openstack team mailing list archive

[Kevin Jackson <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,
You might know me from such emails as "Agggh, I can't get this thing to
work and its close to RC status!" and such bugs as "Why is this only
affecting me?" so I thought I'd share my gratitude to everyone that has
come out to help make life a lot less stressful for me.
Over the course of just a week I've gone from despair and frustration to
almost wanting to shout from the rooftops the achievements that have been
made in OpenStack and my own deployments and testing.
Whilst many of you might still be on that rocky road, I can assure you that
there is light at the end of the tunnel.  And it's quite bright too.

Much of my frustration has come from a number of things:

1) Waiting for Ubuntu packagers and developers to keep pace with the
changes in OpenStack - a challenge that I feel only in the end product.
2) Configuration issues and changes in syntax which seem to be only known
to some key people - Google often sends people down some strange routes of
mis-information!
3) Bugs.

This is a fast-paced project with high expectations...  Very high
expectations.  Thankfully, the army of people working behind the scenes are
approachable and accessible and have literally worked their asses off and
gone out of their way on several occasions to work with me on ensuring that
what they see in their labs and on their networks is similar to what I have
running now.

I am one person of many that is an end-user of OpenStack that wants to see
it succeed as much as the next guy.  I am also one guy in an enterprise
that defines strategy and makes choices - explaining broken things and
answering tough questions to my own powers that be.  My journey began at
the end of the Bexar release, through a working Cactus setup, to
fundamental changes in Diablo, and equally scary and often confusing
late-game changes in Essex.  I am confident that with the help of the
community, and with the ease of installation that is now expected in
today's fast paced world that choosing and sticking with OpenStack was and
is the right thing to do.  Don't get me wrong, had there not been this late
surge in changes, development, packaging and help I'd be sitting here with
my coffee trying to understand what went wrong and where to go next - but
I'm not.  I'm sitting here now planning the next implementation phases in
the projects that had a cloud environment as a fundamental requirement -
these projects were going to succeed whether it was OpenStack or not.

I just want to send my gratitude to everyone and anyone that has made this
happen - from the people cracking the whips high up in the backing
organisations, to those on the front-line who tap away at the keyboard that
end-users take for granted.  I hope, over the course of my journey with
OpenStack, that I end up meeting with the great people that have helped
make this happen - just be sure you're wearing a name badge with your irc
handle, or twitter username on!

Cheers,

Kev
-- 
Kevin Jackson
@itarchitectkev