It's nearly Christmas

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Enjoy the holidays if you want and enjoy my good will if you don't, or just don't feel identified with it.

Meanwhile we have advanced a lot. Yesterday we had a review of the things we are doing and it looked quite impresive.

- Rafa showed tier rating. Now you can use tiers (i.e. from 0 to 2 CPU --> x $/month, 2-4, another amount).... and also a new way to tariff: fixed+variable. Easier to say than to do, I should say. This is a great enhancement, as we know can make tariffs that covers a lot of new uses - with the example that now we can use the same schema that Red Hat uses in its subscription model.
- Amaury showed us the new interface to edit rates. You can now add rows in a table instead of having all the options already there. It will become quite important when we increase the number of options allowed.
- Tamara showed us how to put currencies into the rates, and the initial translation of CF4 into Spanish.

On the other hand, we have new offers to collaborate in the project from different companies. Too early to say, but I expect a significant increase of resources with the start of the new year... coming from different companies.

We also have decided to take a try of an open source project to follow our scrum process
https://tree.taiga.io/

We used Trello before and is great, but we were lacking some measurements that would be great to have, let's see how we adapt to the new platform.

Next steps are harder. We have done everything we can without modifying the models, and now we need to change configuration files, models and everything around.
Focus points: assignment of rates to users, resources and groups, and being able to charge at different levels, not only with the data coming from the C&U database. We are also starting to see how we can integrate with external billing systems.

We've had some contacts with opencell, an open source billing company and product, and we need to work hard on that.

Stay close, this is going to evolve quickly.

Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/07anycolouryoulike/6566897119/

Gathering requirements

So, in a closed development process,  the main (and only?) source of information would be the customer. Perhaps with a little bit of work on our side to see how that can be reused, and even with more than one customer been queried about their opinion.

In this case, the result has to be good and useful for the community, so I am opening an open wiki:

https://sites.google.com/site/chargethecloud/

You are invited to participate, comment, and enhance it... I will be reviewing comments and requests for enhancements to the content.

Let's make this a real solution, with a clear definition of what is needed and the priorities of it.

And.... we started

Last week we started.

July 1st, and I couldn't be with the interns... July 2nd, and I was there for a day.
Not enough, tomorrow I will go back again.

So I have a lot of things to think about:
- How do I empower the interns? We are a team, and they need to make decisions, more decisions than myself.
- I need to teach them while I am remote, and I need to learn from them. I can't forget they are the professional in this... I am just learning. The problem is the big list of things to learn

•  What is charging and billing
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• ManageIQ, what is it for
• Open Source...

So we had an interesting meeting where I talked with them about Open Source, charging, a little about the product.... and that is all. This week I expect to show them a demo, see how they are doing, start listening...

At least, we know:
- We are going to be using TravisCI for CI... Trello, Rspec... More things to learn in the real world

The starting point

What is our starting point?

Imagine you want to collaborate in an open source project. It should be easy, you think, just go there and program, but in fact, there are some soft rules to follow:

- First: you need resources. So we have started to work with the University of Seville to find people interested in Open Source, in cloud, and in working with us for an internship. Amazingly, we won't be alone, at least 3 companies will be collaborating.
- Second: a good value proposition,  I was going to recommend one of the books I am reading, but I have discovered that although the first book on business models was using licenses from creative commons for charts and slides, and thus was perfect to share, this one is not, so I don't recommend it any more...
- Third: we need some infrastructure, a small one, just enough to run RHEV so it can be managed. Working on that
- Fourth: whatever is needed to make the development, TDD (test framework), CI (Maven and/or Jenkins), a compiler,.
- Fifth: let's not reinvent the wheel... what open source components can be used which license is compatible with ManageIQ? The license should be compatible and no problem created beacuse of it. And architectural should be compatible too...
- Sixth: Documentation: where should we store documentation? Wiki style?

So I've been investigating and:
- Trello is a good tool to keep requirements and make them go through a Kanban process. Building a project there.
- Github is needed, upstream uses it already, so aligning is the sensible thing to do. We could think of some tool like Gerrit for code approval, but due to the small team we are, it wouldn't make sense to have an installation for gerrit onsite. We need to evaluate gerrithub as an interface to github, any way
- We are not mandating anything to code, as long as it works :D

Starting point

Back to the future

A few years ago I was having the best time of my life at work. I was doing standardization at OMA, working in R&D on charging and billing at Vodafone, travelling around the world, singing every morning.

For different reasons, I decided to move on. Let's say that I was comfortable with my work but the impact was somehow tiny, just pats in the back, and pay "could be better", so I was impelled to change work. A pity, as I believed - and still believe - that I was making a difference.

I've been missing that since I left, enjoying my new work, learning new things, and thinking how could I have done the work better, and created new opportunities for me and for the company.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to do it again. I am currently working with a couple of universities to see if we can develop, in the best of the R&D world, a new functionality into the ManageIQ Open Source product. 

Coming back to charging and billing, with universities, researching new ways of gather and present information in the cloud, developing something real and that can make a change.

 I will use this blog to show what we are doing and, in the best of the open source world, gather inputs and ideas to implement

This is so good :D

Sergio