As I mentioned in my last several entries, during SXSWMichael Cote and I, on behalf of Dell, organized a series of mini meet-ups focusing on developers, tech and social media folks. These were relaxed informal affairs with the idea of getting people together to learn what they were up to and for us to let them know what had been keeping us busy.
The final meet up was held on Sunday evening at the Hilton bar, Finn and Porter. Here is a mini-montage from the event:
I asked the folks to say who they are, where they’re from, who they work for and what they hope to get out of SXSW.
Today was second day of the two-day Structure conference here in San Francisco. Cloud was the topic du jours with heavy referencing of big data and concepts and projects such as OpenFlow, Open Compute and OpenStack. The format consisted mainly of moderated panels seated in comfy chairs with break out sessions scheduled a couple of times during the day.
While some of the panels and speakers were quite enlightening, I find the true benefit of a show like Structure comes from the networking and hallway conversations that occur. One such conversation was one I had with Jonathan Bryce of Rackspace about the incubation program they have just launched for OpenStack.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers:
Dealing with the question of how to expand OpenStack and include new projects
The initial three core projects: Compute, Object Storage and Image Service
The first two projects that have been approved for incubation: a dashboard and “keystone”
One of the trickiest things to get right in an open source project is the governance model. Who makes up the various boards and gets what authority is something struggled over and something that virtually no one gets right straight out of the gate. Its particularly interesting if you are a commercial entity sponsoring a project and want to maintain a certain amount of influence over the endeavor but also want it to grow and flourish.
Two weeks ago Jonathan Bryce, Rackspace cloud co-founder and one of the leads of the OpenStack project policy board, announced the changes that were being made to OpenStack’s governance.
I ran into Jonathan on Monday during South by Southwest and sat down with him to get some more insight into what the changes were and why they were being made.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers:
From Mosso to Rackspace cloud to OpenStack
How they’ve been surprised by the great uptake by the community and how this has led them to evolve the governance structure.
What the various boards are and what their make up will be
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open World I bumped into Jonathan Bryce one of the two founders of the cloud platform formerly known as “Mosso” (now known as Rackspace Cloud).
Last year when I interviewed Jonathan, I did an audio podcast. This time around I was armed with my Flip Mino and caught it all on video for the little(r) screen.
Some of the topics Jonathan addresses:
When Rackspace funded employees Jonathan and Todd to go off and start their cloud venture 4 years ago, why didn’t they brand it “Rackspace?”
Why did they recently decide to roll Mosso back into the mothership and rebrand it?
The progression of in-house -> colocation -> managed hosting -> cloud.
The three pieces of Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Servers & Cloud Files (infrastructure as a service) and Cloud Sites (platform as a service with the option of using either the LAMP or .NET stack).
Which offering is getting the most traction.
Why their customer Fresh Books went with Cloud Files.
At the Rackspace Customer Event the week before last, I caught up with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce. Jonathan walked me through how Mosso, now officially a Rackspace division, got started and where he sees it going.
Jonathan chillin’ in theBaroque Westin Riverwalk lobby.
Some of the Topics we tackle:
How while at Rackspace, Jonathan and a buddy moonlighted as web app developers and when they couldn’t find a place to host the apps and sites they developed, they got funding from Rackspace and created Mosso.
How Mosso was being founded as people were getting burned by the undelivered promises of Utility computing.
How Jonathan defines cloud computing (hint: it has three layers).
The characteristics and examples of IaaA, PaaS, SaaS and where Rackspace/Mosso plays.
The joy of 15 cents a GB per month storage that Mosso will be providing and which Blueprint will be leveraging in our next release.
The relationship between Rackspace and Mosso and why the Mosso site is so much cooler.
What role open source plays in the Cloud and Mosso.
Extra-credit
If you want to catch Jonathan live, he will be presenting at the Cloud Computing expo in San Jose November 19 – 21.
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 