Preface

My first exposure to OpenStack came in the summer of 2011 while I was working at the University of Kentucky. My coworker and friend, Brent Salisbury, and I were invited to meet with a Fortune 50 technology company to discuss a product development project. During our meeting, the project’s executive sponsor gave us the option to work with existing commercial tools or investigate the use of a community project called OpenStack. Naturally, we chose to work with the framework we knew nothing about, and so began our OpenStack journey. Nothing came of the product development project, but the OpenStack encounter, as it turned out, became a turning point in our professional, and in my case academic, careers. Brent left the university and cofounded a startup that was acquired by Docker, where he currently works. I, on the other hand, transferred from a master’s to a doctoral program and wrote this book.