The elections for the new OpenStack board are coming closer

and this time the Open Source community has a great

opportunity of representation: Giuseppe Paternò is standing as a candidate for the board.

Although Giuseppe is considered by HP and Forrester Research

among the top talented consultants in the world,

Gippa (as he’s largely known in the industry) is still “one of us”,

a “nerd” that grew up with a keyboard on his hands.

As he’s one of the candidates of the OpenStack board,

Fabio Marzocca – wishing to know more – has interviewed him.

[FM] The hard question. You’re a techie. Why the hell are you running for the board?



[GP] This is indeed a good question ☺ It all started as a challenge from some clients and friends that are working in the OpenStack project. The truth is that the board and most of the management of the foundation are from vendors. I’m not questioning here if they do a good job or not, it is very likely that they tend to protect their own interests. In my opinion it lacks some “community spirit” that have fostered Linux development such as Debian and Ubuntu. That’s why I’m running for it, to bring the community where it should be.

[FM] Back to Debian and Ubuntu, could you tell us your story with Linux?



[GP] I discovered Linux in 1994, but only in 1996 things were serious. By the time I just finished high school and I applied for a job in a local Internet Service Provider. At 15 years I was well known in the local community as I was installing and maintaining several BBSes, so it wasn’t hard to get the job. I can say it was love at first sight. I started with Slackware (was the first distro), but I moved into redhat first and then debian. When I was working for the IBM Linux Technology Center, I was in charge of helping porting Linux to PowerPC and backporting LVM to make it similar to AIX. Sun was also a good playground as they acquired Cobalt, a hardware appliance based on debian. Then I shifted more towards Enterprise Linux adoption with 6 years in RedHat and then I went to Canonical. I was happy to go back to Debian and Ubuntu community, because I still believe that Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) were the real spirit of a Linux community.

[FM] Another hard question. We know you’re somehow involved in the “rebellion” of Devuan.org. What is your opinion about systemd?



[GP] Let me tell you that it’s not totally black/white and let’s see the two sides here. Something like systemd was indeed needed. Each distro has its own way of init’ing the system and for a package maintainer or commercial software maker, maintaining different init behaviour is insane. And as an init replacement it totally makes sense. However, IMHO systemd went too far away, incorporating into its code something that should not happen. A DHCP client into an init system, seriously? I doubt it was in the spirit of the Unix and Linux system…

However, in the real world of “pets vs cattle”, where application matters more than systems, having a systemd as it is, doesn’t change that much.

[FM] OpenStack was incubated in Ubuntu and the roots are quite clear. Is there something else that you would like to see from Debian and Ubuntu in OpenStack?



[GP] Stability, if I can name just one. Currently OpenStack is released every 6 months, which was probably the best choice to speed up the development. However, this is now becoming a weakness, as enterprise customers can’t upgrade their critical infrastructures every 6 months. Traditionally Debian is “maniacally” focused on given a bullet-proof distribution, this is something that in my opinion is missing from OpenStack.

[FM] Gippa, tell us just 2 or 3 topics you will bring to action in case of election



[GP] I’d like to introduce an OpenStack “LTS” process, following the Ubuntu approach: while releasing every 6 months is fair enough for development and testing environments, having a stable release every 2-3 years can give enterprise customers the peace of mind they need while running production environments.

I’d also love to see a consolidation of the core (Nova/Neutron/Cinder/Swift): vendors and developers are introducing new features and projects while I’d love to see –for example- a more stable and scalable Neutron and a more stable connection to Oslo (in particular rabbitmq).

In general, I would encourage more attention to who is actually deploying, integrating and using OpenStack every day. I would also try to foster the ecosystem of ISVs in order to release and certify their software for OpenStack. And – last but not least- to see interoperation between “regional” datacenters: I dream of a world where companies in a given territory can “work together”, and this is only possible through standards. I hope that OpenStack can represent this standard.

[FM] When are the elections and how can we vote?



[GP] Individual Member Director elections for the 2016 Board will be held online from Monday January 11, 2016 to Friday January 15, 2016. More informations on the website.