Speaker Interview: Rich Bowen

Rich Bowen, who will be giving the Intro to OpenStack talk at 11:30 on SCALE 13x Saturday, plans to give attendees a look at how all the various moving pieces of OpenStack fit together. Rich took a few minutes with the SCALE Team to answer some questions about his presentation.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: I'm Rich Bowen. I've been doing Open Source stuff since about 1993 when I started tinkering with Perl. Although the early years were writing Perl modules, I quickly moved into documentation with the Apache HTTP Server, and from there into more community-centric stuff. In the last few years, I've been working with the OpenStack community, at Red Hat, while continuing to work with the Apache Software Foundation.

Q: You're giving a talk on Introduction to OpenStack. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: Last year at SCALE, I gave a talk about OpenStack metrics and monitoring, but I discovered that 2/3 of the audience weren't familiar with OpenStack at all. So this year, I'm giving an overview of what OpenStack is, as a software project, and as a community. You'll see what all the various moving pieces are, how they fit together, and how you can get involved as a user or as a community member.

OpenStack can be confusing because it's 20+ separate projects that work together to provide a cloud computing stack, and I'll show you how they talk to each other, and how you can build a private cloud with OpenStack.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: This is my second SCALE. I've been to a lot of tech conferences, and SCALE is one of the ones that is very community-centered, rather than corporate focused. So you'll see a lot of strong technical content, and a lot of collaboration that crosses company boundaries. It also has the feel of the early-day Linux events, with a lot of hobbyist and beginners as well as the experts, so you feel a lot of the enthusiasm that can be missing from the "professional" conferences.

[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]