OpenStack User Groups spotlight: Canada

In this series of interviews, Superuser takes you around the world to meet our newest user groups. These busy groups act as liaisons between the Foundation and the general community in their regions. You can find out more about a group in your area — or how to start one — at the User Groups portal.

Here we talk to Stacy Véronneau, Director of OpenStack solutions at CloudOps, about user groups in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Edmonton.

What’s the most important OpenStack debate in your region right now?

It’s OpenStack vs. Kubernetes when it comes to containers, but also just plain OpenStack adoption for cloud. Canada is picking up the slack it usually has with new technology adoption, so we are seeing more interest, but also more questions.

What’s the key to closing the talent gap in the OpenStack community?

Hands-on training with chaos monkey scenarios. Basically it would look like this: I ramp up on core knowledge in class, then I go in my lab environment, and some playbook or manifest or recipe will trigger an outage and I have to figure out what it is and how to fix it. We need to focus on day-two — when it comes to ops but also on workload onboarding when it comes to architects.

What trends have you seen across your region’s user groups?

Huge interests in containers. Containers for OpenStack, in OpenStack on a VM and on bare metal. Also, there are significant interests in Ceph, as well as big data and machine learning.

What drives cloud adoption in your region?

Telecom use cases, like rest of the world. But, also the need to adapt and be more agile in order to compete. Cloud, as a infrastructure-as-a service (IaaS), is not a magic solve-it-all on its own, it needs proper tooling. That’s where the developer’s toolset complements the base IaaS offering. Use it for a full CI/CD pipeline or put a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) on it and make it a resource pool for containers, VM and bare metal. When devs, ops and management all see a big win going down the cloud path, the case for cloud sells itself.

What’s the biggest obstacle to adoption?

This may sound harsh, but ignorance and fear are always the biggest blockers. Ignorance on what cloud can bring and fear of transformation to a everything-as-a-service and everything-as-code.

What types of clouds/organizations are most active in the community?

Lots of private cloud from telcos, gaming industry but also public and regional clouds for base IaaS and more. It’s a rather diverse ecosystem.

What’s your vision for your group?

For all the groups I’m involved with (Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton) I would love to see better involvement. Come out and speak about your OpenStack journey, big or small. Come out and ask your questions, we’re here to help. For the other two groups I’m not directly involved with (Calgary and Vancouver), please reach out and let us reboot your MeetUp with you. With the Vancouver summit in less than a year, we need to show a strong and united community. The OpenStack community in Canada is small. We can’t live in silos.

How can people get involved?

That one is easy. Show up! Show up to your local Meetup and get involved. Tired of not seeing some content being addressed in a Meetup? Speak up! Also, join our Canada wide Slack channel and get talking with the Canadian community.

Superuser is always interested in hearing from the community. Want to tell us about your user group? Email editorATopenstack.org

Cover Photo // CC BY NC

Tags: OpenStack community