We all cope with COVID differently – my coping mechanism of choice is to obsess, research, and then buy things – my mind recently decided to zoom in on re-doing my videoconferencing setup. I learned a lot during said obsession period, and since I work for Red Hat, I’ve been indoctrinated to share what I learn, so here we are. Why Bother? Recent research shows confirms my intuition – people are attracted to good audio – they’ll want to have longer conversations with you. Conversely, we subconsciously try and cut conversations short if we can’t properly understand what the other side is saying ..read more

To this day I see confusion surrounding the terms: Tenant, provider and external networks. No doubt countless words have been spent trying to tease apart these concepts, so I thought that it’d be a good use of my time to write 470 more. At a Glance Creator Model Segmentation External router interfaces Tenant User Self service Selected by Neutron Provider Administrator Pre created & shared Selected by the creator External Administrator Pre created & shared Selected by the creator Yes A Closer Look Tenant networks are created by users, and Neutron is configured to automati ..read more

Leadership to me seems largely revolving around the topic of persuasion. How do you get people to do something important but not exciting? (e.g. documenting a feature). How do you reposition the unattractive activity in to a norm, and make people want to do it? How do you nudge people’s mentality or attitude? Spotting an overarching problem with an employee (e.g. snubs his/her nose at writing end to end tests), how do you get them to come around and eventually even lobby others? How do you communicate a significant decision? (e.g. going with one technology over the other). You won’t be a ..read more

Edit: The position has been filled, thank you everyone. I’m looking for a Software Engineer to join the Red Hat OpenStack Networking team. I am presently looking to hire in Europe, Israel and US East. The candidate may work from home or from one of the Red Hat offices. The team is globally distributed and comprised of talented, autonomous, empowered and passionate individuals with a healthy work/life balance. The candidate will work on OpenStack Octavia and LBaaS. The candidate will write and review code while working with upstream community members and fellow Red Hatters. If you want to do op ..read more

Adding new configuration options has a cost, and makes already complex projects (Hi Neutron!) even more so. Double so when we speak of architecture choices, it means that we have to test and document all permutations. Of course, we don’t always do that, nor do we test all interactions between deployment options and other advanced features, leaving users with fun surprises. With some projects seeing an increased rotation of contributors, we’re seeing wastelands of unmaintained code behind left behind, increasing the importance of being strategic about introducing new complexity ..read more

In continuation to a previous blog post https://assafmuller.com/2016/12/02/upstream-contribution-give-up-or-double-down/, I presented a version with new content at the recent OpenStack Boston summit. The session had a fair amount of participation and discussions, where we talked about the journey of a new contributor in OpenStack through the lens of data gathered from Gerrit and Stackalytics. We even had members of the Technical Committee that were interested in concrete action items they could take on their part – How do we make it easier for new contributors? What behaviors work in the ..read more

Every once in a while I have to recognize the beauty that is a high level language. Consider this code snippet: def square(x): return x**2 l = [1, 2, 3, 4] for x in map(square, l): print(x) And this one: from multiprocessing import Pool def square(x): return x**2 l = [1, 2, 3, 4] for x in Pool().map(square, l): print(x) Discounting the import line (Because I’m trying to make a point here, dammit!), the diff is a total of 7 characters. Of course, if you recall your Computer Science operating systems 101, the complexity that is hidden here is breath taking. And yet, Python multiproces ..read more

Tomorrow morning, February 1st, OpenStack contributors will receive emails to elect their new PTLs. OpenStack Networking is having an interesting election this cycle. Please, have some fun with your morning coffee, spend a few minutes and read Ihar and Kevin’s nomination emails. Ihar: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-January/110744.html Kevin: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-January/110664.html Both are incredible developers and some of the finest Engineers I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I have immense respect for both, which if ..read more

The position has been filled, thank you for all of the applications! I’m looking for a Software Engineer to join the Red Hat OpenStack Networking team. I am presently looking to hire in Europe and Israel. The candidate may work from home or from one of the offices listed here. The team is globally distributed and comprised of talented, autonomous, empowered and passionate individuals with a healthy work/life balance. The candidate will work on OpenStack networking projects such as Neutron and LBaaS. The candidate will write and review code while working with upstream community members and fell ..read more

One of my personal highlights of the recent Barcelona Summit was a session by Mirantis engineers Elena and Oleg titled “Is OpenStack Neutron Production Ready for Large Scale Deployments?”. In the session they outline a comprehensive control and data plane testing effort, run on two labs, one with 200 nodes and run of the mill hardware, and the other with 378 and top of the line hardware, all running the Mirantis distribution based off Mitaka with standard ML2/OVS, DVR, L2POP and VXLAN. In the session they show near line-rate speed for east/west and north/south routing with jumbo fram ..read more