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avatar for Jason Grimm

Jason Grimm

Rackspace
Open Cloud Architect
Atlanta, GA
I'm a 40 year old husband and father of 7.
I'm a native of downtown Atlanta, GA but have made the move from townie to farmer this year and now live about an hour north of the city on a sustainable farm.
I'm an avid reader, wannabe film critic, and indie music enthusiast; collector and restorer of antique guns; occasional gamer (a.k.a. bonding time with the kids); and always up for something new and interesting.
I've had a longish and interesting career - Naval Intelligence (cryptography) in the Gulf War, freelancing with DoD and government agencies (NASA, Pentagon, etc.), 5 years as a founding partner in a wireless MAN startup, 10 years at Dell, Mirantis and now at Rackspace.
The vast majority of this experience is around *NIX / Linux infrastructure although I can hold my owin in the Windows and VMware realms as well as basic app / dev (python, perl, ruby, etc.). I'm very excited to be an Open Cloud Architect at a great company like Rackspace where I function in a solutioning role situated between sales, marketing, product development, engineering, and support. I have a genuine love for helping people which is conveniently the cornerstone of Rackspace culture. This opportunity allows me to stretch both my technical and service oriented talent as far as I can on a daily basis.
I became intrigued first with eucalyptus and have graduated to near fanatacism with openstack. The technical capacilities, the community, the development pace, and the possibilities are amazing.
However, for me, what is even more incredible is the evolutionary impact it is making on our lives as a whole. It will become what Edison (Tesla) was to the industrial revolution, what Ford and Deming where to the automotive industry, what TCP/IP is to global connectivity and what bitcoin is to currency. I quote one of my close friends and mentors at Rackspace, Charlie Rentschler, who sums it up well when he says "It's the most disruptive technology to hit the industry since the mainframe.".
Sometimes people say "remember when Amazon used to just sell books". Now that this technology is free and open, granting anybody who wants it access to fast, easy and powerful tools for innovation the effects are going to continue to be both staggering and exponential, essentially transforming, holistically, the human experience and capabilities as we understand them today.