You might think we'd cancel the OpenStack Podcast on the rare occasions when both Jeff and I have the flu at the same time. But you'd be wrong. This week, we interviewed EMC Cloud Architect Shamail Tahir (remotely). Or at least we think we did. The transcript of the interview suggests that we were in fact present, but not in the most coherent way.

The good thing is that it didn't matter. Shamail is a boss when it comes to OpenStack, and he proved that by delivering interesting insights on pretty much every hot topic we could think of, including:

• What EMC is doing with OpenStack
• What he and the other participants talked about at the "hidden influencer" meeting in Paris
• Why you should run certification tests on your OpenStack cloud
• Why we need an OpenStack roadmap
• Why the number of OpenStack projects will continue to grow over the next few years
• What role containerization will play with OpenStack
• Whether or not DIY OpenStack is a good idea

To see who we're interviewing next, or to sign-up for the OpenStack Podcast, check out the show schedule! Interested in participating? Tweet us at @nextcast and @nikiacosta.

For a full transcript of the  interview, click read more below.

Niki:                Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone, to the OpenStack Podcast. It is Tuesday, January 27^th. I am Niki Acosta.

Jeff:                 I'm Jeff Dickey, from Redapt.

Niki:                We have an awesome guest with us today, Shamail Tahir. Shamail, introduce yourself for us.

Shamail:        Hey, everyone. This is Shamail Tahir. I'm with EMC, and I am a cloud architect there. I'm actually focused on our cloud innovations, in research and development, mainly, along with being a part of the team that is driving OpenStack strategy at EMC.

Niki:                Sweet. We were just chatting, and it sounds like we have a lot to talk about today. We typically always start by asking about your personal journey through technology; how you started, and what got you into OpenStack. If you want to dial it back a few years, without potentially dating yourself there, we'd love to hear more about your entry into tech, and how you got to be where you are today, in your awesome position at EMC.

Shamail:        Awesome. It's definitely been a semi-long journey already, but it started off actually at a VAR, working as a consultant. In those days, I was kind of doing a little bit of everything; mainly, going out and doing systems architecture and just some deployments.

From there, I actually turned into a customer for a bit. On the customer side actually, I was focused more on network administration, systems engineering still, as well as getting into some of the enterprise monitoring solutions out there, like HP OpenView, TMG, et cetera.

That was actually a really good experience to have, because that kind of gave me my first purview into challenges with scale, as well as distributed systems. From that perspective, I especially was doing a lot of agent management and large-scale systems management and monitoring, so that was a good background.

From there, I eventually went to a vendor, EMC. Over here, I've actually done multiple things as well. I actually started off in our professional services group, doing implementations and deployments. From there, I actually moved into our engineering team for our NAS product, and started focusing on file, as well as cloud gateways. From cloud gateways, I started looking at the cloud platforms that they can use, and OpenStack was one of the things that I started looking at at that point. That was really the start of where I started paying attention to OpenStack and following it.

Over time, that became my main area of focus. Basically, I stopped focusing on the cloud gateway aspect, and started focusing more on the cloud platform itself.

Niki:                EMC has definitely been involved with OpenStack to a pretty wide extent at this point. I can imagine being at Cisco, which traditionally was a hardware company, that you guys are going through sort of a similar transition in moving from hardware, now moving up the stack, more into making sure that kind of everything has APIs, or they're software-defined stuff. Do you see that sort of transition taking place at EMC? Can you tell us about that?

Shamail:        Yeah, absolutely, and I think that transition was started very publicly, probably a couple of years ago, even, when we first started launching some of our software-defined storage solutions, and going into market with journey to cloud type messaging. We've been there for a while, but from a cultural perspective, absolutely. We've been transitioning, in terms of messaging sets, as well as making sure that our products are [inaudible 00:03:42] and they can integrate and operate sufficiently in this new data center architecture.

Niki:                Are you guys taking your existing employee base, and kind of leveling up and kind of providing them with new skills? Is there a hiring exercise going on at EMC to bring in that type of talent?

Shamail:        A bit of both, and quite honestly, who isn't hiring OpenStack talent right now? I would say yes to both.

Niki:                Nice. Jeff, I'm... As I often do, I'm hogging the mic here. Surely, you have some questions you wanted to ask Shamail.

Jeff:                 I was curious, and you were talking about, just to step back a little bit, how you got focused on OpenStack. What was that? What was the driver that really got you behind OpenStack? What did you see? What's that kind of vision?

