OpenStack Summit May 2014 Atlanta

As a European Sovereign Public Cloud Provider, it is required for Cloudwatt to develop its in-house mastery & expertise of the underlying FLOSS components it is deploying, OpenStack & Ceph being the key ones.

In order to achieve that, Cloudwatt has staffed dedicated contribution teams. The catch is that, in a world where existing senior cotributors living in the Paris area are not found easily, and even more a year and a half ago than today, Cloudwatt had no choice but to grow them in-house, with the help of its partner eNovance.


Growing from zero employees to 100 in the past 18 month Cloudwatt shaped his software engineering team for Free Software contribution from day one. The Upstream University course is part of the training program proposed to every engineer. It is only one of the many challenges to build a team able to reconcile the agenda of the company with the roadmap of the OpenStack project.

We’ll describe why we went this way, where we are today, challenges we faced, and the various benefits we got from this journey as a company.

If you’re a developer, you’ll get ammunition to convince your boss to let you contribute. If you’re in a IT leadership role, you’ll get a few reason on why you should let your people do it, and how you could do that.