Making OpenStack Work

An Authentic Critique with Andrew Clay Shafer

Open Business ConferenceMay 6th 2014

whoami@littleidea

I have nothing to sell.

right now... :)

This is my opinion.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I want people to have nice things.

I would rather talk about other things.

This talk is not about:

• OpenStack doesn’t ‘work’

• another solution is ‘better’ than OpenStack

• no one gets any value out of OpenStack

• the OpenStack story has to have a bad ending

• OpenStack is bad people

If OpenStack is making you happy, don’t mind me.

We just have different standards and aspirations.

and that’s ok

we can still be friends

Game Theorythe study of mathematical models of conflict and

cooperation between intelligent rational decisions makers

Rationalchoosing to maximize a utility function

Nash Equilibriumno players have anything to gain by

changing only their own strategy unilaterally.

Pareto Efficiencyan allocation of resources in which it is impossible

to make any one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off

Pareto Inefficient Nash Equilibrium

possible to make at least one individual better off without making any individual worse off

but no one will change their strategy

n-Prisoners’s DilemmaThe dilemma then is that mutual cooperation yields a better outcome than mutual defection but it is not the rational outcome because the

choice to cooperate, at the individual level, is not rational from a self-interested point of view.

Brief Historyoriginal prisoner’s dilemma

Brief History

Brief HistoryI wrote a blog post... because reasons

I was tired of the gap between hype and reality

tired of seeing the thrashing and wasted resources

communities are defined by how they handle dissent

dead projects tell no tales

100s of Millions $$$

Broken Releases

as trumpets blared

not a fan of timed releases

just for the sake of having them

Meritocracy!

Another word for Oligarchy

no known counter example

Conway’s Laworganizations which design systems...

are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

Stewardship

Tragedy of the Commons

compromise all the things

combinatoric explosion

Proliferation of Projectsno foundation

Vanity MetricsContributors! Yay!

1195 total contributors

Nova 287 total contributors120 - 1 commit

345 - 1 commit169 - 2 commits

81 - 2 commits

2155 total contributors

Nova 782 total contributors265 - 1 commit

589 - 1 commit

How many people work on AWS?

Declare Victory!

What can we do?

Long Feedback Cycle

With Weak Signal

fix that & OpenStack could become what it should have been

focus on quality

is it too late to pull back the proliferation of options and projects?

Conway’s Lawso many cooks

not enough pagers

if you don’t ‘devops’,OpenStack is a nightmare

get some

learn you a distributed systems

you write code differently when you have a pager

Andrew Clay

Shafer@littleidea

bring out the hemlock