scale14x-interview-edits

Dear SCALE 14X speaker --

Please forgive the impersonal nature of the salutation. The SCALE 14X Publicity Committee staff is offering you an opportunity to have this Q-and-A interview appear on the SCALE 14X web page.

You'll notice below, too, that we grant you the option to ask and answer your own question. The purpose for this is to give you an opportunity to explain your talk a little more in depth, or to bring up any question about your talk you may want to elaborate upon.

Time, of course, is of the essence and we would greatly appreciate if you could get this back to us as quickly as possible. Conversely, this interview is completely optional, and if you do not wish to take advantage of this, please let us know.

Please fill in the answers after the A: and send it back at your earliest convenience.

Thank you!



Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?


A: Patrick O’Connor is a Staff Systems Engineer working on deploying scalable solutions for The Walt Disney Company. Previously Patrick worked at DreamWorks Animation where he supported the render farm, core systems team and greenfield/new business initiatives. Current adventures include automated deployments and SPOF (single point of failure) removal.

Q: You're giving a keynote on "Nomad - An introduction to Cluster Schedulers " Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?


A: Nomad is a cluster scheduler created by the same team that brought us Vagrant, Packer, Consul etc. The talk will cover introducing Nomad and how to use it to deploy containerized services to a cluster of machines. During the presentation, I will touch on general topics of cluster schedulers. A live demonstration will wrap up the discussion.


Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?


A: This will be my third time attending SCALE. SCALE has a local feel, is volunteer driven. and is always such a positive experience. We are very fortunate to have SCALE is Southern California and I always look forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new people each year.


Q: What are your favorite open source projects?

A: There are so many amazing people contributing lots of time and effort into open source, its amazing! I've really enjoyed tracking the container hype thats been happening lately... Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos/Marathon are all pretty fascinating. Using service discovery such as Consul to drive load balancer configuration is neat. Projects such as Traefik are taking that a step further and making service discovery aware load balancers, its a cool project that I've been using for a while.


Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?


A. I believe 2016 is going to be a great year for technology and I'm super excited for the direction that I see many projects taking. I hope to contribute back to the open source community and help support positive experiences for others.


Thank you for taking part in this brief SCALE 14X interview.

Take care,
Michelle Klein-Hass
SCALE PR Team