A particularly interesting part of the conversation centered on adopting a DevOps model. This company is a decent size, and has an impressive bench of in-house developers, however its developers are often frustrated with IT because they’re unable to get compute resources in a timely fashion. In addition, like many of the customers I speak to, the broader IT/IS organization is concerned with security, shadow IT and grappling with growing amounts of data and pressure to get smarter with analytics.

Keeping developers happy and breaking down walls between sys admins and developers should be an important part of any company’s strategy right now because in the words of The Phoenix Project author Gene Kim, “every company is an IT company.” Breaking down silos between developers and systems administrators can help companies take full advantage of advances in automation and help to deliver innovative products to market. Innovative products, in turn could create happier or more loyal customers and keep your company ahead of your competition.

So how do you DevOps?

1. Make an investment in training your people. This could mean teaching sys admins basic dev skills and developers basic admin skills. It may also mean providing training and access to tools like Chef, Puppet or RightScale, and/or using collaboration tools like GitHub.
2. If you have a cloud strategy (and who doesn’t?) consider the move to cloud-friendly coding languages that have SDKs, open APIs and run well on open source operating systems.
3. Seat them together. By putting admins and developers side-by-side, you’ll reduce finger-pointing and failed/overdue projects that occur do limitations with code or infrastructure.
4. Participate in DevOppy things. There are fantastic events, from conferences to un-conferences to local meetups (DevOpsDays is great).
5. Give your people the resources they need to do their jobs. This might mean permission to use public cloud when it makes sense, or if you’re security conscious, deploying a Rackspace Private Cloud (available via free download) and allowing your team to self-serve.
6. Use the cloud, don’t run it. The value in cloud comes in using it, not running it. Consider leveraging a company like Rackspace to operate your cloud for a fraction of the cost if you were to DIY.

Cloud, DevOps and automation aren’t buzzwords. Companies are doing some really cool and innovative things. If you’re not doing them, be prepared to fall behind or fail.

Questions, comments? Reach me on Twitter @nikiacosta.

To dig deeper into DevOps, check out the Rackspace DevOps Blog and the Developer Center.

In just six months, data pulled from SimplyHired.com shows an 81 percent increase in job titles and postings that contain the term “OpenStack.” The BSA Global Cloud Scorecard 2013 predicts an estimated 14 million cloud jobs will be created by 2015.

The good news is that due to the rapid proliferation of OpenStack, OpenStack-focused positions pay an average of 13 percent more than their industry equivalents. For example, Indeed.com estimates the salary for a network engineer is $91,000 per year, while an OpenStack network engineer can average $103,000. Engineers, administrators and architects with an OpenStack-focus can expect to earn more, too.

The shortage is overwhelmingly visible at OpenStack Summit Portland, where nearly every company within the ecosystem is actively recruiting at the event. We’re all hiring.

OpenStack is growing so fast that the talent pool is not deep enough to fill the positions available.

In the short term, we have to find better ways to support innovators within our companies and keep them engaged; whether that’s through a dynamic culture, flexible schedules, the opportunity to work on new technologies, advancement opportunities, better pay and other incentives and benefits.

But in the long term we must empower the next generation and create an industry that offers an attractive career path to students.

As a community, we need to work together to not only make our respective companies attractive to interested candidates, but offer training opportunities to OpenStack career hopefuls.

At Rackspace, we’ve recently launched the Open Cloud Academy, an educational program designed to arm students with affordable IT certifications, specifically around open cloud technologies. Additionally, we’re working with universities to offer OpenStack training and internships.

We also need to make technology and OpenStack careers more inviting to women. Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of global market development at Qualcomm, wrote in the article “Women In Technology: Let’s Close The Gap,” that in the past decade, just 12 percent of the professionals in engineering are women. That needs to change – and soon.

Those of us with IT careers need to enable future generations of IT professionals. Ask a kid what they want to be when they grow up and you’ll hear ambitions of future firefighters, teachers or doctors. The time is now to prepare the next generation for technical careers, whether that means volunteering for organizations such as GirlStart, DefCon Kids, or STEM, or buying the young ones in your life a copy of Python for Kids.

To achieve these goals, I’ve put together a four-point proposal to the OpenStack Foundation:

1. Create full-time positions for community talent development coordination.
2. Continue, recognize, fund and promote the Women of OpenStack group.
3. Create and award scholarships specifically for women and college students to attend OpenStack Summits.
4. Create an online hub for community talent and women’s resources on OpenStack.org.

