How-To

What the OpenStack Upstream Institute is all about

An inside look on the free training and how you can get involved.

December 3, 2018
image

Believe it or not, it’s that time of year again. Now I know because of the abundance of holiday music blaring through store speakers you might think I’m referring Christmas but alas, jolly ole St. Nick is going  to have to wait. I’m talking about the OpenStack Summit, time for contributors and users from around the world to join together, break bread and share ideas.

Before the conference even kicks off, however,  a small group of enthusiasts joined together in what quickly started to feel like the basement of Berlin City Cube. Their goal was to learn how to become active members of the OpenStack community.

OpenStack Upstream Institute was designed by the OpenStack foundation to share knowledge about the different ways to contribute to OpenStack. The program was built with the principle of open collaboration in mind and was designed to teach attendees how to find information, as well as how to navigate the intricacies of the technical tools for each project.

Over the day-and-a-half long course, attendees are given the chance to have hands-on practice in a sandbox environment that helps prepare them to develop, test, prepare and upload new code snippets or documentation for review.

However, their learning is not limited to simply technical training; attendees also learn about the culture of OpenStack and what it means to be a part of the OpenStack Community. For example, in order to develop for OpenStack it is helpful to understand the Four Opens:

1)  OpenStack is open source, being released under the Apache Licence 2.0 and will remain fully open source. This means there will never be  an enterprise edition of OpenStack.

2) Open design means that OpenStack is committed to an open design process; every release cycle holds face to face events where that are open to everyone  so that the OpenStack community can control the design process.  

3) Open development states that OpenStack source code will be maintained in a publically accessible repository during the entire development process.

4) Open community A decision-making policy which assumes general consent if no responses are posted within a defined period.

See the Upcoming Trainings page for details on the Institute – training is occasionally offered outside Summits.

Are you interested in becoming an OpenStack contributor or active member of the OpenStack community but can’t make it to the Upstream Institute training?

Considering the following steps:

  1. Pick an OpenStack project to try.
    Can’t decide? Take a look at the documentation, as every user relies heavily on documentation regardless of the project resources being used.
  2. Sign up for the OpenStack mailing list that falls within your interests
  3. Join OpenStack IRC.
  4. Review the Upstream Institute Training slides.
  5. Check out the the Contributor guide.

About the author

Ell Marquez has been part of the open-source family for a few years now. In this time, she has found the support needed from her mentorship relationships to grow from a Linux Administrator to an OpenStack technical trainer at Rackspace. Recently, she took the leap to join Linux Academy as a technical evangelist.

Tags: ,

Ell Marquez
Latest posts by Ell Marquez (see all)