Note: the survey is only available through August 2nd, so make sure you weigh in soon!
Way back in the 90's I was suffering from a rare, unnamed condition that forced me to test drive every operating system that I could get my hands on1. As my friends can confirm, I think I was running at least one different OS installation a week for months. Some of these installs were more challenging than others, but the most daunting installation by far was Linux.
Back then, installing Linux was like a rite of passage. The newsgroups and IRC channels were there, and I had friends who'd gotten it to work, but I think it still took me the better part of three days to go from bare metal to a login prompt. Not a slick graphical login page with a cool icon representing my user account. A login prompt.
I was probably a little spoiled by OS/2 (sweet graphical installer!) and my friend's coveted BeBox running BeOS, but that first Linux install wasn't the kind of unboxing experience I was hoping for. I was pretty stubborn about that sort of thing though, so naturally I decided to try it again. This time I wanted to use a distribution that was starting to gain a lot of popularity with my computer nerd friends. That was when I picked up my first copy of Red Hat Linux, version 3.02.
Transforming The Unboxing Experience
Long before there was a name for it, Red Hat understood the "unboxing experience". By the standards of Fedora 19's Anaconda installation system, that 3.0 install was pretty rough around the edges. However, if you know what came before RPMs and the Red Hat installation scripts, you know how much easier Red Hat made it to get up and running with Linux.
So why am I talking about Red Hat Linux 3.0 when we're getting ready to release the latest version of OpenShift Origin? Because just as Red Hat transformed the Linux unboxing experience, we're also getting ready to transform the OpenShift Origin unboxing experience. At Red Hat Summit 2013, one of the visitors to our developers' lounge set up an account and created his first OpenShift Online app from his smart phone. We want to give cartridge developers and the "cloud curious" the same kind of experience with the entire platform.
We Need Your Help!
And this is where you come in, OpenShift aficionado! At Summit we got a ton of great user feedback, but we know that the OpenShift community is bigger than that and growing by the day. We want to hear from you about what you want to do with OpenShift Origin. Are you:
- Someone who just really likes trying out new tech?
- Someone who wants to build a new cartridge for OpenShift?
- Someone who wants to get OpenShift running on RHEL?
Take The Survey
If you are interested in helping to define the OpenShift Origin unboxing experience, please take this survey and join the discussion on the developer mailing list. We may not be ready to deploy OpenShift Origin from a smart phone by Summit 2014, but I believe we will have a system that makes it easier than ever to run your own open source Platform-as-a-Service.
