OpenStack Spotlight – Ryan Beisner & James Wengraf

This week we were able to catch up with Ryan Beisner who is an OpenStack QA Engineer. Ryan is super excited to share his experience with Canonical and his excitement about attending the OpenStack Summit.

How long have you been with the company?

I’m in my third year with Canonical.  In many ways, it has flashed by very quickly.  That must be a sign of fun and enjoyment!

Who are you interested in speaking with at OpenStack in Austin?

I generally attend the tempest, rally, third-party-ci and openstack-infra related discussions.  At past events, I’ve enjoyed conversations with a wide range of disciplines, from Developers to CI/QA to Cloud Architects to Product Strategy and Business Leaders.

Why should people want to speak with you at OpenStack in Austin?

I’ve got a few interesting stories.  Here’s one:  At Canonical, we have leveraged the MAAS and Juju tooling to deploy and test over 14,000 OpenStack clouds in the past 12 months (on top of OpenStack, which is also deployed and managed by MAAS and Juju).  This is a powerful story of leveraging bare metal provisioning and application modeling, not only to deploy a long-running HA private cloud with ease, but to also deploy a robust CI infrastructure as a workload on top of that cloud.  That’s just our OpenStack Charm dev gate.  Our OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) does that and more, also with Juju and MAAS.

Top tip for people attending their first OpenStack event?

There is a lot going on at the event.  Use the app. in advance to select all of the sessions of interest.  There may be conflicting schedules, but it’s helpful to limit the schedule to the things that pertain to your work or interests.  Hit the registration booth on Sunday to avoid long lines, and go get your schwag (shirt/jacket) on the 2nd day it’s available.

What made you decide to join Canonical?

Working for Canonical means teaming up with some of the brightest talent and the most interesting individuals on the third rock.  I thought that would surely be thrilling, and it is.

What do you love about your Job?

I thrive on a good balance of hands-on engineering, use of creativity, having some customer-facing interaction, and taking part in strategic business and product efforts.  My role at Canonical nails that.

What keeps you at Canonical?

The challenge, and the reward.  There is a constant fire hose of knowledge that comes along with developing, testing and consuming both bleeding edge and stable release versions of Ubuntu Server, OpenStack itself, Juju, MAAS, and other tooling.

Where is your office?

I live, work and play in Nixa, Missouri (US).  Everyone on the team works from home.  We have established a very effective stride and rhythm with our work flow.  I travel a few times per year for events and team sprints, which gives an important balance to the ~99% remote work structure.

To find out more about Ryan visit his OpenStack Member Profile (Link Here)

James Wengraf explains his Cloud Platform Sales role at Canonical, what he loves about his job and who he is interested in speaking with at OpenStack.

Describe what do you do at Canonical

I work with global enterprise businesses on helping them navigate their OpenStack journeys whether that be private or public cloud, as well as selling open source scale out technologies into their datacentre environments like LXD, Autopilot and much more.

Who are you interested in speaking with at OpenStack in Austin?

We love to hear how enterprise end users are deploying Linux at scale and using OpenStack. If you are exploring software defined networking, software defined storage like ceph and swift or simply building out a production grade OpenStack platform, we want to hear from you!

Why should people want to speak with you at OpenStack in Austin?

As the most widely used OS platform for OpenStack, the team at Canonical have specialist experience around open source technologies, cloud platforms and emerging infrastructure technologies that will shape next-gen datacentre architecture. We can share a wealth of experience and insight into your cloud road map and infrastructure strategy.

Top tip for people attending their first OpenStack event?

Plan your schedule carefully around the OpenStack sessions you want to be in most in advance, not missing on the keynote speeches where you will hear from OpenStack power users, and come drop by the Canonical stand to test drive your own Ubuntu OpenStack cloud deployment

How long have you been with the company?

I have been with Canonical for 3 years in May, and my how time has flown by fast.

What made you decide to join Canonical?

Charismatic and dynamic sales team doing great things, and a great team spirit in the London head office

What do you love about your job?

I get to work on multi national technology engagements with some of the world’s most prominent organisations, not forgetting the ample travel opportunities that come with the job. In the past year I have been to USA, Japan, Spain, France, and more! Good times.

What keeps you at Canonical?

Great balance of interesting work around complex products and solutions coupled with good earning potential for high performers.

Where is your office?

BlueFin building on the Southbank of the Thames, central London!

Interested in Career Opportunities with Canonical? Visit us at OpenStack Summit Austin or check out our Career Openings

And don’t forget to follow us at @UbuntuWantsYou on Twitter for latest Career Opportunities and other updates.