I’m trying to post weekly about things I’m doing as I come up to speed on Ceph. As I continue to develop training and come up to speed, one thing that is glaringly obvious (to me anyways) is the need to unite the dev and ops communities so we can actually get past the grandiose claims of what “THE CLOUD” can do, and get down to the work that needs to be done.

First, I want to speak to my fellow ops  and enterprise brethren. Dev people many times use the same words we do to mean something else. Lots of times they are focused on specific applications, and how the applications work. They don’t realize we already use terms that they adopt to describe how their application works. As the applications are able to scale and do new things, this language barrier may get worse. This isn’t a bad thing – we need the intense focus on the application level so we can innovate and do things we’ve always dreamed of doing. Just remember – don’t take the words they use at face value. If it doesn’t make sense – get them to explain and translate!

Ok now my new dev friends – why do y’all think that ops/enterprise have never worked with open source products? Why don’t you think we can code? Most of us have had to hack commercial products together with our own code and scripts to make them work. And isn’t this really the genesis of the Open Source movement? According to this IBM article about the history of open source, here’s what the movement gave to developers

… in the past programmers felt trapped by the confines of policies and procedures, [and] open source gave them the ability to become creative and autonomous.

Ops/enterprise are technical, have participated in open source projects from the beginning. Sometimes they are bound by political, compliance, or just the poor technical architecture decisions that they have inherited. They aren’t the enemy though.

We need to close the community gap that exists between pure open source and enterprise. We need to work together to set some reality on what “THE CLOUD” can actually do. We need to work together to move our industry forward.

OK, glad I got that off my chest. Back to testing and writing training. 🙂