This document summarizes Andrew Clay Shafer's talk "Making OpenStack Work: An Authentic Critique" given at the Open Business Conference on May 6th 2014. The talk discusses issues with OpenStack including a long feedback cycle with weak signals, the proliferation of projects with no foundation, and metrics that don't reflect real contributions or usage. Shafer suggests focusing on quality instead of timed releases, learning distributed systems principles, and handling dissent within communities.

1. Making OpenStack Work
An Authentic Critique with Andrew Clay Shafer
Open Business Conference
May 6th 2014

2. whoami
@littleidea

4. I have nothing to sell.
right now... :)

5. This is my opinion.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.

6. I want people to have nice things.

7. I would rather talk about other things.

8. 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

9. 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

10. Game Theory
the study of mathematical models of conflict and
cooperation between intelligent rational decisions makers

11. Rational
choosing to maximize a utility function

12. Nash Equilibrium
no players have anything to gain by
changing only their own strategy unilaterally.

13. Pareto Efficiency
an allocation of resources in which it is impossible
to make any one individual better off without
making at least one individual worse off

14. 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

15. n-Prisoners’s Dilemma
The 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.

16. Brief History
original prisoner’s dilemma

17. Brief History

18. Brief History
I wrote a blog post... because reasons

19. I was tired of the gap between hype and reality

20. tired of seeing the thrashing and wasted resources

21. communities are defined by how they handle dissent

22. dead projects tell no tales

23. 100s of Millions $$$

24. Broken Releases
as trumpets blared

25. not a fan of timed releases
just for the sake of having them

26. Meritocracy!

27. Another word for Oligarchy
no known counter example

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

29. Stewardship
Tragedy of the Commons

30. compromise all the things
combinatoric explosion

31. Proliferation of Projects
no foundation

32. Vanity Metrics
Contributors! Yay!

33. 1195 total contributors
Nova 287 total contributors
120 - 1 commit
345 - 1 commit
169 - 2 commits
81 - 2 commits
2155 total contributors
Nova 782 total contributors
265 - 1 commit
589 - 1 commit
How many people work on AWS?

35. Declare Victory!

36. What can we do?

37. Long Feedback Cycle
With Weak Signal

38. fix that & OpenStack could
become what it should have been

39. focus on quality

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

41. Conway’s Law
so many cooks
not enough pagers

42. if you don’t ‘devops’,
OpenStack is a nightmare
get some

43. learn you a distributed systems

44. you write code differently when you have a pager

45. Andrew
Clay
Shafer
@littleidea
bring out the hemlock