Shamail:        To me, it was about the enablement and the agility that the platform offered. Looking at it as a shift in how IT and infrastructure can be consumed, was I think the thing that really drove me deeper into the platform. It started off, like I said, I was looking at it more as a landing spot for some of our other stuff. When I started looking at the platform, and more specifically at the vast amount of services and endpoints that are available, it became really interesting.

The other big part as the community aspect of it is, OpenStack has a very good community ecosystem. Yeah, there's a lot of material, and at times, it's daunting to dig in. People are willing to help you if you jump on IRC or if you talk to people. I think the community is really what got me to the next level with OpenStack, which is being able to interface with people, and see their passion and have their passion be inherited by me as well.

Niki:                Did you guys dig into the Eucalyptus and the CloudStacks, and even some of the VMware solutions? Did you just not see what you... Were you not liking what you saw? Was the community factor kind of a win out of the gate?

Shamail:        Also, this is me personally. From an EMC perspective, I think we've kind of looked at all those platforms. Obviously, with the VMware EAC solution, and VMware stackware, we're definitely involved with that one.

For me personally, I did look at all of those, and I actually even looked at OpenNebula as well, when I was starting to look at various cloud platforms. For me, it was the modularity as well as the community that kind of attracted me towards OpenStack specifically. The thing was, being in an OpenStack community, if you were a storage domain expert, you could work on storage. If you were a compute domain expert, you could work on compute, et cetera. With some of the other platforms, it was kind of more monolithic and less modular, in a sense.

Niki:                It really gave you guys an opportunity at EMC to specialize and hone in, in an area where you guys were comfortable, it sounds like.

Shamail:        Yeah, it was a good starting point. There was a lot of value from the structure, as well as we wanted to make sure that we enabled what we were hearing from our customers, and we were hearing that from our customers as well.

Niki:                One thing I find myself doing, even now quite a bit, especially in the enterprise space, is explaining what OpenStack is. I'm starting to realize and recognize that everyone has their own sort of take or perspective, when they talk about OpenStack and the value that it provides.

How are you explaining OpenStack to your customers and your prospects?

Shamail:        OpenStack is a full-blown platform. I would say, the way I look at it is, the base layer is the IaaS layer that it offers, but then it offers so much more beyond that. The best thing about OpenStack is, it offers multiple services and multiple widgets, if you will, that you can combine to build your own platform, that's relevant for your organization.

I kind of explained it as multiple stacks or layers, if you will, with the IaaS layer being one layer, then the next step being services that actually help with the cloud management deployment itself. These are things like Ceilometer, TripleO, et cetera. The last piece is like advanced services, or services that actually consume the IaaS layer, to provide additional value-add; things like Sahara, Trove, et cetera. It's a multi-layer stack, in a sense.

Also, if we look at what is it from a directional perspective; is it an API product, distribution, et cetera, you know the standard taxonomy or categories that are being used, I would say straight out of [repo 00:08:09], it's probably more than an API has to be. Otherwise, I think it just becomes a standard. At the same time, it's probably less than a distribution, because it doesn't really have the packaging and the coupling of projects together. I think it's something more than an API, but less than distribution.

Niki:                Are you finding that people are looking... What are your customers, by the time you get to them, what are they looking for? Have they already deployed, and gone down that DIY path with OpenStack? Are they looking for a VMware alternative? What is your sweet spot when you talk to customers? What are they coming from?

Shamail:        I think the two major types of customers that I've seen, are the ones that are researching it, and have kind of built an open source first strategy, if you will, where going forward, they're kind of looking at open source as being something they're evaluating, and if it meets their needs, that's where they're going to go. At the same time, they're at the research phase of that strategy right now.

The one ones that I see typically are customers that have started with the do-it-yourself path, and going from a POC to pilot to production, have hit an inflection point where they're looking at someone to come in from either a skill set perspective, or from a product perspective, to help them scale to that next level, if you will.

Niki:                Nice. I think we're seeing similar stuff, too. Jeff, you look like you're pondering a question.

Jeff:                 Yeah, it's funny to talk about that, because I just want to go on kind of a little rant here about... It seems like folks have a different view. I'm working with a lot of folks that are doing OpenStack, that are trying to build RACK scale architecture, and kind of forgetting about the whole DEV/TEST, QA type environments. It seems like we're skipping that in a lot of these deployments, and it's kind of... Are you seeing people in these deployments? What's the lifecycle look like?

