Yesterday, I gave a presentation about CloudFS at Red Hat Summit in Boston. During the day I joked about how it had been scheduled at 5:30pm, with free food and beer elsewhere, so I didn’t have to worry about presenting to a large audience. How right I was. We ended up with about 40 people in a room that seats 200 – yes, I counted – and those who did attend seemed very tired from a full day’s worth of other sessions. It was a bit depressing, to be quite honest, especially when some folks got up and left half way through. Maybe it was for the free beer, maybe it’s because they realized this session wasn’t especially relevant to them, maybe it’s because I just sucked. Personally I would rate my performance as about average. I’m not a great speaker by any means, but I felt that I was able to present the material pretty clearly without pauses and stutters and nervous repetition like I saw from other speakers. There was some good back-and-forth with those who did stay, as well, and it was certainly better than not having been there at all, so I’ll try to focus on the positive.
The best thing that came out of this was probably not the in-person presentation itself but the opportunity to create a better set of slides than I had before. Here they are, in both OpenOffice and PDF forms. This includes the hidden and backup slides, plus notes that include most of what I said during the presentation and even some of the answers to questions, so if you’re reading the ODP version be sure to use a view that lets you see everything (the PDF version was already generated that way). I’m rather proud of these, actually, as I feel that they give the clearest picture to date of what CloudFS is about. Many thanks to Mark Wagner who did the performance part of the presentation (which meant that he had to put up with not having the same document on both the big and small screens due to mismatched-resolution problems with the conference setup), and to Ben England who actually did the vast majority of the testing to generate those numbers.
Just to be clear on what CloudFS’s goals are, I really really wish I could be working more actively on the “dynamo” and “paphos” (multi-site replication – so named because of this) pieces which only occupy two backup slides at the end of the presentation. Those are the features that inspired me to start the project, I think eventually they’ll be the most compelling for users, but in the interim I just saw these huge functional gaps between what current distributed filesystems provide and what’s needed to deploy them properly in a cloud environment. Frankly that stuff’s kind of boring. It involves a lot of mucking about with mundane GlusterFS implementation details, and a lot of “anyone could write this” kinds of code to interface with libraries or handle management functions, with little in the way of algorithmic excitement except for a few encryption-related bits. It’s also necessary. I firmly believe that this is the stuff people need, right now, before we go off and do the more cutting-edge stuff. Stay tuned, and we’ll get to the good part. I promise.
Don’t feel too depressed from the low attendance. I can say that at that time I only get 50% of late presentations because I am tired. It is a lot of content to take all day with all the material available from each session. It is also easy to get the material when you miss a presentation (thank you for that).
I had to leave some presentation and it has nothing to do with the quality of the presenter. Work calls and need assistance with an issue. I also left because it was not what I was expecting.
There is only a few that are great presenters. If you have a good pace and you don’t repeat yourself then you are a good presenter.
So don’t be depressed and present again next year.
Indeed, don’t be discouraged. I thought the talk was absolutely great, although I was late to it due to the “hallway track”.
1. It was late in the day. For my 3PM talk, we barely managed to wake folks up – but the thanks I got was the first question afterwards was “Are you guys on Red Bull or what?”
2. Most people don’t realize CloudFS is a new use case, or that they need CloudFS. The storage guys at the conference may think they’ve already got all the answers, when in fact they should have been paying attention.
3. In counterpoint, the folks that think they need a CloudFS aren’t necessarily filesystem guys. They might be developers having trouble developing cloud-based apps and looking for a better way. When you dove in, you may have lost a few of those guys.
4. In the future, I agree with you – you might want to emphasize the “design for failure” requirement for cloud a little more instead of leaving it in the backup slides. With the Amazon EBS outage still fresh in everyone’s mind, it would be good to case-study how to build a filesystem that can survive that specific type of failure. That will likely connect with people more than multi-tenancy, privacy, and base testing. Although I for one appreciate seeing the testing as it lends you credibility.
So keep up the good work. You’ve done an excellent job explaining the new use case and it’s requirements, and laying down foundational work to address them. We’ll be watching your talk next year.