Taking on a New Role

Until very recently, I have been a developer on the Ubuntu Server Team.  In that capacity since February 2008, here's a quick recap of a few of the things that I have worked on:

• Regular package maintenance, merging, bug triaging, bug fixing:
• cobbler, eucalyptus, kvm, libvirt, mdadm, openstack, qemu, qemu-kvm, screen, (and hundreds of others)
• Development and packaging of new tools and projects:
• apply-patch, bch, bzrp, bikeshed, bogosec, byobu, col1-col9, dman, ecryptfs-*, errno, eucalyptus-live, kvm-ok, musica, openstack-live, pbget, pbput, pictor, powernap, release-build, release, run-one, screenbin, service, ssh-import-id, testdrive, uec-provisioning, update-motd, what-provides, wifi-status
• Upstream contributions of fixes and features
• kbd, newt, cobbler, qemu (just a few from the top of my head)
• Authored and maintained a couple of documentation-finding websites:
• Ubuntu Manpage Repository, manpg.es, LinuxSearch.org
• help.ubuntu.com's search tool
• GSoC Mentor, University Graduate Project mentor
• Ubuntu Archive Administration (particularly for Canonical Partner packages)
• Bootstrapped Canonical's OEM Server Team and its processes for contract work on Dell and other servers available from Canonical's Partners

So it's been a busy 3+ years and 7 Ubuntu Server releases (8.04 - 11.04)!  I sincerely hope that at least a few of these things contributions have helped make the Ubuntu Server one of the very best UNIX/Linux servers in the industry.

In any case, I'm now 2 weeks into a brand new job here at Canonical, and I'm quite excited about it!  I'm now managing our new Systems Integration Team.  The rock-star team currently consists of Marc Cluet, Juan Negron, and Brian Thomason.  Marc and Juan bring a wealth of DevOps expertise and Brian has several years experience packaging some of the most complicated software in the Canonical Partner archive.

We were all quite active at UDS-Oneiric in Budapest last month, participating in many discussions around Ubuntu Orchestra and Ensemble.  And now we're currently developing Ubuntu Orchestra, as a Server Provisioning and Configuration Management system.

Marc has been enhancing mcollective, and packaging numerous new mcollective-plugins.  Juan has been developing a set of modules for deploying some interesting software stacks through Orchestra.  Brian is packaging VMWare's CloudFoundry and its dependencies.  And I've been working the base packaging of Ubuntu Orchestra, itself, and its dependencies, such as cobbler and Ubuntu's new dotdee utility.  We have a bunch of interesting work coming down the pipeline, including integration of Ensemble as Orchestra's Service Orchestration framework.

Anyway, I just wanted to mark the occasion as I'm transitioning away from daily development on the Ubuntu Platform Server Team, and into the brave new world of Management and Systems Integration.

And most importantly, I hope you will welcome Marc (lynxman), Juan (negronjl), and Brian (iamfuzz) into the Ubuntu Server Community with open arms!  These guys have valuable expertise, code, and packaging to offer to the Ubuntu Server, and we're all quite excited about the opportunities ;-)

Cheers,
:-Dustin