Welcome back!
> -----Original Message----- > From: Darren Shepherd [mailto:darren.s.sheph...@gmail.com] > Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 12:17 PM > To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org > Subject: Introduction > > All, > > I want to introduce myself to the Apache CloudStack community. I've have had > a long love/hate relationship with CloudStack over the years, but recently > I've > decided to fully dedicate myself to working on this platform (again). > > Just a little about me, well okay, this might be a little long. I've been a > Linux > user for a good amount of time. I've ran Linux as my primary OS for over 15 > years. Both personally and professionally, my desktops/laptops have always > ran Linux. As soon as I discovered Linux I also fell in love with > virtualization. > I've ran the gamut in terms of virtualization technologies. Type 1, Type 2, > containers, etc. I have a particular fondness for Xen though. I've been a > Xen > user since the 2.x days. > > Couple years after I got into Linux I discovered programming. After so many > failed "./configure && make" I figured I'd should probably learn C/C++ to > figure > out why the heck nothing ever "make'd" right. I worked for awhile running a > lab for developers that were writing stuff in Java. Again I learned Java to > figure > out why the heck their stuff kept failing to build and run. After I learned > Java I > took the professional route of leaving the sysadmin stuff and started > programming distributed systems. > > As means to an end I developed a system that would take code builds, deploy > them to Xen thin provisioned VMs. So a developer could go to a portal, click > some stuff and get a clean VM that optionally had a code build on it. We > would > then running automated integration tests against it. This was around 2006. > About a year or 2 later I discovered EC2 and was like "holy crap, that's > exactly > what I want." Then I found eucalpytus and realized there was a whole industry > around this stuff. IaaS is basically the trifecta for me. I get to combine > my love > of Linux, virtualization, > and programming distributed system. Basically since then I've been > absolutely obsessed with IaaS. > > Around 2010 I got a job at Go Daddy specifically to build their public Cloud > product. Before I even got there they had already decided to go with > vmops/cloud.com. I'm pretty sure they were already cloud.com when I started. > At Go Daddy with a core team of about 5 guys (1 UI guys, 2 java guys, 2 > sysengs) > we built three generations of clouds. The first generation of cloud was > basically CloudStack 2.2++. It was CloudStack 2.2 with a new UI, billing > system, > storage subsystem, and a tons of operational tools. That was the initial > public > launch of our Cloud. > > The second generation was "CloudStack like." Basically we had a lot of > problems with CloudStack at the time. First, it was just a complete pain to > operationalize. Trying to hand off CloudStack to our ops and support teams > was > practically impossible. Basically our level 1 and 2 support would be very > efficient at escalating all issues to level 3 (my team). > Typically the sysadmins would see something is stuck, they'd look at a log > (that > made no sense to them at all), see a 100 line stack trace and then they'd just > toss the issue to the developers. Also, their was no visibility to the > general > health of CloudStack. If you asked ops, "How's production doing right now?" > Their answer would be, "Well I can ping the UI and the java processes are > still > running." In developer terms that is kinda like saying, "Well it compiles so > it > must work fine." > > Secondly, we had a hard time extending the platform. We always seemed to > be a little ahead of the curve in how we wanted to implement the cloud. > How we wanted to run storage and networking didn't match at all what > CloudStack was at that time. So we embarked on improving it. It was just way > too difficult. Basically we felt like 70% of our dev time was just fighting > the > framework. So we made the choice to abandon the platform. We started > rewriting the the entire platform. We did this piece meal over time. We'd > redo a subsystem, put that in production, and then move onto the next > subsystem. This ended up being very tricky because we had mixture of > CloudStack and our own stuff. We also always tried to do no downtime > deployments. So we would almost never lock people out of the UI and most > deployments were during business hours. We basically finished most of this > work around summer last year. I gave a talk at OSCON 2012 [1] regarding > what we built. A couple months later, solely based on business direction, we > decided to stop selling the public cloud (it really wasn't shutdown until > about > May this year. I'm proud to say it ran for almost 8 months with live > customers, > some quite large, with no incident and no dedicated ops team). > > After we shutdown the public cloud, we turned our effort to building a private > cloud to run Go Daddy on top of it. This marked the third generation of the > cloud. At this point the IaaS system was 100% our code. > The problem was it inherited the CloudStack DB schema and with it a lot of > cruft in dealing with being compatible with CloudStack. So we started a clean > up of the code, which ended up being a huge refactor. Our goal was to be able > to support all of Go Daddy running on it. That meant we needed a very > flexible > and extensible platform to support a very heterogeneous environment. (We > had a very scalable L3 network design that I've yet to see any IaaS system be > able to support too.) Additionally it needed to plug into all other systems > in Go > Daddy for monitor, tracking, and network management (IPAM, etc). This was > by far my favorite cloud to build. > Really, really complex. The goal was to build a system that could deploy > over 1 > million VMs in less than a day. (I think we did it too, unfortunately I quit > before > I could fully prove it. We got the system to the point of deploying 1000 real > VMs in 1 minute. I just never had the time to fully run the 1m test). > > So I've done a lot with cloud provisioning systems. I was given an incredible > opportunity at Go Daddy that most people don't get. I was allowed to build an > IaaS system from scratch and given millions and millions in hardware to build > and test it out and run real production work loads on it. I very much liked > my > cloud I built. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, it was all > proprietary. I've > decided to abandon all the proprietary stuff I've done and try to do my best > to > help out the open source IaaS landscape. After looking at all the stacks out > there, I honestly believe CloudStack is the best one. I reached out to > Citrix and > they have been so gracious as to employee me full time to work on CloudStack. > > So expect to hear a lot from me. I'm initially very interested at improving > the > core architecture of CloudStack. Just a couple random things. 1) I'm here to > code. Talking is great, collaboration and information sharing is important, > but > I'm not here just to talk. I'm here to actually get stuff done. 2) I've > only ran > production clouds. None of this dev/test/poc "optimize for innovation" crap. > I > want a system I can run in production. So stability, upgrades, making > sysadmins happy, is very important to me. 3) I'm very pragmatic and > practical > about how I implement stuff. I always have the 2 year vision, but I'm very > interested in what I can deliver in the next 3-6 months. I enjoy delivering > solutions far more than coding. 4) I'm really bad at typing emails and make > tons of typos and forget important words like "not" or "no" all the time. > > I really look forward to gaining the trust and respect of this community and, > more importantly, improving CloudStack. I'm based out of Phoenix, AZ area, if > anybody happens to be in this fabulous part of the country hit me up and we'll > get together. > > Darren Shepherd > > [1] You can see my crappy slides for my OSCON talk at > http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/24035 . They were > really bad, basically I created them the night before. Did I mention I'm > good at > procrastination too. Also that has the only known picture of me on the > internet.
