Superuser weekend reading

Here’s the news from the OpenStack world you won’t want to miss — the musings, polemics and questions posed by the larger community.

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In Case You Missed It

OpenStack pundits upped the fear factor this week: articles seemed to be all about scaring, spooking and otherwise putting people off. Hopefully, we’ll go back to reassuring food analogies next week after this hair-raising reading.

Writing about what keeps tech execs up at night, Barb Darrow over at Fortune writes: “Pity the poor soul at your company who is in charge of technology decisions. Whether that person is the CIO, the director of engineering, vice president of IT, or holds some other title, this person faces a thankless task. If things go smoothly, no one really notices. But if they go sideways, as they often do, guess who gets blamed?”

Rob Hirschfeld, OpenStack individual board member and founder/CEO at startup RackN got us thinking with a piece on ["The Matrix and Surrogates as an analogies for VMs, Containers and Metal.]
(http://robhirschfeld.com/2015/06/08/the-matrix-surrogates-as-an-analogies-for-vms-containers-and-metal/) He writes: "Virtual servers are important because data centers are just like the Matrix.  The real world of data centers is a ugly, messy place fraught with hidden dangers and unpleasant chores.  Most of us would rather take the blue pill and live in a safe computer generated artificial environment where we can ignore those details and live in the convenient abstraction of Mega City."

Spooky…

Arthur Cole at Tesora takes on another kind of battle with a piece titled: "Fighting OpenStack Complexity" From his take, it pretty much sounds like a losing battle: "But no matter how hard we try, the sheer number of projects, contributions and updates to OpenStack all but guarantees that the enterprise will need a pretty savvy team of coders if it hopes to enjoy the benefits of non-proprietary cloud infrastructure."

It’s more like the battle of the sexes over at Mirantis with "Ops are from Mars, Devs are from Venus.” David Fishman opines: "Here’s where discussions of DevOps are largely headed in the wrong direction. The presumption is that there is a magical place in which the interests of “Devs” and “Ops” are aligned, a ‘culture’ in which each ‘respects’ the work of the other, yadda yadda…The differences are not easily reconciled or surmountable." Sigh.

And coming in with our favorite sub-hed this week ("I know what you did last server") The Inquirer chimes in with "Red Hat: Beware of scary OpenStack support." They’re picking up on a post from back in May by Alessandro Perilli, general manager, cloud management strategy, about "Scary Enterprise Support," which you’d correctly imagine means the terror of lack of said support.

Finally, we got the chills with this Reddit thread titled "Holy crap! Openstack Virgin here" with a newbie college student setting up an OpenStack environment for class. Chime in if you can!

Oh, one more thing: if you’re interested in attending OpenStack Seattle August 20 but short on funds, here’s info on the diversity scholarships.