Welcome to the New Project Atomic Community Lead

The Open Source and Standards team in Red Hat is very pleased to announce the addition of its latest team member: Josh Berkus, the new Community Lead for Project Atomic.

It is probably not hyperbole to say that Josh's life is all about containers right now... almost literally. Not only is Josh taking on the new role at Red Hat for Project Atomic, which is all about managing and optimizing containers, he and his wife are in the process of transporting their residence from the Bay Area to Oregon this month--appropriately enough, using shipping containers.

Josh has been a fixture in the open source community for quite some time. His work as the marketing manager for OpenOffice.org in 2001 was a pretty notable foray into the community, especially since--at the time-- this was the first time anyone had tried to apply open source methodologies to the production of marketing materials.

Many people familiar with Josh are also certainly aware of his work on the PostgreSQL database core team. But given that association, they may also be wondering why Josh would be making a switch over to an open source project that is primarily concerned with improved container management.

"Being a database geek also means you're an ops geek," Josh recently shared with me. And, as far as ops go, he added Linux containers are the most exciting thing since VMware. Or, at least, the impact of virtual machines had to the world of operations.

"Containers," Josh explained, "and their stack should deliver on the overall promise of VMs, completely separating ops management from apps management."

Because of this potential, Josh has been keenly interested in containers for quite some time, especially as something that can be used in production. While at the second DockerCon, Josh attended a session where the speaker asked how many people in the room were using Docker.

"About 80% of the hands went up," he related. "But when the speaker asked how many people were actually using it in production, about 70% of those hands went down."

As tools like Atomic and Nulecule continue to mature, Josh plans to be a part of directing the future of container management. Using Atomic to create a high-availability database, or working with the Docker community to build a consistent storage solution. Ideally, Josh said, container stacks should be as common as VM stacks.

Josh's work for the last 14 years has been entirely about community, and the OSAS team is happy to have him and his experience on board!