These four steps will go a long way to ensure we reach the right candidates and build an environment that will make OpenStack a more attractive career option.

If OpenStack is going to win, we need to foster talent and get people interested in us.

It was also another big day for news.

Rackspace kicked off the morning by showcasing how HubSpot is using an open hybrid cloud infrastructure to power its marketing software. Through a mix of public and private Rackspace clouds and bare metal, HubSpot is able to move workloads between environments and has achieved a four times increase in efficiency of processing workloads.

VMware and Linux distributor Canonical also came out with news today. The two companies are teaming up to enable users to deploy VMware’s vSphere and the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP), with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution.

Also noteworthy, Hortonworks and Red Hat pledged their support for Project Savana, Mirantis’ Hadoop deployment tool for OpenStack.

Today saw a bunch of work go into the development of OpenStack’s Havana plans and some really impressive talks on the current state of OpenStack and its future.

Day one also saw big news from some of OpenStack’s main players.

Rackspace kicked off the Summit with plans to build and launch an interoperable Global Cloud Network for large service providers and telcos. The network will run the OpenStack-powered Rackspace public cloud – the largest OpenStack-based public cloud in the world – at global scale, creating a networked cloud of clouds. Rackspace will deploy our public cloud into a service provider data center and remotely operate that cloud, and the service provider will provide the physical data center operations as well as market, sell and support the co-branded cloud directly to its end-customers. This extension of our public cloud portfolio will give both service providers and their customers access to a network of interconnected global data centers – customers will be able to run their workloads in any data center that is part of the network, while maintaining their business relationship with the local provider of their choice. Users will be able to run their workloads where they want, when they want.

HP made headlines on OpenStack Summit Portland’s first day with the debut of new Converged Cloud products. HP said it has updated its CloudSystem private cloud (version 7.2) to enable bursting of workloads into other clouds. It calls it CloudSystem Bursting Activation Services.  HP also launched Cloud Messaging, which enables developers to reduce downtime by duplicating messages across multiple servers. HP Cloud Messaging is built on the OpenStack Marconi API. CloudSystem version 7.2 also adds support for Red Hat KVM resource pools. Bursting will be available this summer, while CloudSystem 7.2 and Cloud Messaging are available now.

Cloudscaling also came to Portland with news. Cloudscaling is partnering with Juniper Networks to deliver an elastic cloud infrastructure solution that marries Cloudscaling’s OpenStack-based Open Cloud System with Juniper’s virtual network control technology to offer advanced networking capabilities for enterprises and service providers.

Meanwhile, Red Hat updated its OpenStack enterprise and community technologies and also its roadmap. First, Red Hat revealed that its OpenStack offering is now in an Early Adopter Program. Red Hat also launched RDO, which the company calls “a community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” Lastly, Red Hat introduced the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which it says is a global ecosystem of technology and service partners to accelerate the adoption of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure offerings.

NetApp also made a big play to start OpenStack Summit. The company says it submitted a prototype and proposal for a file share service capability for consideration by the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and community at large. According to NetApp, OpenStack doesn’t currently offer native management support for file-based storage systems and NetApp is proposing adding a file share service that is broad enough to address a range of file system types, either as an extension to the existing Cinder project (in its current form referred to as OpenStack block storage) or implemented as a separate project. NetApp says the goal of this integration is to extend access to applications written for file-based storage without the need for a separate management interface. vNetApp has designed and developed a prototype, which includes code contributions and extended APIs, as well as both a reference and a back-end implementation specific to NetApp. The prototype is available as a recent submission to OpenStack’s Cinder project.

And when you picked up your bag at registration, you may have noticed these sweet hoodies – a pretty cool way to keep warm in chilly Portland.

That was a big first day. Be sure to check in tomorrow for the Rackspace keynote and more news from the OpenStack Summit. And don’t miss all of the awesome things Rackspace has going on at OpenStack Summit this week! If you want to chat, you can find me on Twitter at @nikiacosta.

Essentially, OpenStack is an open source cloud operating system driven by a thriving community. OpenStack now powers open public and private clouds – in our data centers or yours – all backed by our legendary Fanatical Support. It makes once-complicated tasks like deploying applications much simpler; and it helps our customers avoid lock-in.

Here’s a quick primer on OpenStack, what it is and who uses it – let’s call it OpenStack 101. This video dives into OpenStack from a high level to show you why it’s so awesome.

