Speaker Interview: Sandro Mathys

Sandro Mathys, the MidoNet Community Manager at Midokura, will be giving a presentation on SCALE Sunday at 4:30 on "Introduction to MidoNet Plugin for OpenStack Neutron." The SCALE Team caught up with Sandro to provide some insight into his talk.

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

A: My name is Sandro Mathys, and I work as the MidoNet Community Manager at Midokura. My main focus is fostering the MidoNet community and furthering everyone's understanding of the concepts behind clouds, particularly network virtualization. Before moving to Tokyo and taking on this challenge, I was a Linux Systems Engineer in Zurich, where I first came in touch with the technologies that power today's clouds, like Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Linux Containers (LXC), Docker and OpenStack. I'm also a long-standing contributor to the Fedora and RDO projects.

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

A: Buzzwords, lots of buzzwords. You know how much managers love buzzwords, right? Imagine how happy they will be when you report back from my talk! It's buzzword-mania! All kidding aside, while there will be lots of buzzwords given the nature of the topic, hopefully people will learn what makes a great SDN solution to power your (OpenStack) cloud and which widespread pitfalls in particular MidoNet avoids, and how. Now I made it sound like it will be a sales pitch but I promise it will be technical and there's obviously no price tag to use MidoNet!

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: Indeed, it is my first SCALE! And honestly, I'm not exactly sure what to expect. Linux conferences are just as diverse as free & open source projects (or ice cream flavors) are, and that's what makes them great in my opinion (mmm, ice cream)! So let's see, I certainly expect the event to be characterized not just by the organizers but by everyone. Every volunteer, every speaker, every booth staff, every attendee - the whole greater community. Hopefully there will be lots of friendly, positive, constructive interactions between everyone. If everyone is engaged like that, you can truly feel the community vibe and that's always awesome!

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A: Just that I'm very excited to come to SCALE this year and I'm honored to present! Thanks to everyone involved, and particularly to everyone who'll sit in my audience (looking forward to meeting you)! And sorry for the terrible jokes...