openstack team mailing list archive

[Chris Behrens <chris.behrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'd like to announce my candidacy for a seat on the OpenStack
Technical Committee.

- General background -

I have over 15 years of experience designing and building distributed
systems.  I am currently a Senior Software Developer at Rackspace,
where I have been for a little over 2 years now.  Most of my time
at Rackspace has been spent working on OpenStack as both a developer and
a technical leader.  My first week at Rackspace was spent at the very first
OpenStack Design Summit in Austin where the project was announced.

Prior to working at Rackspace, I held various roles over 14 years
at Concentric Network Corporation/XO Communications including Senior
Software Architect and eventually Director of Engineering.  My main
focus there was on an award winning web/email hosting platform which
we'd built to be extremely scalable and fault tolerant.  While my
name is not on this patent, I was heavily involved with the development
and design that led to US6611861.

- Why am I interested? -

I have strong feelings for OpenStack and I want to help take it to
the next level.  I have a lot of technical knowledge and experience
building scalable distributed systems.  Having finished helping
launch a large deployment of OpenStack at Rackspace on 8/1, I have the
time and support to start making a larger contribution to the community.

During most of my past experience, I haven't had the luxury of having
access to a lot extremely fast hardware, so it's been important to
make software as performant as possible.  I've also had to put lots of
effort into having 0 downtime, meaning code can be updated seamlessly
without dropping clients.  I've also been one to lead host and software
security efforts so I have a lot of strong feelings in this area.

I am extremely interested in using this experience to make OpenStack
perform well, be secure, be more easily pluggable, and easy to use!

- Relevant Private Source Experience -

Unfortunately XO was not very big on open source, so there's a lot
of innovative work that I have not been able to publish.  But, I've
worked on such things as developing multithreaded DNS and MX (mail)
servers from scratch.  The latter work is notable as it allowed scaling
to tens of thousands of simultaneous socket connections to a single mail
server, allowing us to be very efficient hardware wise.

- Open Source Experience -

My initial contributions to open source software date back to 1994,
working on EFNet's IRCD daemon, submitting performance improvement
patches and features to help EFNet grow to over 100,000 simultaneous
clients.  Starting in 1998, I rewrote the daemon to make it scale
even further, also adding in support for dynamic upgradeability
(code upgrades without dropping clients).

- OpenStack -

As I mentioned above, I was at the very first design summit, so
I've been involved with the project from the beginning.  I started
the initial work for nova-scheduler shortly after the project was
opened.  I also implemented the RPC support for kombu, making sure
to properly support reconnecting and so forth which didn't work
quite so well with the carrot code.  I've contributed a number of
improvements designed to make nova-api more performant.  I've worked on
the filter scheduler as well as designing and implementing the
first version of the Zones replacement that we named 'Cells'.  Cells is being
used today in production at Rackspace, but it does need a bit of work to fit
into trunk (like documentation :).

- Summary -

I feel my years of experience contributing to and leading large scale
technical projects along with my knowledge of the OpenStack projects
will provide a good foundation for technical leadership.

Thanks,

- Chris