Event Report: OpenStack Conference and Design Summit

Last week I was at the OpenStack Conference and Design summit: I thought I would share a quick report of what I found cool and interesting. Obviously this won’t be a complete picture and the report is my personal opinion. Before I do this though, I wanted to remind you that Xen and XCP are tightly integrated with OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage.
Not all presentations and videos have been posted yet: they will be available from OpenStack on their website and vimeo soon. Anyway, here is what I liked:

• A talk by James Williams (NASA) on “NASA and OpenStack” covering the past, present and future of NASA in OpenStack.
• A talk by Ryan Lane (Wikimedia) called “The site Architecture you can edit” which shows how cloud orchestration tools (based on OpenStack) can lead to a new model of collaborative and community led system administration.
• Ewan Mellor (Citrix) showed a demo of the OpenStack Virtual Appliance project as part of a talk given by Gordon Mangione
• Neil Sample (eBay) analyzed the case for the Hybrid Cloud in “OpenStack and eBay“ providing interesting data and figures showing how the Public Cloud reduces internal data center costs.
• I have always been very interested in governance of open source projects so I was extremely excited to listen to a fairly new community coming to grips with how it is and will be governed in future (see the Governance discussion video)
• Nati Shalom from Gigaspaces gave a very interesting presentation on “PaaS on Openstack“ discussing different PaaS architectures, their trade-offs, leading into a discussion what architecture OpenStack should follow
• The developer community led an excellent discussion on whether to use Launchpad or Git in future. Those issues always bring forward lots of passion in any community.
• A saw a demo and talk of Dell’s Crowbar project given by Rob Hirschfeld. Crowbar is a Cloud Installer come Operations Foundation tool (you will have to watch the video of the demo when it goes on-line).
• Bernard Golden (HyperStatus) talked about “Cloud Service Providers and OpenStack“ diving into the choices for service providers when it comes to offering Cloud solutions.
• Of course there were many more…

I also had the opportunity to meet Xen community members from all across the world for the first time, which was fantastic. Some cool ideas for future events and activities were born. I will let you know more, as the detail develops. Watch this space!