Shamail:        When you say DEV/TEST and skipping that, are you referring to kind of from a data center use case perspective? They're saying, "How do I deploy production resources and work loads on OpenStack, versus using it for DEV and QA?

Jeff:                 Yeah, that's kind of... What we're not seeing is, we're not seeing the infrastructure similarities that we used to see back in the day of, this is... If I was going to be deploying VNX in production, then I would have the similar VNX in TEST, DEV and QA, and kind of have this roll out. We've gotten this stuff... Infrastructure is code, but we still have this underlying hardware, and I'm curious of EMC's take on that, and being such an instrumental part of the infrastructure stack.

Shamail:        I think we are seeing actually both. From the enterprise customer perspective, I would say that I see more adoption initially, at least from a pilot program perspective, in the DEV QA space, because it seems, to be honest, more like low-hanging fruit, from their perspective, where they can try it out, understand it, learn the ins and outs, the pain points, the benefits, et cetera, before they start adoption from a production perspective.

I'm actually seeing DEV and QA as being a very prominent starting point for a lot of our customers in enterprise, actually.

Jeff:                 That's great to hear. Another question I had was around Ceph. What's EMC's view on Ceph? Are you able to talk about what you guys are doing, or are you talking about Ceph? What does that look like to you guys?

Shamail:        Ceph is obviously a really strong community player, and they are very involved in a lot of aspects, and they have been involved in a lot of aspects, from a storage perspective, both on the object and sender side as well. They're actually a really good enabler, because they are an open source project for some of the reference of limitations, and open source deployments that are happening, of OpenStack.

From our perspective, of course, we are looking at them, and we are also figuring out, where does our definition and their definition of software-defined storage intersect and deviate at the same time?

Jeff:                 Are you seeing Ceph change at scale, where people are starting with Ceph, and you kind of come in with a solution?

Shamail:        Me personally, no, probably because I'm more into Office of CTO, R&D space, so I'm not getting that feel to feedback directly, so I probably couldn't comment on that directly myself.

Jeff:                 What about... Sorry, Niki, I feel like I'm... Now I'm dominating.

Niki:                No.

Jeff:                 What's going on with... Are you able to talk about anything with Cloudscaling, or what our friends are doing? Are they in the...?

Niki:                How's Randy?

Jeff:                 Yeah, I haven't heard from him in a while.

Shamail:        He's doing good. He was actually supposed to be in Palo Alto, but he had some conflict come up, so unfortunately he's not here. I was looking forward to seeing him actually, in person again. No, they're doing great, and they're actually all over the place still in the community. I'm sure you run into them in meet-ups and various aspects of community management engagements.

From an internal perspective, they've been really good for us, because I think some of it is infusing that DNA that Cloudscaling brings with them. Another is infusing the young talent that they bring with them as well. They are busy all over the place at EMC, and the challenge is making sure that there's a shield to let them do what they need to do, effectively.

Yeah, it's a great team, great products, and they still have their existing customer base as well.

Jeff:                 That's good to hear. I think it was a good acquisition. That's just a bunch of great folks over there.

Shamail:        Yeah.

Niki:                I have to jump in real quick and let folks know this is... Jeff and I are both probably likely coming down with the flu. Mine is from a co-worker, who probably caught it in the airport when someone hurled on him. Jeff's, I think, is from a children's birthday party. If we seem a bit off today, it's because both of us are a little under the weather. Thank God we have a great guest who is pulling it together for us.

You mentioned being... I just had to preface that, because we're both like, "Uh."

Jeff:                 Yes, I have a fever, so I don't think anything coming out of my mouth is coming out right.

Niki:                I'm walking around with sanitizer spray, sanitizing everything. You are in Palo Alto now, and for those of you who don't know, there is a product working group ... a product management working group within the OpenStack community. Both today and I believe tomorrow, or is it yesterday and today, you guys are in Palo Alto and meeting, and having some really interesting conversations.

We were talking about some of the things that are going on there. For those that couldn't make it, and for those who don't know what the group is, can you give us a definition of what that group is, what it does, and tell us about what's going on there in Palo Alto, both yesterday and what's planned for today?

Shamail:        Yeah, absolutely. Just some background and context is, this group was originally started when a few people got together. I believe it was Alison, Rob, Shawn, Randy, and a few others that decided to figure out, how does OpenStack work as a product, and how does it move forward as a product, beyond being a set of projects, and being an integrated release, if you will?

