The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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You know the saying:  “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

This week has been a crazy one, so I didn’t get to chime in on Tuesday with my thoughts on the one year anniversary of OpenStack.

So today, I took some time to think back over the last year, and I realized how far we’ve come as a technology and as a community.  

In addition to the solid OpenStack technology that is being guided by market requirements and pushing the envelope, I believe that the unique set of OpenStack developers, partners, and users has helped get it to where it is. 

Pardon me, while I stroll through memory lane…
  

Design Summits

• Austin Design Summit (July 13 – 14, 2010) – I’m not sure if we could have called this one a design summit as it was more of a meeting of minds, lots of ideas, and a ton of excitement about this new platform called OpenStack.  Got to hear from both Rackspace and NASA on the code bases, and how this could change the market.  I specifically recall our group of cloud solution attendees from Dell (the company I work for) talking about how much potential this technology had.  (And besides, this meeting was in our home town!)
    
  OpenStack was announced publicly for the first time a few days later on the 19th.  Dell was among a handful of companies who believed in the initiative back then – it was early – and we had to have vision.
    
• San Antonio Design Summit (Nov 9 – 12, 2010) – This was held at the Weston Centre in San Antonio, and I remember thinking “where did all these people come from???”   We had a lot of international presence there from the UK, France, Japan, and other parts of the world.  It was exciting to think that in just four months, we’d already started going global. I also recall we started talking to the business of OpenStack – licenses, brands, etc, which was a good sign of progress.
    
  Dell did our part as well – Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, a couple of Dell OpenStack rockstars, each spoke on OpenStack deployment, reference architectures, and operational models. We also contributed gear for the InstallFest later that week, made up of PowerEdge C6100s and C2100s  (I also remember giving quite a few tours of the “server room” to see what Austin release was running on.)  
      
• Santa Clara Design Summit (Apr 26 – 29, 2011)– Our first design summit on the west coast!  This one is still pretty fresh in my mind, but what blew me away was again, the growth!  The community grew and became more sophisticated.  Those that were learning at the first two design summits were blossoming experts at this design summit, having lived through the evolution of OpenStack.  Though I’m sure it was logistically nuts for the organizers as they greatly exceeded capacity, it was a great indicator that we were on to something special.
    
  The Dell team gave it our all here as well – Rob gave a session on what Dell was doing with OpenStack and Crowbar, and my favorite – daily live demos of Crowbar deploying multi-node OpenStack clouds on bare metal servers! (I’d time our guys – the best time was 29 min minutes for a 6 node OpenStack cloud running on Dell PowerEdge C 6100’s – not too shabby! 
    
  (Anyone remember the Crowbar bunny shirts?)
   

Year One Partners

I just checked the OpenStack.org site, and at THIS MOMENT, there are 91 partners in the community.  (Depending on when you read this, there could / will be more.)

You’ll find a number of key industry players there – Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Canonical, Brocade, Arista, Opscode, and more.  And this group has done a lot to further the intiative over the last year. 

Here are a list of a few examples. 

• Rackspace announcing the creation of Rackspace Cloud Builders, who’s purpose in life is to service customers on OpenStack deployment, training, support, and consulting.
• Citrix announcing Project Olympus and a distribution of OpenStack to come soon
• Dell announces the Crowbar deployment software for OpenStack, and our intention to release an OpenStack solution to market
• Canonical announces their intention to make OpenStack the default cloud platform in the Ubuntu operating system
• Equinix’s sponsoring of a live OpenStack demo enviornment w support from Dell, Rackspace, and Citrix
• Real live production usage by companies like Internap

What a year. 

I’d venture to say those of us who were there on Day 1 believed this was going to be big, but we’re excited that it has been adopted by the cloud community as much as it has.

And to all the partners, develeopers, and users who have made the first year amazing – I salute you.

We’re on to something big.   🙂
      

If you want to learn more about what Dell has done with OpenStack over the last year, and see if what we’re building is a fit for you, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.
   

More info on OpenStack and the one year anniversary:

• The GREAT infographic from Rackspace on the past year!  http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/07/19/happy-1st-birthday-openstack/
• Rackspace’s Lew Moorman: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/07/19/what-a-year%C2%A0-openstack-at-one/
• Jim Curry’s blog on OpenStack.com http://www.openstack.org/blog/author/jimcurry/
• Derrick Harris’s great article on what’s next http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-turns-1-whats-next/
• The OpenStack.org Design Summit page – lots of historical info and pics http://www.openstack.org/blog/tag/design-summit/
• Dell’s Rob Hirschfeld’s (@zehicle) tech blog – a ton on OpenStack – http://www.RobHirschfeld.com
• The Dell OpenStack site featuring the popular technical whitepaper “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds” www.Dell.com/OpenStack

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge