Tuesday, November 22, 2011

One

Eucalyptus has a long history of listening to our community. You asked for Eucalyptus to have a life of its own, and Eucalyptus Systems was born. You asked for a different license (GPL) and you got it. You asked for easier ways to install Eucalyptus and so we packaged Eucalyptus for the main linux distributions, we delivered UEC and we created FastStart.

We are still listening to our community. Currently we are working on the Eucalyptus 3 feature set and development process. Check our roadmap for more information
on the feature set, and stay tuned for more information about this
important release.

Our mantra is and always will be:  "Listen to our community and deliver quality software".

We always strive to get better at it. We are now in the process of redesigning the way we communicate with you. Currently we differentiate our users between customers (paying users) and community (intended here as the non-paying users). We have two web sites (www and open), two different sets of communication -- a support team,  an issue tracker, phone line 24/7 and direct emails for customers and a forum, IRC, launchpad and mailing list for community.

This setup is common enough, yet in our case it seems a bit arbitrary. Our engineers, our sales people, and our support team help community members on IRC and in the forum. Conversely we are all dedicated to help our customers. So we are in the process of removing this artificial division. Our support team is working to integrate the forum, mailing lists, and issue tracker. Our sales and marketing teams are working closely to understand the needs of our users and to provide them the information they want. Our professional services team is producing online training material. Our web team is working to tie all of the above together in a seamless and user-friendly way. And our engineering team is readying the best release of Eucalyptus yet.

Eucalyptus 3 will bring a lot of changes for our community: reconciling the various source branches into one, bringing a new plug-in architecture, and opening up the development process. Before Eucalyptus 3 is released, our two web sites will merge. We'll group information together following the cloud IT roles. Our webinars, forum posts, technical information, and documentation will be focused on delivering the best possible service to the specific IT role.

The new web site redesign, will put our community in the driver's seat. We will present updates and new design soon, and your feedback is necessary to carry on this ambitious plan.

One Eucalyptus Community.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

I miss my '-g'

One thing I can say for sure: there is no time to get bored here at Eucalyptus. If you like big challenges and you have it to take them on, consider joining our team: I'm extremely pleased to say that Greg just did so.

If you are at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara or in the Bay area, come and meet Greg (or Rich or Marten or me for that matter :) at EucaSocial, or visit us at our booth (#615).

I have been knowing Greg by fame for a while, but in person for only few months, and I can say that the energy, and passion he brings to Eucalyptus are intoxicating. You may have already noticed the impulse on our community activities (from our #eucalyptus IRC channel, our mailing lists, our projects and our planet) and this is just the start!

The only downside is that I don't have anymore the exclusive '-g' at the end of emails. Welcome Greg:   I'm  thrilled to be able to work with and learn from you.