Designing cloud tools in Cape Town

Our cloud design team has just returned from a trip to Cape Town for our mid-cycle sprint. We have the luxury of being collocated in London and working closely throughout the whole year, but these sprints give us an invaluable opportunity to collaborate with other stakeholders and engineers working around the world. We get together to define priorities and review progress on our goals for this cycle.

We can showcase upcoming features and designs and get feedback from a variety of sources.

This time we also heard from cloud architects who are building data centres with the products we design. It gave us an insight into how our products are being received in the field – what is working well in reality, what we need to do more of.

The week mainly involves lots of talking, drawing, presenting and discussing topics and we work to a tight schedule.

But we also get a chance to socialise and get to know people we work with in different time zones, which I think is just as valuable as the working bit.

At the end of the week we plan in detail for the next few weeks based on the outcomes of our conversations.

It’s an exciting time to be at Canonical. A new version of our provisioning product MAAS has just been released and it’s a huge evolution and something we’re very proud of.

The new Juju GUI just went live today! It has a completely revamped interface to make it easier to build and manage your cloud applications and services.

Our Autopilot tool for building OpenStack clouds will have a really nice set of new options in our next release.

Below are some photos of our week in Cape Town. I’m looking forward to our next Ubuntu release in April and the evolution of the cloud tools that come with it.

If you’d like to join the fun, get in touch, we’re hiring!