November 10, 2010 Deploying OpenStack Object Storage
I just gave a talk at the OpenStack Conference on deploying the Object Storage, Swift. Here are the slides! Click through to slideshare if you want to read the speaker notes.
Thanks goes to Val Beck with the slide designs! Thank you!
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- Posted under Cloud, Cloudscaling, OpenStack
October 4, 2010 Planning Meetings — starting w/ a blank page
Over the past week, we’ve (Cloudscaling) been going back and forth with a client on an integration point. Each team has been volleying back and forth multiple, multi-page documents of product plans, technical specs and user workflows. In the end, those documents were useful, but not for planning purposes. 
They were incredibly useful to share knowledge, kickoff a conversation and help with the design activities. However, we failed (twice) to kick-off an actual who-does-what planning session.
What ended up working was showing up with a blank document. “Okay guys, let’s fill this out. What’s the team goal for this iteration?”
We were quickly able to hone in on the core of what needed to be done, craft up a quick design, write up a few user stories and walk away with a task-driven-plan of what needed to be done over the next 2 weeks.
Moral of the story: don’t confuse documentation and design with a plan for action.
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September 25, 2010 From beginner to spinner… a decade later
“Stay one trick ahead.”
My debut as an author.
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September 21, 2010 Four yanks and a kiwi walk into a serviced apartment in South Korea….
…and spend the entire evening in socks laying out post it notes all over the floor. I’m pleased to report no games of Twister ™ ensued.
I’m a huge fan of using “cards” as tasks and making planning processes very tactile, visual and interactive experiences. It’s a lot more engaging than say, the overhead projector or the “one man at the white board” approach. We also develop tools along the way that help to do estimating (our “dot” approach can be seen here; using polka dots to represent scales of time for each task).
I try to take photos of these sessions as often as possible, both for reference and for the old reminisce. Got any of your own you’d like to share?
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July 19, 2010 Rackspace Must Build a OpenStack Ecosystem
OpenStack must build an ecosystem to survive. They’ve enlisted a lot of help to build a community including Cloudscaling — OpenStack.org Community – Cloudscaling. How this differs from other open-source products is that OpenStack will never have an ‘enterprise’ version (at least provided by Rackspace).
Rackspace is not in the game to sell ‘cloud-in-a-box’ software to service providers. For this strategy to be successful, they have to explicitly not offer a paid version of CloudStack. For a community to catch hold, an ecosystem of service providers, hardware vendors, infrastructure software providers and cloud systems integrators must have a stake in the outcome.
Rackspace is behind Amazon’s AWS in the infrastructure-as-a-service space. As a new crop of competition enters the market over the next few years, Rackspace had to make a move to begin leveling the playing field for infrastructure clouds. Time will tell if Rackspace’s “cast a wide ecosystem net” strategy will out-maneuver Amazon’s closed approach.
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- Posted under Cloud, Cloudscaling, It's Just Business
July 19, 2010 Building clouds at Cloudscaling
It’s been a bit slow on the blogging front. I only seem to use this as a platform to announce new positions at companies. Well, I’ll do it again. Several months back I joined Cloudscaling. We’re building infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing products for service providers.
It should be a fun ride.
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- Posted under Cloudscaling, It's Just Business
February 23, 2009 Bullet-Proofing a Demo
Tomorrow at VMworld Europe, we’re presenting Engine Yard Solo running on VMware’s vCloud. We are presenting real software that is running against real systems. It’s great to show working software. But as everyone knows who has ran a demo, what can go wrong, will go wrong. So to that end, we’ve been working with VMware’s seasoned demo team to help us out. They really know what they’re doing when it comes making sure that everything goes smoothly.
To that end there are two systems that host our demo. The primary system is a set of two boxes. The first box is running the vCloud APIs and VMware management software. The second box has two virtual environments. One runs the deployment environment where the Ruby on Rails application will be deployed. The second virtual environment runs Engine Yard Solo that works with vCloud. There is a second backup system that has all the virtual environments required for the demo running on a single box.
That way, if there are any issues with the primary demo environment, we can switchover to the backup system (although with a slight degradation in performance).
To drive the demo, there are two laptops setup; each connecting to both demo environments. In addition, a screen cast was created, just in case, that would mimic the actions that I would be performing. So if both real-live demo systems fail, we can switch over to avoid an awkward situation.
The VMworld demo team has set up KVM’s that run over cat-5. This makes it easy to control from the stage and the back of the house at the same time. The back of the the house is in complete control and controls what appears on the main screen. So they will have my back to take control if any issues arise.
I would say “Wish me luck!”, but I guess I won’t need it.
Tags: demo, engineyard, engineyardsolo, vcloud, vmworld, vmworldeurope
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- Posted under Engine Yard
June 9, 2008 Leaving Yahoo!
This will be my last week at Yahoo!. I’m taking up a position at Engine Yard to help scale a company that’s making Ruby (on Rails) scale.
This also means it’s my last week in Bangalore. I’ll be leaving Saturday morning to head back to San Francisco. Please ping me if you want to meet up before then. I’ve made so many great friends during my stay in India so I’m leaving with a heavy heart. Please keep in touch and let me know if you ever make it out to the bay area.
I’m looking forward to getting back home with friends, family and colleagues. See you all when I get back!
-Joe Arnold
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May 25, 2008 Kanban: "Just set it and forget it!"
Late last year I set up a kanban system for a Yahoo! India team. They had lots of little features and bug fixes to work on, but they didn’t know how to organize it all to get it done. Scrum wasn’t working well because the nature of the work was too dynamic.
Armed with blue painter’s tape (imported) and post-it’s (imported too) I worked with the lead developer & producer to set it up. I briefly discussed the principals that makes the system work: reduce WIP to increase throughput, use the post-it’s as a signal to begin work.
Time for team indoctrination. The lead engineer explained the system to the folks on the team.
- The producer/product manager will queue up ‘things to do’, limited to 5
- The developers will take the top items from the top of the queue
- When the developers are done, they will be placed in the ‘dev done’ slot
- Then the testers will pick up items from the ‘dev done’ slot and test them
- When the ‘thing to do’ is done to the tester’s and producer’s/product manger’s satisfaction, it’s ready to release.
I sat back and just watched it unfold. Every few weeks I would go by and I’d stop in to see how things were going. The system was just like a machine; it was systematically pushing features & bug fixes through the team in a very transparent way. The tech lead moved to another project and the kanban system kept working. A new product manager came in and the kanban system kept working.
Ron Popeil sells a Rotisserie & BBQ Oven with the tag line, ‘Just set it and forget it!’ My Aunt ordered the machine. The first thing that you see when you open the box is (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “WARNING! While the slogan may be ‘Just set it and forget it!’ it doesn’t mean you can leave the machine unattended at any time. As with any kitchen appliance involving high temperatures, you must take caution.”
This team, did not literally ‘set it and forget it’. But it was a system that worked very for them with few modifications. They were largely in maintenance mode and were tasked with fixing bugs, making performance improvements, fixing production issues and making incremental improvements.
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- Posted under Kanban Man!