From that perspective, there was a kick-off meeting at the Paris Summit, called hidden influencers. In that meeting, we kind of got together, and we kind of discussed, what's our charter, and what are we trying to achieve?

A few things that we discussed were things along the lines of ... Again, as I was saying ... How does OpenStack, from a person who is new to OpenStack, consume it as more of a product versus downloading an integrated release and figuring out, "Which projects do I use? Which ones don't I use?" It can be pretty daunting, to someone who is not in the community, and not immersed in OpenStack day-to-day, the way it's structured today.

The other big thing was, how do we work on strategically identifying a multi-release road map, if you will, or a strategy around multi-release? Right now, everything's kind of operating on a 6-month cadence, if you will.

Those were the two big things that we wanted to do, and the last thing was getting a new persona involved in the community, which is a product manager which, the product manager is a loosely-used term here, because to be honest, in the meeting, we have product managers, we have operators, we have engineering and R&D managers, and the whole purpose is, how do we get this group of people that's probably been around OpenStack for 2, 3 plus years in some cases, but they've been kind of behind the scenes. How do we get them to kind of express their viewpoints as well, going forward?

Niki:                Yeah, being a product manager I think is really interesting, because you sit somewhere in between... You're accountable to sales, I guess. It's your responsibility to deliver what sales is asking you for. You're also... You have this other responsibility, to really be involved in the OpenStack community, understand what's going there.

A lot of times, you're the one prioritizing your own product road map. You're going to take OpenStack from trunk, you are going to pick which components you think customers are going to want, based on what sales is asking you for, or based on which projects are on the wish list for a lot of your customers, and then it's your responsibility to prioritize what you are going to release in your own product.

It's a tough place to be. I think you talk to people who've gone to the Summit, there's two groups, two main camps. You have the business sort of vendor side of the summit, and then you have your developer and engineering component at the summit. I think there's that kind of desire to figure out a way to bring those two groups together. I think the product manager is a very good place to start, if you are trying to do that.

You also talked about, before the podcast, some of the stuff that Rob Hirschfeld is working on. We had a fantastic podcast with Rob a couple of weeks ago, but fill us in on what Rob presented to this group as it pertains to RefStack and DefCore, and if you could define those terms for people who are kind of new to the OpenStack space. Fill us it on what that is, and what the intent is, and tell us what Rob's working on.

Shamail:        Yep, absolutely. When Rob was on your podcast last month ... a while ago ... he actually covered a lot of the same content yesterday at the Summit, or the meet-up, for us. For people that are new to DefCore RefStack as initiatives, DefCore is an initiative to kind of define the core of OpenStack, from a marking perspective.

Going forward, DefCore hopefully will identify some criteria that lets people understand whether something is or isn't OpenStack, as well as what type of mark they can legally use, from an OpenStack perspective. RefStack is the component that actually runs the testing to validate that functionality, that's needed. DefCore might define certain functionality, such as can you load a certain type of... Can you load images? RefStack would be the testing mechanism to make sure that you are compliant with that functional requirement.

Secondly, in DefCore, there's also a designated code section, which not only means that you have to have functional parity with the definition of DefCore, but you may also have to have some portions of the open source code as well, within your product.

Niki:                Yeah, I think this is important for a lot of reasons. The big reason is, from a user perspective, if you are evaluating OpenStack, you have a multitude of different options, and you have a lot of things that may look and feel like OpenStack, that are very, very different than what OpenStack is about.

I think the effort around RefStack and DefCore is figuring out what it takes to be called OpenStack. There's a list of criteria, like do you have to have some of these ancillary projects included? Which projects should be included in that definition of OpenStack? Just to give users around the globe some consistency in terms of what they expect from OpenStack.

It's tricky, because you have so many vendors who have so many different perspectives that are involved on so many different layers, at what point is what you're offering not really OpenStack? How do you add value in the context of OpenStack, and represent that value, if your flavor of OpenStack, or your distro of OpenStack, or your product around OpenStack, is so vastly different? Can you expect the same APIs from one OpenStack cloud to another OpenStack cloud, and get to that ideal world of not being locked into a particular vendor, or being able to move workloads from one provider to another?

I think it's a hugely important effort that is going on in the community, and based on what we discussed with Rob, it's a hard thing to do. There's going to be a lot of people who are going to want to make sure that they can still call their thing OpenStack, even if they don't have everything in that DefCore definition included in their product.

