1. How Fedora Does Early Adoption & Uses Free Software
Real world examples from Fedora
How Fedora does early adoption and uses free software
Version: 1.0
Contact:
Real world examples and processes from Fedora Infrastructure
Mike McGrath
Fedora Infrastructure
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2. Topics Covered Picking new software When to early adopt Business Case
Best Chance for Success
Implementation
Got'chas
Risk
Rollout

3. Our Environment Pretty common requirements
Primary purpose is building and distribution
Started small and grew with virtualization
Fedora (the OS) bits end up in RHEL.
Mostly web services. We also have mail, scm hosting, etc.
Fedora's secret sauce is in building and distributing RPMs.
Faced a pretty important challenge early on with growth. Virtualization helped significantly.
To further re-iterate Fedora RHEL relationship, Fedora becomes RHEL.

4. Free Software Licenses Free software policy Partnership
Must be in Fedora
Licenses only on
Free Software Policy -
Working with upstreams is very important. That relationship is both useful for individuals and helpful to the larger Free Software universe.
All software our Infrastructure runs must be packaged and in Fedora with a few exceptions.

5. Early Adoption What type of engineer / architect are you?
What type of organization do you work for?
Look carefully at this graph and decide what type of engineer, admin, developer you are.
Now, think carefully and decide what type of organization you work for.
If they're the same, great. You are in for a much easier time then the rest of us. If they don't match up, think carefully about what that means, it will have impact on how you proceed to proposing new software.

6. Picking New Software
In Fedora our best example was xen.

7. Early Adoption: When? New Business Need Cost reduction
Fix / Update deprecated systems
Competitive advantages
Development environments
Use the graph
New needs from the business
Lowering Costs
Fix or update deprecated systems or even just improperly used systems.
Competitive advantages.
Non-production (future production situations)
Be extra careful about being on the innovative or early adoption side of things for mission critical applications. Not that they should be avoided, just that they require extra care.
Xen when: Ran out of space in the colo

8. Early Adoption: The Business Case
Permission and prototype
Lobby Lobby Lobby
Prove it's not “because we can”
Status quo is hard to change
Start small in a reasonably public way to prove the application works. Work with those in the business you can trust to do good work. Try to get an advocate from every team early on in the process.
Marketing is an important part of getting acceptance of a new technology.
Make the case that this isn't some new fancy technology for the sake of being fancy.
The status quo is hard to change. This is true of changing a process in place as well as putting a new one in place. Make sure if it's new, that it is the way you want it to be because changing it later will be difficult.
Fedora xen:needs to grow, and we literally can't do it.

9. The Backout Always an option Have a plan Protect data Just drop it
Everyone hates it
Failure is always an option. Being the primary advocate and driver always examine if something is about to fail and have a failure plan.
In Fedora we went through this with Zabbix and Nagios.
Have a plan! Write it down!
If there is a data layer here that is needed, protect the data.
See if the work can just be dropped.
Sometimes everyone, including you, will hate the solution. In this scenario you'll need to decide if it can be fixed or should be put down.
Fedora Xen: Go back to unvirtualized and don't grow

10. Writing a Proper Proposal
Learn How
Pros and cons
Be the expert
Details, graphics, data, $$
A proposal they can't refuse
“The MIT guide to Science and Engineering Communication” James G Paradis and Murel L. Zimmerman
Know all the pros and all the cons and list them.
Be the expert, no surprise is a good surprise.
Details, graphs, data all make the case for your readers.
Fedora xen: Skipped this, but it's worked well in the past. I was the decision maker on that.

11. Best chance for success.
Contact upstream
Look for non-code content
Roadmap
Cross Training
Find other adopters
Contact upstream the first time you run into issues. Examine how that issue is viewed, how it is resolved and how you felt about the interaction.
See if “the extras” are done. Proper documentation, screen shots, user shout-outs, migration plans, etc.
Does it have a roadmap? With dates and version numbers?
Cross training is extremely important for the project and your own sanity.
Fedora Xen: Found others doing it, worked with the kernel team and filed bugs.

12. Got'chas and Known Risks
Searching on Google
Broken upgrade paths
Vanishing upstreams
Nothing is worse then googling for a problem you've had, only to find the only link is a mail list thread you started that no one responded to.
Watch for version updates that don't cleanly upgrade.
Upstream could up and vanish.
Fedora Xen: We ran into the google problem a lot and while xen didn't up and vanish, the support in our OS did. Lucky for us, KVM came around and is easy to convert to.

13. Risk Identification Risk to the business Risk to your job Mitigation
Identification: Focus on risk to the business. What are those risks? Risks to end users, customers, etc.
Is there a real risk to your job? Are you making yourself obsolete? Think about all aspects of this.
Mitigation is how you manage risk. Think if you are risk averse. Generally risk is ok, if it's managed properly. Be a risk manager, not a risk avoider.

14. Rollout RPMs CSI SOP Configuration Management Documentation
Cross Training
Tuning, performance
Use RPMs for everything. Have a buildsystem, version everything.
CSI Standards – Developed by Fedora Infrastructure as a way of doigng things. SOPs are part of this.
Configuration management- Fedora uses puppet. It's been nothing short of amazing.
Cross training
Tuning, performance
Fedora got a lot of metrics for virtualization conversion

15. Summary Fedora is free and open to duplicate
Know when and how to do early adoption
Go in knowing the got'cha's and and risks
Fedora Infrastructure uses only free software and has an open documention system, CSI
Remember times when early adoption works and how to do it.
Go in to selecting new free software knowing common pitfalls.

16. Questions / Comments? Hit me, I can take it
No really, if you hate Fedora Infrastructure tell me
It hates you.
Actually that's not true.
Fedora Infrastructure just needs a hug.