In keeping with my occasional interview with companies that use open source Xen – I would like to introduce Thomas Morgan from Zerigo, inc.
Who is Thomas Morgan?
I’m the CEO and founder of Zerigo, Inc. My personal interests, in the realm of technology, include automation, virtualization, APIs and integration, and user experience. I’m able to work on all of those these days and it’s a lot of fun.
Tell me more about Zerigo?
Zerigo is focused on higher-performance, higher-reliability hosting.
Our flagship offering is our Xen VPS hosting. We also offer managed DNS hosting and server monitoring–both with feature sets catering to VPS users (whether on our VPS service or not). More broadly, we tend to offer services and features that are desirable to more technically- inclined users. To that end, we try to listen really well too.
How do you use open source Xen?
It powers our VPS service, so that’s pretty significant by itself. We also use it for a ton of our internal operations too, as we gain operational efficiency from the flexibility of a virtual environment.
Why is open source Xen important?
Open source software is such a market disruptor, I think people are crazy to ignore it–that includes virtualization software. I find the culture around open source projects to be substantially different than traditional commercial software. Open source software projects tend to be designed to be used with other products and are more easily used and extended in ways not originally envisioned. For Zerigo this is crucial as we continue to bring new features and new takes on old features to the marketplace. It’d be much harder to lead in that kind of way if our hands were tied by the typical closed source software stack.
How do you contribute to the community?
We encourage everyone at Zerigo to participate in giving back to the various communities that enable our success–many of which are communities surrounding the variety of open source projects we use. I personally tend toward helping answer people’s questions about using Xen or whatever other project they’re asking about. Most frequently this is in an IRC channel or blog posting, but sometimes it’s in mailing lists or forums too. I also try to help in identifying bugs and fixing them. We’re always up for providing resources to help worthy open source projects too.
Do you have any offer for the Xen community?
How about 10% off our VPS services? Promo code is xenorg10.
http://www.zerigo.com/
