Foggy Software

or,dissipating   the fog in the cloud Update (Feb 3,2012):  read the meetup retrospective here OpenStack  is creating lots of buzz in the IT industry. Its promise is to revolutionize the cloud market in the same way that Linux revolutionized the operating system market. Part of the reason that Linux was successful is the community of devotees that saw the potential and ushered the code base to where it is today. But communities don't always just happen, they're made with sweat and pizza. My group has taken on the goal of making OpenStack users in the Boston area a vibrant community. The promise of OpenStack and quick pace of activity has spurred a worldwide  wave of excitement, with local groups spanning the globe - from Argentina  to Japan, Australia to British Columbia. I half stumbled into organizing the  Boston meetup group . Being an engineer, it gave me a new appreciation to what it takes to make an event happen. From gett...

or, what's this DevOps thing everybody is talking about Agile in software development is an attempt to be more real - rather than attempt to predict the future, the methodology is all about taking stabs and correcting with a fast feedback cycle. Start producing real value quickly, and keep chasing the value fanatically. In a recent Openstack meetup discussing Swift  an attendee asked - so swift has all these parameters, do you have good guidance on how to set them ?  A traditional approach would involve enormous efforts attempting to predict workloads, methodically simulating them in a lab environment, and laboriously attempting to tune parameter after parameter to find the optimum setting for those workloads. Can you predict what would happen? You will end up deploying optimized the system based on the lab results driven by the simulated workloads.  By the second week in production you realize that the actual workloads are substantially different t...