Back in 2011, or 200 years ago in Internet time, Red Hat announced an important acquisition when it acquired Gluster, an open source storage software company. John Mark Walker – Gluster Community Lead at Red Hat, stopped by as our last guest for our #OpenStack Summit 2013 coverage by #theCube. Co-Hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick gave the floor to Walker to discuss what Gluster and Red Hat saw happening in the community.

Gluster was a perfect acquisition target for Red Hat’s cloud computing strategy two years ago because Gluster is specifically optimized for emerging large-scale content-centric workloads, rather than for use as a general purpose storage technology. As a storage solution, an important feature of Gluster is that it is a pure software solution, able to run on commodity storage hardware.

The Red Hat Gluster community is a very active community. And as you’d expect with an open source community, there is no shortage of opinions. In working with a very active an opinionated community, the guys asked Walker for some best practices of good community work:

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1. Encourage and help the community commit code (recently had its first major feature that came from a non-core engineer)
2. Business models can be created, allow those to foster
3. Halo effect is real, be mindful

He believes we’ve seen the end of the proprietary solutions in the enterprise as we know it. “Open source is what is driving things forward,” says Walker.  So what’s the next big challenge in that transition? Cloud interoperability between clouds, not operators. Users getting their data, their way.