Today we officially launch the next generation of FastStart, the quick deployment solution for Eucalyptus. We think it’s a pretty dramatic improvement to our previous version, and it’s certainly the easiest way to stand up your own AWS-compatible private cloud.
And while I have you, I’d like to shout out to the guy who made most of this happen: a guy named Bill Teachenor. When you use FastStart today and discover that it’s totally awesome, come by #eucalyptus and say thanks to bteachenor for all his hard work on the Silvereye project, the codebase upon which the new FastStart is based. There were plenty of other folks who helped — but Bill was the one who took the ball.
Open source is powerful because you don’t need anyone’s permission to make it better. You just need time, belief, determination, and a bit of skill in the right places. Bill looked at FastStart with the eyes of an experienced sysadmin, picked out a whole bunch of places where we could do stuff better, and led the way. When you write good code that does useful stuff, people will follow. Rough consensus and working code: it’s what drives the open source world.
So here’s to Bill, and all the folks who say “I can make this better” and then commit code at 2am to prove it.
Greg DeKoenigsberg Speaks 