The JBGeorge Tech Blog

Wanted to provide some visibility to the great stuff happening at the OpenStack Design Summit at the Weston Center in San Antonio.

• Intention is to draft requirements and specs for the January release of OpenStack
• ~300 attendees total – 90 companies and 12 countries represented
• Companies in attenance include Dell, Citrix, RightScale, Cloudkick, Canonical, NASA, and many others
• Technical and business tracks running touching on topics like evolution of the datacenter, Bexar release plans, and many others
• Lots of Twitter action via #openstack
• Discussion of cloud deployments from the hardware perspective, the software perspective, the services perspective
• Lots of hallway conversations between companies – networking-a-rama!
• Great party at Rackspace HQ last night
• Pictures Day 1 at from the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinhole/tags/openstack/ and http://www.openstack.org/blog/2010/11/openstack-design-summit-day-1-pictures/

Will try to provide an update tonight after today’s festivities as well.

Some personal thoughts that have been ruminating lately, and are becoming confirmed in my mind this week.

• No matter what side of the fence you’re on, cloud will need to eventually settle at a model that allows users to evaluate needs, business strategy, etc, then decide HOW MUCH to put in the hosted / public cloud, HOW MUCH to put in the private cloud (whether on premise or of premise), and then implement a BURSTING capability.
• Services are going to be a key part of broader migration to the cloud, especially at the enterprise level
• We, as a group, are doing better on this, but we’re not spending enough time understanding and designing the networks that will drive our clouds.  More thought, discussion, and debate need to be done on this topic asap.

For the latest happenings at the Design Summit, search Twitter for #openstack (direct link = http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23openstack).  You can also learn more about OpenStack at www.openstack.org.

Also, if you’re at the event, and interested in seeing the Dell PowerEdge C servers that are running at the event, and will power the InstallFest later this week, find me, tweet me, etc, and I’ll get you into the server room.

Until next time,

JBGeorge
www.jbgeorge.net / @jbgeorge