This is my last day at Dell EMC. It was a privilege and an honor to found and lead Cloudscaling, one of the leaders in OpenStack, which was acquired by EMC on October 14th, 2014, exactly two years ago. Coincidentally, this is also my birthday. While working at EMC I learned an enormous amount about operating successfully at large enterprise vendors.

I want to thank all of the Cloudscalers who helped Cloudscaling deploy a number of prestigious OpenStack clouds and making history. Including, but not limited to, all of the following:

  • KT uCloud, the first public cloud in South Korea (OpenStack Swift @ scale in early 2011)
  • AT&T’s SilverLining project, the first major telco initiative around OpenStack, completed in late 2011
  • Walmart’s private cloud project based on our product, Open Cloud System (OCS), which supported Black Friday twice in 2014 and 2015

More recently, the Cloudscalers were at the heart of the Dell EMC VxRack Neutrino product, which is a greatly under-appreciated part of the Dell EMC portfolio. I hope that it ultimately succeeds in the market place.

The list of Cloudscalers to thank is much too long and there were several generations. You all know who you are and that I will always regard your willingness to follow my and Adam’s leadership as a blessing and foundational to our success.

I also want to thank a bunch of fabulous people at EMC who supported my mission there. In particular, CJ Desai, my boss, for making sure I had what I needed to succeed and Josh Bernstein, who was primary partner in crime while here. Blake McConnell also for being there to hear my gripes when I had them and giving me straight feedback. I also had a great bunch of peers who were incredibly helpful including Manuvir Das, Boaz Palgi, Dan Dougherty, Doug Bowers, and many others.

There was a special team of folks in Moscow who included some legacy Cloudscalers but also new people who graciously followed my lead on building some awesomeness into OpenStack, Mirantis Fuel, Canonical OpenStack, and RedHat OpenStack. They basically made me look good:

  • Alex Levine
  • Feodor Tersin
  • Andrey Pavlov
  • Anastasia Kravets
  • Alexey Morlang

A big shout out to all of the various investors that supported us, including Dan Scholnick and Fred Wang at Trinity, Ankur Singla and Pradeep Sindhu at Juniper, and the folks at Seagate.

My co-founder at Cloudscaling, Adam Waters, has always been an amazing partner and friend. Without him, Cloudscaling would have imploded multiple times.

Finally and most importantly, my wife, Donna Bias and my beautiful baby, Lia Kae Bias.

The Disposition of this Blog

This domain is owned by Dell EMC. I’ve put in a request to transfer the domain to me, and I hope that this goes through. OTOH, the content is all hosted at GitHub, so it can’t be lost. Fingers crossed that Dell EMC comes through.

Farewell & I’ll See You Soon

Obviously this industry is too small to truly say farewell. But I do want to say farewell in my capacity as a Cloudscaler and EMCer. That chapter is closed. And while I will always be a Stacker I expect I will take a much broader view of things in the near future. If I am not blogging here, I’ll be blogging elsewhere.

You know where to find me.

Best,

–Randy

Ps. Yes, I’m going somewhere else. No, I won’t tell you yet, but you’ll know on Monday.