The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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It’s been a couple of weeks since the OpenStack summit took place in San Francisco.  It was a great one, and I’m finally getting some time to put down a few thoughts about this year’s show. 

The company I work for, Dell, chose to sponsor again, which was great.  That would make five OpenStack conferences in a row, including the first one in Austin before OpenStack was announced.

It was great to see all the familiar faces, some with new companies.  And there was a number of new faces, which is a great indicator of the progress the OpenStack movement is making.  In fact, in the first keynote delivered by Jonathan Bryce, he asked for a show of hands of those who had never been to an OpenStack Summit before – I ballparked it at about 25% of the room as new! 

Some interesting takeaways from the conference:

• The user community showed up 
    
  The topic of users has been coming up at our local Austin OpenStack meetup often, and I was glad to see a number of inquisitive users come to the show to learn about using OpenStack in operation.  Users are an important part of our communit’y’s evolution, and it was good to see that group out in force to have their voices heard.
    
• HPC as a cloud use case
    
  In a number of user sessions, high performance computing came up as a use case on OpenStack.  This has not been a space where I would have expected HPC to come up as a technology, but in thinking about it, it makes sense.  Similar to other spaces, the HPC communities are looking for more flexible, extensible platforms to build their systems on.
    
• More user adoption of Crowbar
    
  Dell has been at the forefront of bare metal provisioning of multi-node OpenStack clouds since the advent of OpenStack, and every conference featured Dell doing bare metal deployments live.   It was great to hear about a number of methods of deployment that users were using, but also enlightening to know about all the users using Crowbar that we weren”t even aware of.  (It’s an open source community so that happens. 🙂 )   We’re commited to continuing to drive Crowbar as a deployment / mgmt / configuration framework, and it’s good to see the community adopting it as a platform.
    
• Continuing interest in the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution.
    
  Lots of good work is being done all over the community – software, services, and public cloud featuring OpenStack.  But I was happy that Dell was still clearly focused on being a central provider of OpenStack as an on-premise, cloud solution, whether private cloud for IT, or a public cloud option for service providers to offer.   Along with the announcement of the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem, which features a number of Dell partners like Canonical, enStratus, and Mirantis, there were a number of great discussions on how customers could get going on OpenStack asap.
    

And there’s a ton more that I’m not covering – the foundation, user group formation, hypervisor talk, etc, etc, etc – I’ll let you do that.

Drop me a comment about some of the things that you took away from the summit.  There was a lot to be excited about.

Already looking forward to the next summit in the fall.

Until next time,

JBGeorge
@jbgeorge

More info:

• Info on the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution – www.Dell.com/OpenStack
• Info on the Dell Crowbar open source software framework – www.Dell.com/Crowbar
• Info on the OpenStack movement – www.OpenStack.org
• Email us if you have questions – OpenStack@Dell.com