know you've been at Red Hat for all of about a month or so.

Diane:  A month, yes, a whole, exciting month. Yes.

Gordon:  What's coming up? What are your plans over the next four months, six months, year?

Diane:  Well, I think that what I'm seeing is the OpenStack and OpenShift convergence is one of the core things that I'm focusing on, is that the two of them play so nicely together and they deliver an open cloud in a way that Red Hat will obviously have some enterprise offerings to continue that and support that, But also the ability to take Origin to the next level, to truly drive and create an engaged developer community around Origin and make that stand on its own as well. That's one of my tasks, and is near and dear to my heart as an open source person for many years.

I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to do is lower the barrier to entry to using Origin on its own, as well as to bring people who are currently using, maybe, the OpenShift Enterprise or openshift.com and have them realize that there are really easy ways for them to come and contribute and extend openshift.com or create cartridges and work right on the core with us and be part of the community.

That's, I think, the crux of it is, one of the things about platform as a service, which is very near and dear to my heart, is that it scratches an itch that I've had for many years, to paraphrase Eric Raymond. I think this is one of those projects and platform as a service that helps developers get out of the way of ops and be able to do things and get back down to the business of coding.

There's a lot of community development there. There are people who love to work on PaaS and cloud architectures. There's lots of cloud architecture and technologists that love to work on PaaS, but there's also a huge community of users who want to extend and create cartridges, which is our metaphor for creating something similar to the Heroku buildpacks, the languages and the extensions you need to plug‑and‑play your projects.

There's lots of opportunity to work together and build out the next generation of PaaS platforms, because I think what Origin represents is, we came to the game about a year ago. 2012, mid‑year, is when Origin became an official open‑source project and made it there. We're about a year into the game now, and we're about ready to do our first official release, though it's been used by many people, including OpenShift.com.

There's just such momentum going now in terms of getting the community together and making this into a very vibrant, collaborative community, where people feel like they can actually make a contribution and they can be committers, and they can take the things that their enterprises, if they're using an enterprise, needs, and add that into the core or add that as a cartridge, and help extend and build this into a truly robust PaaS that has lots of great applications around any enterprise or any small to medium‑size business that might need to get their apps going to the cloud.

Gordon:  Thank you, Diane, and welcome aboard. It sounds like you're going to be busy over the next year.

Diane:  Oh, yeah. You can find me pretty much; I'll be doing a lot of talking at conferences and doing a lot of community day works and hosting a lot of mini‑hackathons. So if you're interested in Origin and Open Source and Red Hat OpenShift, give me a buzz, I'd be happy to talk to you about it, and always a pleasure to be with you here today. Thanks, Gordon.

Gordon:  Thanks, Diane.