With the Flock conference being under way, Thomas answers a few questions related to his expertise.

Thomas Cameron:

Senior Principal Cloud Evangelist at Red Hat

Influential in the field of containers, Cloud solutions, JBoss middleware, and more, in the industry since 1993

Specializes in cloud security and integration

Author of trainings for many Red Hat products

Experienced presenter

What would you like to achieve at Flock 2016? (what outcome would you like to see?)

I’d love to show that Red Hat folks outside of the Fedora project are

committed to the greater community. I’d also love to get folks up to

speed on container security (the topic of my presentation).

What do you think are the most pressing issues that should be discussed concerning Fedora Cloud at Flock?

Balancing the release of new features with stability/usability. There

are a ton of new features around containers, security, orchestration,

etc., and it’s incredibly difficult to get them out for use while

keeping them stable.

What do you think are the hot topics at Flock this year?

Containers, cloud computing, orchestration, security. I’d love to see

more around open hybrid cloud – i.e. integration of ManageIQ with

OpenStack and Fedora.

What is the future of containers in Fedora?

I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon, but… there seems to be a huge

amount of momentum in containerizing everything. In some ways, I think

that’s great, and it makes a lot of sense. But I worry it’s also

dangerous to go all in on containers. While I don’t think it’s the “hype

du jour,” I worry that something newer and shinier might come along and

derail all the work that’s been done.

You have insight into how the “productized Fedora,” that is RHEL, is used by Red Hat’s customers. Does the ‘loop’ close in any way? In other words, does some feedback from customers go all the way back to Fedora folks?

I definitely get feedback from a lot of our customers – from really

bleeding edge early adopters to very conservative, slow moving

customers. I try to make sure that feedback goes all the way from

support and product management to the folks in Fedora.

The opposite is true, as well. I try to take what I’m learning at Flock

to our customers to make sure we’re setting expectations as to what’s

coming over the next 12-36 months.

What do you think is a good way to attract more contributors to Fedora?

Fedora seems to be thought of as a hard-core developer’s platform. I

would love to see us change that image to a great, general purpose Linux

platform. We’re not just a coder’s distro, my kids use it to game on,

for Heaven’s sake!

Changing the perception of Fedora as a geek-only platform would be

awesome! I use Fedora as my daily driver at home, and it works

flawlessly for productivity work like mail, word processing,

spreadsheets, and so on. I also use it to play games from Minecraft to

Steam, and I also do a lot of sysadmin/systems engineering work like

virtualization and container development. I think Fedora is an

incredible distro, and we should talk a LOT more about that!