POSScon, Indiana Linux Fest, Texas Linux Fest, oh my.

I just realized that I’ll be travelling a lot in the next few weeks.

First up is POSScon, which is March 23-25. They’ve been conned into letting me speak again this year (and I am speaking on Thursday afternoon for those of you who wish to avoid it ). It should be a good time, if you are in the Carolinas or Georgia, it’s relatively easy to get to and you should check it out.

I have to leave POSScon essentially after I get done speaking on Thursday (and miss the last day of that conference) to head to Indianapolis for the the Indiana Linux Fest the 25-27th. On the ‘pre-conference’ day there’s Build An Open Source Cloud Day which will be featuring, I *think*,  Puppet Labs, CloudStack, OpenStack, DynDNS and Arista Networks (they have this really cool Linux-managed network switch, and the switch runs Fedora incidentally, which delights me to no end, I am desperately trying to figure out a justification for replacing my Cisco 2948G with one of their 10Ge switches so I can put a ‘powered by Fedora’ sticker on it). I likewise have conned the ILF organizers into letting me speak on Saturday, and am really excited about this first year conference that seems to be very well organized.

I’ll then fly home to do laundry and repack and it’ll be time to head out to Austin for the Texas Linux Fest where I get to speak again. My wife, who grew up in Texas, has been looking forward to this event all year (and was upset she didn’t get to attend last year) so she can have beef brisket and TexMex. There will be Build An Open Source Cloud Day there as well, with Gluster joining the lineup from Indiana.

What I’ve been up to of late.

My blog has gone silent of late and I figured with the pi day celebrations now behind us, and the Beefy Miracle wiener roast still several weeks off that I’d give an update.
Around a month ago I accepted a job as the Community Manager for Cloud.com‘s open source project CloudStack, which is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud management application. Since them I’ve been working to try and ensure that we are working towards doing things the open source way. A lot of that has been setting up scaffolding like IRC channels (#cloudstack on irc.freenode.net) and mailing lists. Other things have been dabbling in documentation, QA, and release engineering-related tasks for an upcoming release. (Did I mention a lot of hats were included with this job) Things are a bit nascent at the moment, and there’s still a long way to go, but keep watching to see things continue to improve.
So today is the first release I’ve been present for, and I am excited about it. Multi-hypervisor, high-availability, multi-tenant compute cloud that’s GPLv3. CloudStack is actually a relatively mature project from a software standpoint, it’s been under development for 3 years, though only recently open sourced. It’s also appears to be widely adopted, including some recent adoptions by Tata Communications and Logicworks.