As a European Sovereign Public Cloud Provider, it is required for Cloudwatt to develop its in-house mastery & expertise of the underlying FLOSS components it is deploying, OpenStack & Ceph being the key ones. In order to achieve that, Cloudwatt has staffed dedicated contribution teams. The catch is that, in a world where existing senior cotributors living in the Paris area are not found easily, and even more a year and a half ago than today, Cloudwatt had no choice but to grow them in-house, with the help of its partner eNovance. Growing from zero employees to 100 in the past 18 month Cloudwatt shaped his software engineering team for Free Software contribution from day one. The Upstream University course is part of the training program proposed to every engineer. It is only one of the many challenges to build a team able to reconcile the agenda of the company with the roadmap of the OpenStack project. We’ll describe why we went this way, where we are today, challenges we faced, and the various benefits we got from this journey as a company. If you’re a developer, you’ll get ammunition to convince your boss to let you contribute. If you’re in a IT leadership role, you’ll get a few reason on why you should let your people do it, and how you could do that.

1. Building a Contribution Culture @Cloudwatt
Régis Allegre
VP Software Engineering
@HappyKing
Loic Dachary
Software Craftsman
OpenStack Summit Atlanta – May 13th 2014

2. - Sovereign Cloud provider, created to deliver competitive
IAAS Services to French & European companies
- Joint Venture (Orange, Thales & French Gov.)
- Security, privacy and resiliency compliant with the French &
European legislation and regulation requirements
- A Free Software DNA from inception
- One of the largest OpenStack deployment in EU
Building a European Leader
on Free Software foundations

3. 3
Why did we chose to contribute?
1. Solution Mastery
2. Influence on our Architectural Foundations
3. Sovereignty: Developing our own Competency &
Expertise
1. Access to world-class technical coaching
2. Access leading edge engineering practices & tools
3. Boosts attractiveness for the « right » developers
4. Leverage opportunity on new developments
The Necessity
The Bonus

4. Solution Mastery

5. Sovereignty

6. Nurturing Neutron

7. Leading edge engineering

8. Bootstraping with training

9.  Ala Rezmerita
 Cédric Soulas
 Jordan Pittier
 Nassim Babaci
 Sahid Ferdjaoui
 Edouard Thuleau
 Loic Dachary
 Christophe Courtaut
 Yves-Gwenael Bourhis
Cloudwatt as a Contributor
9
Contributions Other Activities
Source: www.stackalytics.com
Team
18th contributor (Icehouse)
25 Proposed Blueprints
5 Completed Blueprints
4th contributor
Projects

10. Our Options
10
Feature is submitted, and gets through the acceptance
process
Feature is implemented an external component, integrated
through APIs with the core project.
Upstream
External Component
Downstream Feature is implemented as a fork from the regular
component

11. 11
Upstream
Change
External Component
Downstream
Change
 Contribution will be reviewed,
improved and validated
 Maintained with the product « by
construct »
 Can be developed by others
(leverage)
 Feature remains differentiating
 Can be implemented faster (you
own the lifecycle)
 Feature remains differentiating
 Can be implemented faster (you own the
lifecycle)
 Feature is not differentiating
 Can be long to pass through
 Can be rejected
 Change needs to be reapplied
(recurring cost)
 Can be incompatible with
future choices
 Feature will not be improved
by the review process
 Subject to API evolutions: The
component will need to be
maintained forever
 Significant architectural impact
(complexity, integration,
performance)
Pros Cons
Our Options

12. Hard questions
12
 You’re tiny fish. Do you really expect to influence anything when the
big guys get involved?
 When insert_big_company_name contributes, it’s a rounding error
on their P&L. Can you afford it as a small scale player?
 How do you build your company culture, when your developers
loyalty go primarily to the open source project?
 That’s a lot of people you’re flying to the Summit. Is this
reasonable?

13. Questions?
• Don’t hesitate to
• Visit our booth
• Talk to our engineers in and out the design sessions
• Ask for Beta Compute test accounts