Shamail:        Yeah, and it's even harder, because you're establishing this definition after four years of the project being up and running. It's a lot harder to actually go and figure out, how do we get people that maybe invested a certain way two or three years ago, and then do we go back to them and tell them that you're no longer OpenStack now, because of how we're defining it?

It will be interesting, so that definition and those tests will be really critical. I think one of the things that people should do is, right now, DefCore has Havana certification standards defined, which are advisory. The encouragement that Rob gave everyone in the room, and he wants to give to the broader community as well, is go out there and run the certification tests, just to see, does your cloud pass? Does it not pass? That will help the committee get additional data that's needed, to be able to really fine-tune some of the testing, as well as understand, where do most clouds sit today?

I think that data will be really useful, and it's already out there. The encouragement is, if you have an OpenStack cloud running, please run RefStack against it to see what the outcome is.

Niki:                Could we talk about the roadmap component a little bit as well? I think we've had themes within OpenStack. One theme, for example, was stability. Let's just focus on the stability of OpenStack. Lately it's been like, let's focus on OpenStack in the context of enterprise. I think where a lot of people are getting tripped up, is the road map. There's so many people now contributing to OpenStack, there's a lot of sort of wish lists that a lot of people have, from a user and a vendor and an operator perspective.

Tell us why the road map discussion matters, and tell us about the conversations that are going on around it, trying to create a sort of broader road map for OpenStack.

Shamail:        Absolutely. There's multiple factors on why it's important. One is, so obviously, we have some clear cadence of what we're trying to do, and we can hopefully use those. Those themes still play into this, but then you take the themes, and you kind of break them into hopefully smaller, tangible requirements that you can kind of iterate through in a multi-release manner, to get to the eventual goal of whatever the theme was.

Targeting stability as a theme for a 6-month release is good, but there's so much to do there, that it's going to be really hard to accomplish that theme, within one release.

Niki:                It's so broad, right?

Shamail:        Exactly. The other piece of that is also, you have to get cross-project buy-in as well. If we say that we want to improve, let's say, logging, then just because one project says, "Yeah, this is something that we agree with. It's all well, and we're going to do it." That's good, but at the same time, if there's no clear alignment and consensus with all the projects and the various people that are involved, that yes, logging is something that addresses operational burden or ease of use, and that's the theme that we're targeting, so therefore we're going to implement that, if two out of 12 projects change your logging, that, to the user, does not deliver the benefit yet. We have to get more alignment on a cross-project level as well, which I'm hoping the roadmap helps with as well.

Last but not least is also the fact that once we have a release roadmap that's probably broader, and probably more long-term, hopefully having it publicly available and be transparent in that nature, will help customers look at, what are the capabilities of OpenStack? What is OpenStack focusing on? Being able to make that decision internally, within their IT strategy of when it intersects with their needs, I think we'll benefit from that.

Basically, people will see that based on where it is, and based on where it's going, and based on where I am and where I want to go, this is the intersection point of where we should look at OpenStack, or consume OpenStack, or deploy OpenStack.

Niki:                If I was an enterprise decision-maker watching this podcast, I might say, "Wow, I'm seeing how the sausage is made, and frankly, OpenStack just seems F'd up." What kind of reassurances can you give people about these efforts that are going on, and why OpenStack actually is a good decision? Why are these discussions important?

Shamail:        These discussions are important because again, overall, the platform is really relevant. It can serve multiple needs for multiple customers, and customer types, even. The reason these discussions are relevant, is because we are experiencing a phenomenal amount of growth, and we have to figure out, how do we take that growth, and also build new mechanisms around it, that let us scale for the volume that we're seeing now, from an adoption perspective, from an enquiry perspective, et cetera?

I think all of these things are good, because they kind of, in the long run, not only work on making the product effectively more stable, let's say, but it also gives more transparency and more long-term vision to end users that are looking at OpenStack. Again, if you're new to a project, it's really hard figuring out, where's it going?

As you mentioned, stability being a theme in the community, we know that. I think from a user perspective, it's just a lot harder to figure that out, when you're trying to jump into OpenStack initially. I think these things give clarity, and they give some sort of, what's the word I'm looking for here... Commonality, as well, across projects.

Jeff:                 What's ... If you're wearing your octo glasses, what does it look like two years from now? Are we going to have less projects, like tightly integrated projects, or are we going to have mo