“Computers have enabled people to
make more mistakes faster than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand guns.” — Mitch Radcliffe

Progress is made through a
series of (hopefully smaller) mistakes, through which we asymptotically converge on something that doesn’t suck.

Everyone lies.

Everyone lies. But, geeks are
horrible liars.

Which makes open source, the
perfect social experiment.

Scale-out Community OpenStack: Code, Community,
Culture, and Conway Joshua McKenty, Director, OpenStack Foundation @jmckenty josh@openstack.org

Conway’s Law "Organizations which design
systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Code
Community
Culture

Code
Community
Culture
Conway’s Law

Cultural
Cohesion
Code
Community
Culture

9,685 people. 1,219,874 lines of
code. Less than 3 years.

History

In the beginning, there was
the cloud.

But before that, there were
6 of us in a bar, and a project called…

‘pinet’

ASTER image taken from Terra
Satellite, May 24, 2010

0 2000 4000 6000 8000
10000 01/04/ 01/06/ 01/08/ 01/10/ 01/12/ 01/14/ 01/16/ 01/18/ 01/20/ 01/22/ 01/24/ ComputeNeeds Time

"A committee is a creature
with three or more legs and no brain.” - Robert Heinlein

Culture

“The primary purpose of any
piece of software, is to exist. It is better to ship, than to not ship.” — Bob Parsley

• Rough consensus and working
code • Drinking, tests and code review • A community of peers Culture: Your Community DNA

• HACKING – https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/ bf6e6e718cdc7488e2da87b21e258ccc065fe499/HACKING
• DOCS – https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/ bf6e6e718cdc7488e2da87b21e258ccc065fe499/docs/index.rst • TESTS – https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/ bf6e6e718cdc7488e2da87b21e258ccc065fe499/run_tests.py Culture

Community

Code

~ 85% test coverage. 0
“committers”. 0 pep8 violations.

STORAGE (SWIFT) (CINDER) COMPUTE (NOVA)
(GLANCE) NETWORKING (MUTNAUQ) OPENSTACK & AWS APIs COMMAND LINE TOOLS SELF-SERVICE WEB PORTAL (HORIZON) METERING AND MONITORING (CEILOMETER) SERVER PROVISIONING AND SERVICE ORCHESTRATION OPENSTACKCOMMONLIBRARIES (OSLO) AUTHENTICATION & AUTHORIZATION MIDDLEWARE (KEYSTONE)

So what?

Coming back to the truth…

Code
Community
Culture
Chaordic
Governance

• 3-Tier Governance • IRC-based
teams • Open Meetings • Vendor ecosystem Governance mirrors the code • MVC Software • Queue-based RPC • Open Source • Plugin-based

• It SCALES. • Fundamentally
resilient and adaptable. • Powerfully general purpose. Chaordic Advantages

• Natural systems consume detritus,
but digital systems abhor kruft and abandon- ware. • No one cooks with a swiss army knife. • It’s still hard to tell what’s going on. Chaordic Flaws

• Authenticity scales. • Names
matter. • Always be leveling the playing field. • Do the right thing, to start with. • Just ship. Hacking Conway’s Law

Lying doesn’t scale.

“In retrospect I realize that
in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs... But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.”