Have questions or comments about OpenStack? Feel free to ask them here; or reach out to Niki (@NikiAcosta) and Scott (@ScottSanchez) on Twitter.

What brought you to Rackspace?
The majority of my professional career has been based in a busy hosting environment. Rackspace is not only seen as a leader in the hosting industry but it also helped pioneer OpenStack, which has consumed the last two years of my life. Moving to Rackspace was an easy decision for me.

Why Rackspace?
Rackspace is, undeniably, the world leader when it comes to OpenStack given its rich legacy, and this trend continues at a fast pace today as it continues to innovate, leading all sizes of business on a journey into public and private clouds. While Rackspace has taken a step back to allow OpenStack to flourish in the rapidly expanding community, Rackers still actively contribute, helping take the cloud software to new levels of innovation and functionality. All this has been wrapped up into products supported by Rackspace’s infamous Fanatical Support mantra – and this is clearly demonstrated by each and every Racker involved with OpenStack, meaning customers only get the best level of commitment and support available in the hosting industry.

Talk a little bit about your team.
It is a very experienced and immensely talented team working on Rackspace Private Cloud, Alamo, at a product architect and engineering level. Casting a wider net I get to work with some of the most fanatical thought leaders and evangelists on the OpenStack and cloud computing circuits who do an amazing job of promoting OpenStack around the world. I’ve not met a team more dedicated than the incredible and crazy but loveable folk working on OpenStack at Rackspace.

When and how did you first hear about OpenStack?
I first came across OpenStack around the Bexar release; back in February 2011, when I was tasked with looking at a cloud computing platform to migrate a portion of applications running in AWS back on-premise and ultimately support a website that receives well over 1 billion page impressions a month. In my previous role I evaluated Cloud.com (now CloudStack), Eucalyptus and OpenStack, and the decision to pursue OpenStack was made after demonstrating its potential to deliver what was required and the huge amount of support behind it.

What prompted you to write “OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook?”
In the early days of OpenStack, some of the tasks that we take for granted in the latest releases were not as easy to perform. Coupled with the fast pace of development, operational information seemed to be strewn across official documentation and so many blog posts that users had to piece together the information themselves. I was approached by the publishers to write the book after they saw my work on my own blog. At this stage I probably knew about a quarter of the content required for the book, but deciding to write the book made me discover and learn more about OpenStack than I would have naturally picked up during my work to set up OpenStack.

What’s your book about?
The book is structured in such a way that if you have a question on how to do something with OpenStack, there is a recipe – a series of repeatable steps – that takes you through the answer. This is synonymous with recipe/cookbooks that show you how to make bread or cakes by following the steps. The book is designed for people who have grasped the concepts of virtualization and are familiar with Linux and want to enhance their skills to enter the world of cloud computing with OpenStack.

Where can people buy your book?
The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble as well as on the publisher’s website, PacktPub.com. If there are any discounts or competitions I announce them on my Twitter feed (@itarchitectkev) and these relate to offers on PacktPub.com.

Where do you see OpenStack and Rackspace in five years?
There will be a lot more “Powered by OpenStack” software and appliances in five years. Software and hardware vendors will treat OpenStack as a de facto open standard platform that they will naturally develop and support drivers and applications for this stack. Rackspace-powered and managed clouds will span the globe both within people’s datacenters and in an extensive set of locations allowing people to float their applications to any OpenStack powered datacenter. Rackspace and OpenStack together will create a globally interconnected mesh of compute and storage that people will spin up locally, making it a natural choice when they require off-premise capabilities. Within five years, just as we say “virtualize first, physical second” now, people deploying applications will say “cloud first” and demand legacy goliath application suites to be able to be deployed in flexible environments. And given OpenStack’s impressive backers, these re-written legacy applications will be certified for OpenStack infrastructure. In five years, automation and self-healing infrastructures will be a fundamental requirement to differentiate cloud providers – users will expect to deploy an application and given certain parameters (cost, resilience, uptime, etc.) a broker will decide on where to deploy the application – this shouldn’t be an arduous task – it will be designed into OpenStack-powered clouds.

I also like to see some crazy innovation happening in this space in the next five years – there’s the possibility to have a public P2P arrangement of OpenStack-powered clouds that are aware of each other’s capabilities between different people’s datacenters. This allows for building a massively scalable suite of cloud infrastructure in the same way that BitTorrent is used today for sharing files efficiently – demonstrating OpenStack’s unique position in the industry as being a true open cloud standard.

