Building a Contribution Culture @Cloudwatt

Régis Allegre

VP Software Engineering

@HappyKing

Loic Dachary

Software Craftsman

OpenStack Summit Atlanta – May 13th 2014

- Sovereign Cloud provider, created to deliver competitive

IAAS Services to French & European companies

- Joint Venture (Orange, Thales & French Gov.)

- Security, privacy and resiliency compliant with the French &

European legislation and regulation requirements

- A Free Software DNA from inception

- One of the largest OpenStack deployment in EU

Building a European Leader

on Free Software foundations

Confidentiel - Préliminaire 3

Why did we chose to contribute?

1. Solution Mastery

2. Influence on our Architectural Foundations

3. Sovereignty: Developing our own Competency &

Expertise

1. Access to world-class technical coaching

2. Access leading edge engineering practices & tools

3. Boosts attractiveness for the « right » developers

4. Leverage opportunity on new developments

The Necessity

The Bonus

Solution Mastery

Sovereignty

Nurturing Neutron

Leading edge engineering

Bootstraping with training

Ala Rezmerita

Cédric Soulas

Jordan Pittier

Nassim Babaci

Sahid Ferdjaoui

Edouard Thuleau

Loic Dachary

Christophe Courtaut

Yves-Gwenael Bourhis

Cloudwatt as a Contributor

9

Contributions Other Activities

Source: www.stackalytics.com

Team

18th contributor (Icehouse)

25 Proposed Blueprints

5 Completed Blueprints

4th contributorProjects

Our Options

10

Feature is submitted, and gets through the acceptance

process

Feature is implemented an external component, integrated

through APIs with the core project.

Upstream

External Component

Downstream Feature is implemented as a fork from the regular

component

11

Upstream

Change

External Component

Downstream

Change

Contribution will be reviewed,

improved and validated

Maintained with the product « by

construct »

Can be developed by others

(leverage)

Feature remains differentiating

Can be implemented faster (you

own the lifecycle)

Feature remains differentiating

Can be implemented faster (you own the

lifecycle)

Feature is not differentiating

Can be long to pass through

Can be rejected

Change needs to be reapplied

(recurring cost)

Can be incompatible with

future choices

Feature will not be improved

by the review process

Subject to API evolutions: The

component will need to be

maintained forever

Significant architectural impact

(complexity, integration,

performance)

Pros Cons

Our Options

Hard questions

12

You’re tiny fish. Do you really expect to influence anything when the

big guys get involved?

When insert_big_company_name contributes, it’s a rounding error

on their P&L. Can you afford it as a small scale player?

How do you build your company culture, when your developers

loyalty go primarily to the open source project?

That’s a lot of people you’re flying to the Summit. Is this

reasonable?

Questions?

• Don’t hesitate to

• Visit our booth

• Talk to our engineers in and out the design sessions

• Ask for Beta Compute test accounts