RDO Duck adventures at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit

Last week, I attended the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, as RDO Ambassador. That was a good experience to connect with the RDO community.

What does an RDO ambassador do?

As an ambassador, your role is to engage the community by answering their questions, helping them to fix their issues, or getting started to contribute. You don’t need to know everything, but it implies, you can at least point people to the right direction.

On Sunday, we started helping with the booth setup, and for me it started with massive T-shirt folding and sorting them by size in laundry baskets. During trade shows, many people just want their swag, so efficient T-shirt distribution means more time to exchange with community members. Thanks to everyone at the booth, it was done quickly.

Massive T-shirt folding with RDO Duck

I also set up the RDO hardware demo. Rain Leander, RDO community liaison had prepared a shiny new demo using two NUCs and a portable gaming screen, using TripleO, this will be used in future events to demo RDO. Since we had limited time, I had to wait monday morning to reinstall everything since demo was borked during the previous event.

RDO Duck busy debugging TripleO deployment

From monday to thursday, I had to do shifts at the booth to advocate RDO and engage with the community, welcoming people doing their shifts and helping them to get set up. The community pod was shared with Carol Chen (ManageIQ) and Leonardo Vaz (Ceph), so we were able to cover many topics.

RDO’s swag was ducks – everyone loves them, we had three colors (Red, Green, Blue!) and I can say they were a bit mischievous 😉

RDO Duck having fun with stickers

Most of the questions we’ve had were related to RDO/RHOSP relations, how to contribute, TripleO, Ceph, etc. We also helped an user to debug his RDO deployment to find out a bug in CentOS cloud images breaking qemu-ev repository ($contentdir variable set to altarch instead of x86_64)

Demo and Q/A sessions

We also had people who came for demo’ing the cool stuff they made. We’ve had Michael J. Turek who demo’ed Ironic deployment on ppc64le (the shiny new arch supported by RDO!) mjturek and I

Also T. Nicholle Williams who presented us how to deploy OpenShift on OpenStack and as a guest star her lovely puddle. 🙂 Nicholle and I

And last but not least, David M. Simmard, creator of ARA which was the center of many questions.

David and I

RDO meetup

We had a RDO meetup jointly with the Ceph community at the Portside Pub. It was awesome to discuss around drinks and snacks. I noticed that among us, there were local stackers not attending the summit, so we reached a wider audience.

RDO meetup as if you were there

Conclusion

That was a great Summit, it was good to connect with fellow stackers (old and new friends!), and share the love around RDO. We’ve had an exceptionally good weather in Vancouver, and I must say that the scenery in British Columbia is just breathtaking. I really enjoyed my short stay there.

Thanks to Rain for sending me, my team for allowing me to go 🙂 Many thanks to Leo, Carol, Jennifer, Tracy with whom I had a lot of fun 🙂 The Dream Team packing up

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