The software, called Alamo, has a re-skinned dashboard and comprises 100 percent community OpenStack, Chef and the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system.

It’s incredibly easy to get started, and to get you on your way with Rackspace Private Cloud we’ve put together these brief videos.

If you haven’t yet installed the Rackspace Private Cloud Software, check out a quick video walkthrough for the Rackspace Private Cloud Installer.

Once you have the software installed, this video shows you how to use the Rackspace Private Cloud in the admin view:

And, here’s a demonstration of the control panel from the user’s view:

To download Rackspace Private Cloud and get started, head on over to www.rackspace.com/cloud/private. And come share your Rackspace Private Cloud experiences with other users and OpenStack engineers in our new community forums at https://privatecloudforums.rackspace.com/.

That’s why we’re so excited that RightScale has endorsed Rackspace as the gold-standard for OpenStack-powered clouds.

This strategic partnership builds on our long-running relationship and will deeply integrate RightScale cloud management capabilities with the Rackspace portfolio of open cloud solutions. This will make it easier for our customers to build, deploy, manage and scale their public, private and hybrid cloud applications.

The pairing between Rackspace and RightScale is another step in the fight against vendor lock-in. With the launches of our new cloud products this year like Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Networks and Cloud Databases, RightScale users now have a broader selection of cloud alternatives and we believe they’ll be looking at Rackspace.

The deep product integration will also include the OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud, which lets users deploy a Rackspace cloud in their data center of choice — be it their own data center, a colo facility or in one of Rackspace’s global data centers. By leveraging RightScale, customers can move or spread applications and workloads between a Rackspace Private Cloud running on premise, a private cloud hosted at Rackspace and the Rackspace public cloud for true hybrid cloud capabilities. And because of RightScale, they can do it all from a single pane of glass.

For those of you familiar with RackConnect, the Rackspace product that bridges Rackspace public cloud and hosted dedicated resources for an intra-data center hybrid environment, you can think of RightScale as a service that extends that functionality to private and public cloud resources across data centers. Cool, right?

Taking RightScale’s expertise in deploying and managing cloud applications and adding in our trademark Fanatical Support will ensure a truly open and reliable cloud.

Integrated products are expected roll out over time, so stay tuned for the latest developments.

And for those of you at Cloud Expo this week, we’re hosting a Tweetup at the Hyatt lobby bar. Follow us on Twitter (@Rackspace) for details and join us for a beverage!

Dell came out swinging Tuesday morning when it revealed that it’s working with Morphlabs, a converged infrastructure platform, to offer customers a private cloud appliance based on OpenStack. Dubbed mCloud Helix, the cloud solution leverages Dell blade servers and Crowbar cloud software; Morphlabs’ mCloud technology; management and support services; and OpenStack technology. The two companies also announced that hosting provider Media Temple now offers private cloud services using mCloud Helix.

During his keynote presentation at OpenStack Summit on Tuesday, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said Ubuntu 12.10 is available now and runs OpenStack Folsom and that the upgrade path for Ubuntu 12.04, which adds Folsom, is also ready. Shuttleworth showed the audience how to upgrade a production cloud with services running on top of it from Essex to Folsom using a new Juju GUI – in just three minutes.

At the Summit on Tuesday, cloud storage player Zadara Storage unveiled the integration of its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service with OpenStack Cloud Block Storage (Cinder) for public and private cloud.

Leading up to the Summit, OpenStack Foundation member SolidFire, in conjunction with Canonical, announced a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Block Storage. At the Summit, SolidFire demonstrated the deployment of 1,000 production-ready VMs with predictable performance and quality of service.

And in a keynote presentation, former-NASA CTO Chris Kemp, now CEO of Nebula, dug deeper into why attendees ventured to OpenStack Summit. “To service customers and to build opportunities on this platform,” Kemp said, later adding that OpenStack as a community has “an opportunity to define what Amazon does next.”

Another big draw at this year’s Summit was the “unconference” track, which let attendees present ad hoc sessions and discussions. One notable unconference that popped up Tuesday was the Women in OpenStack Unconference led by Rackspace Content Stacker Anne Gentle.

