Ceph Launches New Community Advisory Board

There are a few important milestones in the life of any open source project: the first outside contribution. The first general release. And, for really successful projects, the creation of a solid governance structure to help guide the project in a way that benefits many.

For Ceph, that milestone is today.

In conjunction with the OpenStack Summit currently taking place in Tokyo, the Ceph community is announcing the formation of an advisory board to assist their community in driving the direction of Ceph. Specifically, the new advisory board will launch with the goal of expanding and enhancing community participation and collaboration for the Ceph project, working closely with the community’s technical and user committees.

The charter advisory board includes Ceph community members from global IT organizations that are committed to the Ceph project, including individuals from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.

Getting together a collection of people from such various companies may seem passé in these modern open source times. After all, consortiums, foundations, and other forms of multi-organization boards are all a part of the open source landscape. But while they may seem to be a common occurrence, industry-neutral governance organizations are more special than you might think.

It's not easy for companies to put down their guard and work with people who can be regarded as competitors. For Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE, who have been around the block more than a few times, it's much easier, but it still should not be taken for granted. For major companies like the ones listed above to openly and excitingly work with one another speaks a lot to the power of collaboration in the free and open source software ecosystem.

The new Ceph Community advisory board will be a forum for overall Ceph Community participant cooperation and the orchestration of feedback collection and resource allocation. The board will meet quarterly and conduct monthly working group meetings, managing the broad issues and opportunities important to the success of the Ceph software-defined storage project.