Fedora's Cloud Future (and, self (re-)introduction)

[Matthew Miller]

Hello everyone. I've been active with Fedora for a while, and I know a lot
of you and I hope a lot of you know me. I helped with the first few FUDCons
back when I was at Boston University, and have been moderately active on
this list, in Bugzilla, and as a package maintainer, and with other things
Fedora as my employment has allowed.

Well, now, my employment will allow it *a lot*, as I've been hired by Red
Hat full time to work on Fedora. Specifically, I'm going to work on bringing
some sense to the whole "Cloud" thing – what that buzzword practically
means for us as a project both now and in the future, and (critically) what
we should do about it.

There is some seriously awesome cloud-related work going on in Fedora —
many of the features for F18, for example — but there's no real overall
vision for how this will all work together for us. So, I'm going to indulge
in some strategic planning, starting with some basic questions about our
stakeholders for cloud in Fedora, and working on a mission and vision within
Fedora as a whole. I hope you'll join me in working on this.

If any of this sounds interesting, please come on over to the Cloud SIG,
centered around the mailing list

  <https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud>

and pitch in. And if the words "strategic" and "planning" make your
eyes
glaze over, don't worry. This is going to be a *doing* thing, not just a
*talking* thing. Computing as a whole is _really_ at one of those big
inflection points, and it's going to take a lot of action to bring us on
over to the other side — where we've got a *lot* to contribute that the
world shouldn't miss out on.

(Working on bringing the Cloud SIG Fedora wiki page up to reflect current
activity is one of my low-hanging-fruit tasks as well, but I wanted to get
this intro out there first thing.)

And if you want to talk about any of this in any medium _beyond_ the Cloud
SIG, please feel free. My inbox is open, I'll be seeing a lot of you at
various conferences, and if you're in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area,
we have a lot of nice places serving local microbrews. (I will buy you a
drink if you can refrain from using the word "nebulous" in a conversation
about cloud.)

-- 
Matthew Miller  _☁_  Fedora Cloud Architect  _☁_  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;