Loading…
avatar for Matt Kassawara

Matt Kassawara

Rackspace
Information Developer
Austin, TX
In late 2013, one of the networking vendors I supported became involved with OpenStack, particularly the virtual networking aspects, and asked me to develop training, demonstrations, and lab environments for their customers. While attempting to install OpenStack with Networking (neutron) for the first time, I ran into significant hurdles from issues with the installation guide. After determining the source of the main problem, I filed my first documentation bug with a suggested patch. Several patches later, I realized that the networking chapter needed rewriting from the ground up. Working with several people on the documentation team, I completely rewrote the content for the Icehouse release and have continued to improve it along with other portions of the installation guide and other community documentation. I became very familiar with OpenStack during this journey, particularly the Networking service, and have assisted a large number of people with architecture, deployment, operation, and troubleshooting. Between support, bug triage, and general observations, the Networking component seems to cause the most frustration because most people learning OpenStack come from virtualization platforms with only basic networking features or from network infrastructures using physical equipment rather than Linux. The lack of practical documentation, arguably less than any other service, only increases frustration. During the last development cycle, people from various parts of the OpenStack community including myself from the documentation team decided that we needed to develop a networking guide. Around this time, I also became a technical writer at Rackspace for the OpenStack Private Cloud product. Since the beginning of the networking guide project, I developed, tested, and contributed documentation for several practical scenarios including basic/legacy with Open vSwitch, basic/legacy with Linux Bridge, and DVR.