June 2017 RDO Community Newsletter

Thanks for being part of the RDO community!

Thanks to those that were paying attention, and missed the May newsletter. I was traveling for 3 weeks in May, and the newsletter slipped through the cracks.

As always I love hearing your feedback about the newsletter, as well as your input into what content we need to add to it. Thanks!

Contributor Survey

A few months ago, we conducted a survey of RDO developers to discover what we can do better, and what we should do differently, to improve the developer experience around RDO. Hopefully this, in turn, will also improve the user experience.

Last week we published the results of that survey. With 21 RDO developers responding, we got a pretty consistent message that the best thing we can do is improve the documentation, so that it's less of a barrier to new contributors. You can read the survey results on the RDO blog and you can see the detailed feedback on the RDO mailing list

To this end, we'll be running an RDO Documentation Sprint Day in the coming weeks. See the 'Upcoming Events' section below for more details.

See also the RDO User Survey results from last last year.

Recent Events

In May, there were two big events for RDO.

The first week of May we had a booth at Red Hat Summit in Boston, where we showcased the RDO minicluster, running RDO Newton on 4 Intel NUC machines. (There will be a longer writeup of this cluster on the RDO blog next week!) We also shared space with the ManageIQ project, who connected their NUC cluster to ours, and managed our RDO cloud from their control panel. We also had a lot of great conversations with users of RDO.

The following week, we were back in Boston for OpenStack Summit, this time at the Hynes convention center. RDO shared space with Red Hat at the headline sponsor booth, where we had many more great conversations with RDO users, and once again demo'ed our minicluster. And, of course, as at every OpenStack Summit, we had ducks.

On Wednesday evening, we had a gathering of RDO users and developers, with about 60 in attendance, to celebrate the community, and thank you for being part of the RDO effort. Thanks to all who attended. (You can see some photos of the event on Google+

We appreciate each of you who visited us at our booth. We would love to hear more from you. Join us on the RDO-list mailing list, or drop in on the #RDO channel on the Freenode IRC network.

Upcoming Events

There's lots of opportunities to connect with the RDO community in person, in the coming weeks and months. We'd love to hear your RDO stories, and find out what we can do better. Here's some of the places where members of the RDO community will be out in force.

This week, there's two OpenStack Days events.

First, there's OpenStack Israel, in Tel Aviv, on June 5. As always, this is a full day of OpenStack content from leading experts in the field. But it's also a great opportunity to connect with the community, share stories with colleagues, and learn about best practices in the real world.

Later this week, on June 7 OpenStack Days Budapest will be held at the Nokia Skypark Office. There will be three tracks of OpenStack Content, and another opportunity to mingle with the community.

And, towards the end of the month - on June 27th and 28th, Deutche OpenStack Tage will be held in München, at the Leonardo Royal, with another two days of great OpenStack content, and another opportunity to rub shoulders with the people who make OpenStack happen.

Looking a little further out, please mark your calendars for the two upcoming events:

On September 5th, we have tentatively scheduled a meetup at LOPSA (League of Professional System Administrators) in Oak Ridge, Tennesee, in conjunction with the data scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. We'll have more details in the coming weeks, but expect lots of OpenStack content, and lots of cool use cases from ORNL, where they use OpenStack as part of their nuclear research program.

On October 20th, the CentOS community will be holding a Dojo (that's what they call their one-day events) at CERN. This event will focus on HPC (High Performance Computing) and OpenStack on CentOS. As you may know, CERN has one of the largest OpenStack clouds in the world, running RDO on CentOS, and so we'll have access to some of the leading experts in running OpenStack at scale. This is the Friday immediately before the Open Source Summit in Prague, and so it's an opportunity to combine two trips into one, and learn twice as much. Details to come within the next month.

And, every week, there are OpenStack meetups, around the world. These are the best place to connect with your local community, and learn the skills you need to be an effective cloud operator. You can get an update of upcoming OpenStack meetups every week on the rdo-list mailing list, or on the RDO events page.

Community meetings

Every Wednesday at 15:00 UTC, we have the weekly RDO community meeting on the #RDO channel on Freenode IRC. The agenda for this meeting is posted each week in a public etherpad and the minutes from the meeting are posted on the RDO website.

If there's something you'd like to see happen in RDO - a package that is missing, a tool that you'd like to see included, or a change in how things are governed - this is the best time and place to help make that happen.

Keep in touch

There's lots of ways to stay in in touch with what's going on in the RDO community. The best ways are …

WWW

Mailing Lists:

IRC

  • IRC - #rdo on Freenode.irc.net
  • Puppet module development - #rdo-puppet

Social Media

Thanks again for being part of the RDO community!