The pace of technology in our industry continues to accelerate, particularly in the infrastructure space. In recent years, every new technology worth mentioning in infrastructure has been complex, distributed, and built for scale: OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes, Cumulus Linux, OVN... the list goes on.
As customers demand that service providers like us make these technologies available, and as we ourselves identify the need to deploy them, you would think that the primary challenges we face are scalability, time-to-market, or cost. That is not the case. The primary challenge is enabling people to know and understand these systems, and finding more of those people as we grow: we're dealing with a skills gap, not a technology gap.
Florian will be talking about how City Network addresses this challenge: with our very own approach to hiring, training, and skill-building — using the very technology that we train people on.
Florian Haas
I run the Professional Services & Education BU at City Network, and help people learn to use, understand, and deploy OpenStack. I've worked exclusively with open source software since about 2002, and have been involved in OpenStack since early 2012. I co-founded hastexo, a professional services company specializing in OpenStack, Ceph, and Open edX. There I served as CEO and Principal Consultant until our acquisition by City Network in October 2017. I have presented at several OpenStack Summits and numerous other conferences and meetups.
