Open Stack

Hello,

As you may be aware, a report on Friday indicated that Intel and Rackspace plan to discontinue OSIC. Since the effort was run by these two companies and not the Foundation, my knowledge is somewhat limited, but I’d like to share my perspective since there is a lot of conjecture flying around right now. 

1) OSIC was launched almost 2 years ago in July of 2015 and is described on osic.org: "The OpenStack Innovation Center (OSIC), established by Intel and Rackspace, is designed to accelerate enterprise adoption of the world’s leading open source cloud operating system while supporting open source principles” (source: osic.org <http://osic.org/>)

In essence, it was a joint venture to provide a large OpenStack cluster for developers, hosted and staffed by Intel & Rackspace. For example, the cluster was used for large scale testing and as a basis for training many new stackers. OSIC also provided the OpenStack infrastructure team with some capacity for our CI/CD pipeline, which tests every code commit.

2) Contrary to some of the wilder theories on social media, there are no signs that Intel or Rackspace are abandoning OpenStack. This move was specificaly about the end of the OSIC joint partnership for the test cluster after ~2 years. 

Key facts worth noting:

- Both Intel and Rackspace are high level sponsors of the OpenStack Summit next month in Boston. 
- Intel is giving a keynote in Boston.
- We'll be featuring a large Rackspace private cloud customer, GE, during the opening keynote in Boston.
- Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes said in a February blog post that OpenStack private cloud was among their businesses "growing rapidly, at annualized rates in the high double digits.”
- And as Kolla PTL Michal tweeted: "Intel is still around #openstack”[1]

3) What does the loss of this test cluster mean for the infrastructure team testing OpenStack code? Fortunately, the infra team is already integrated with 6 other cloud providers in a dozen regions all over the world, and is preparing for life without OSIC. We believe any disruption to the development process will be minimal.

4) How many people are now potentially looking for work, and what can do to to help them? We don’t have an official count, but the latest quote from Rackspace suggests its about 45 people. If you are personally affected, but are still wanting to attend the Boston Summit or get connected with companies who are hiring, please contact me directly. We will do our best to support you.

The good news is that OpenStack community is diverse and resilient with more than 70,000 members globally, and 3,500 developers contributing to the codebase in 2016 alone. Thank you to the community members who have already responded with an amazing show of support by offering to connect those impacted with companies hiring for OpenStack, and linking directly to many. To name a few, AT&T, Amadeus, Bloomberg, Catalyst IT, Cisco, Comcast, GoDaddy, Huawei, Kumulus, Okinawa Open Lab, Ormuco, SUSE, Target, Wells Fargo, Verizon are all hiring [2]. We're asking these companies to use our free job board at http://www.openstack.org/jobs <http://www.openstack.org/jobs> to help centralize these efforts.

A few of the tweets:

Monty Taylor: https://twitter.com/e_monty/status/852856567699566593 <https://twitter.com/e_monty/status/852856567699566593>
"OpenStack humans now in need of a job: I talked with several OpenStack companies who are hiring - ping me and I'll make intros."

Jim Rollenhagen: https://twitter.com/jimrollenhagen/status/852594340870447110 <https://twitter.com/jimrollenhagen/status/852594340870447110>
"Wow, the OpenStack community is simply amazing. <3”

Jim Meyer: https://twitter.com/purp/status/852570999883268096 <https://twitter.com/purp/status/852570999883268096>
"For all you #OpenStack-related folks who might be looking, now or in the future, we’re hiring at @SUSE"

Over the last two years. the team working on OSIC have made very valuable contributions to the community, including training and recruiting, upstream code and testing. Their efforts in providing a public test cloud have positively impacted the software and the community, and I hope many will be able to continue their work in different roles at Intel, Rackspace, or at a new company.

Anytime there is change in the commurimty, it means another opportunity to pull together and help one another.  We’re already seeing this happen in a big way, which makes me very proud to be part of this community!

Mark Collier
COO, OpenStack Foundation
@sparkycollier

[1] “Intel is still around #openstack” https://twitter.com/_inc0_/status/853703745938481152 <https://twitter.com/_inc0_/status/853703745938481152>
[2] Hiring links:
-AT&T:  https://connect.att.jobs/search-jobs/openstack/117/1 <https://connect.att.jobs/search-jobs/openstack/117/1>
-Verizon: http://www.verizon.com/about/work/jobs/search?per_page=&location=&location_country=&location_state=&radius=&ns_lcache=&q=openstack&v_category=&v_location=&v_dist=50&sort_by=updated_at%2Cdesc <http://www.verizon.com/about/work/jobs/search?per_page=&location=&location_country=&location_state=&radius=&ns_lcache=&q=openstack&v_category=&v_location=&v_dist=50&sort_by=updated_at%2Cdesc>
-Comcast: https://jobs.comcast.com/search-jobs?q=openstack&loc=&submit=GO%21#results <https://jobs.comcast.com/search-jobs?q=openstack&loc=&submit=GO%21#results>
-Target: https://jobs.target.com/search-jobs/openstack/1118/1 <https://jobs.target.com/search-jobs/openstack/1118/1>
-Amadeus*: https://career012.successfactors.eu/career?company=AmadeusProd&career_ns=job_listing_summary&navBarLevel=JOB_SEARCH&_s.crb=rKZSOOSZ6xmp3gmoSMe%2fhaq3iOk%3d <https://career012.successfactors.eu/career?company=AmadeusProd&career_ns=job_listing_summary&navBarLevel=JOB_SEARCH&_s.crb=rKZSOOSZ6xmp3gmoSMe%2fhaq3iOk%3d>
-Bloomberg*: https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/search?qf=openstack <https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/search?qf=openstack>
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