And for fun, here’s a photo of me and Tristan Goode, Aptira CEO and OpenStack board member from Australia who gifted me some amazing Australian cookies! And awesome Aussie cookies weren’t the only hot bit of schwag at OpenStack Summit. The duffel bags given out are going to be a hot commodity for attendees to carry home the show. From dozens of t-shirts and stickers that pledge OpenStack allegiance to Raspberry Pi computers and reusable water bottles from vizvid topped off with an IPA.

Be sure to check out the news from day one of OpenStack Summit San Diego. And don’t miss this brief video looking at how community and collaboration are two pillars of the OpenStack Summit.

Join Rackspace’s experts at various presentations and sessions throughout the Summit.

First, Rackspace started the party with the launch of the Rackspace Private Cloud Product Certification program. The new program ensures that Rackspace’s technology partners’ products and solutions are compatible within an OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud.

Rackspace on Monday also launched a pair of software development kits (SDKs) that make it easier for developers to leverage the OpenStack APIs. The SDKs also provide documentation to help users get started, along with tested, working sample code developers can use for their applications today. The first two SDKs are for Java and PHP, but more are on the way. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Java leverages the jclouds open-source library and has full support for OpenStack Nova (Rackspace Cloud Servers) and OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files); and the Rackspace Cloud SDK for PHP uses the Rackspace-developed php-opencloud library, which supports Nova, Swift, Rackspace Cloud Networks (preview access) and Rackspace Cloud Databases. You can learn more about the SDKs here: http://docs.rackspace.com/sdks/guide/content/intro.html.

OpenStack Foundation members also came to San Diego armed with big announcements.

OpenStack Foundation Gold Member Cisco came out of the OpenStack Summit gate ready for action with the unveiling of Cisco OpenStack Distribution, a Cisco Edition of OpenStack that’s a packaged and tested version of Folsom with open source components. The packages offer automated deployment and other functions like high-availability, monitoring and Cisco-enabled networking with Quantum.

And OpenStack Foundation Gold Member Cloudscaling announced that it opened up the Google Compute Engine APIs to OpenStack, providing an alternative to Amazon Web Services.

Cloud infrastructure automation player Opscode also came to OpenStack summit with a full arsenal of announcements. First, Opscode announced Chef for OpenStack, which Opscode said offers a centralized, defined collection of code and best practices for using Chef to create and automate OpenStack infrastructures and deploy and manage application stacks on OpenStack. Chef for OpenStack combines a central repository of cookbooks with key features of Hosted and Private Chef to offer a reference framework to improve business agility and operating efficiency with OpenStack, Opscode said.

Second, Opscode announced integration via the Knife command-line for OpenStack Folsom, which enables users to rapidly create, bootstrap and manage OpenStack Folsom compute instances.

Lastly, Opscode announced that OpenStack Gold Member DreamHost has deployed Opscode Private Chef to automate configuration and environment management for DreamHost’s DreamCompute public cloud and DreamObjects cloud storage service. DreamHost is using Opscode Private Chef to automate the Ceph-powered object storage infrastructure behind DreamObjects, plus the OpenStack-powered virtual machine management and Ceph-powered block storage infrastructure behind the OpenStack-based DreamCompute public cloud computing service that DreamHost announced at OpenStack Summit.

NetApp, an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member, also continued to back OpenStack at the Summit. On Monday, NetApp announced the contribution of Data ONTAP 8 Clustering Drivers to OpenStack Block Storage. The move gives developers, service providers and enterprises improved resources to build private and public clouds on OpenStack, NetApp said.

And coming out of stealth mode at OpenStack Summit on Monday was Metacloud, which launched a managed enterprise private cloud offering based on OpenStack. Meanwhile, Japanese network virtualization upstart Midokura unveiled at OpenStack Summit that it is officially entering the U.S. market. Midokura also unveiled MidoNet; software defined networking play designed for IaaS that virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms like OpenStack.

Along with the product announcements that marked day one of OpenStack Summit San Diego, the OpenStack Foundation and community continued to grow with new companies joining the family. First, Nimbula announced Monday at OpenStack Summit that it has joined the OpenStack community. Nimbula, a cloud operating system maker, said it plans to collaborate on improvements the OpenStack codebase and incorporate OpenStack services into future Nimbula Director releases. Another OpenStack newcomer, Comcast, confirmed just before the Summit that it was joining as a member of the community. And cloud management company Gale Technologies also announced that it joined the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor.

That was a big first day. Be sure to check in tomorrow for more news from the OpenStack Summit San Diego. And don’t miss the many Rackspace experts speaking at the OpenStack Summit this week.