OpenStack 2012 Events

 

December 21, 2011

We are working on the 2012 event calendar, and are actively seeking feedback and sponsorship support for OpenStack to be well-represented at industry events.  There is a public etherpad where you can suggest an event to attend (or pass up!), and we would love to get  your input.  Right now, we are hoping to have OpenStack represented at the following industry events the first half of the year:

– SCALE10x, January 20-22, Los Angeles
– FOSDEM, February 4-5, Bruxelles, BE
– PYCON, March 7-15, Santa Clara, CA
– Ubuntu Developer Summit, May TBD
– EuroPython, June TBD, Florence, Italy
– OSCON, July 16-20, Portland, OR

We’ve had a lot of success with OpenStack having a community-sponsored presence at industry tradeshows. In this case, companies in the community may choose to pitch in and split costs for the OpenStack booth and marketing activities. In return, their brand is featured on promotional materials (signs, t-shirts, etc.), they are co-sponsors of the evening event (if applicable) and they have the opportunity to help staff the booth. Please contact Lauren Sell and Dee Rosales at [email protected] if you are interested in sponsoring OpenStack at upcoming events, the first of which is SCALE10x in January.

We are making headway on next OpenStack Design Summit & Conference, targeting the week of April 16 depending on venue availability.  We plan to finalize the venue and dates by the end of December, and will post a sponsorship prospectus and call for papers shortly thereafter. If you have a venue recommendation or your company might have the facilities to accommodate 800+ people, please contact [email protected] (note: we are moving very quickly on this with a goal to lock it down by Dec 31).

Also, if you are hosting a local meetup or OpenStack event, please contact [email protected] to have it listed and promoted on OpenStack.org/community/events.

Thanks for your continued support.

OpenStack Deployments Abound at Austin Meetup (12/9)

 

I (Rob Hirschfeld) was very impressed by the quality of discussion at the Deployment topic meeting for Austin OpenStack Meetup (#OSATX). Of the 45ish people attending, we had representations for at least 6 different OpenStack deployments (my employeer Dell, HP, ATT, Rackspace Internal, Rackspace Cloud Builders, Opscode Chef)!  Considering the scope of those deployments (several are aiming at 1000+ nodes), that’s a truly impressive accomplishment for such a young project.

Figure 1 Diablo Software Architecture. Source Dell/OpenStack (cc w/ attribution)

 

Even with the depth of the discussion (notes below), we did not go into details on how individual OpenStack components are connected together.  The image my team at Dell uses is included below.  I also recommend reviewing Rackspace’s published reference architecture.

Notes

Our deployment discussion was a round table so it is difficult to link statements back to individuals, but I was able to track companies (mostly).

  • HP
    • picked Ubuntu & KVM because they were the most vetted. They are also using Chef for deployment.
    • running Diablo 2, moving to Diablo Final & a flat network model. The network controller is a bottleneck. Their biggest scale issue is RabbitMQ.
    • is creating their own Nova Volume plugin for their block storage.
    • At this point, scale limits are due to simultaneous loading rather than total number of nodes.
    • The Nova node image cache can get corrupted without any notification or way to force a refresh – this defect is being addressed in Essex.
    • has setup availability zones are completely independent (500 node) systems. Expecting to converge them in the future.
  • Rackspace
    • is using the latest Ubuntu. Always stays current.
    • using Puppet to setup their cloud.
    • They are expecting to go live on Essex and are keeping their deployment on the Essex trunk. This is causing some extra work but they expect it to pay back by allowing them to get to production on Essex faster.
    • Deploying on XenServer
    • “Devs move fast, Ops not so much.”  Trying to not get behind.
  • Rackspace Cloud Builders (RCB) is running major releases being run through an automated test suite. The verified releases are being published to https://github.com/cloudbuilders (note: Crowbar is pulling our OpenStack bits from this repo).
  • Dell commented that our customers are using Crowbar primarily pilots – they are learning how to use OpenStack
    • Said they have >10 customer deployments pending
    • ATT is using OpenSource version of Crowbar
    • Need for Keystone and Dashboard were considered essential additions to Diablo
  • Hypervisors
    • KVM is considered the top one for now
    • Libvirt (which uses KVM) also supports LXE which people found to be interesting
    • XenServer via XAPI are also popular
    • No so much activity on ESX & HyperV
    • We talked about why some hypervisors are more popular – it’s about the node agent architecture of OpenStack.
  • Storage
    • NetApp via Nova Volume appears to be a popular block storage
  • Keystone / Dashboard
    • Customers want both together
    • Including keystone/dashboard was considered essential in Diablo. It was part of the reason why Diablo Final was delayed.
    • HP is not using dashboard
  • OpenStack API
    • Members of the Audience made comments that we need to deprecate the EC2 APIs (because it does not help OpenStack long term to maintain EC2 APIs over its own).  [1/5 Note: THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL POLICY, it is a reflection of what was discussed]
    • HP started on EC2 API but is moving to the OpenStack API

Austin Meetup Housekeeping

  • Next meeting is Tuesday 1/10 and sponsored by SUSE (note: Tuesday is just for this January).  Topic TBD.
  • We’ve got sponsors for the next SIX meetups! Thanks for Dell (my employeer), Rackspace, HP, SUSE, Canonical and PuppetLabs for sponsoring.
  • We discussed topics for the next meetings.  We’re going to throw it to a vote for guidance.

 

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OpenStack in Production – Event Highlights

 

December 20, 2011

As a matter of tradition at this point, we offer a photo report, covering OpenStack event series that Mirantis hosts. Our December 14th event focused on sharing experience around running OpenStack in production. I moderated a panel consisting of Ken Pepple – director of cloud development at Internap, Ray O’Brian – CTO of IT at NASA and Rodrigo Benzaquen – R&D director at MercadoLibre.

This time we went all out and even recorded the video of the event: http://vimeo.com/33982906

For those that are not in the mood to watch this 50 minute panel video, here is a quick photo report:


We served wine and beer with pizza, salad and deserts…


…While people ate, drank, and mingled…


…and then they drank some more…


We started the panel with myself saying smart stuff about OpenStack. After the intro we kicked off with questions to the panel.


The panelists talked…


…and talked…


…and then talked some more.


Meanwhile, the audience listened…


…and listened.


Everyone in our US team was sporting these OpenStack shirts.


At the end we gave out 5 signed copies of “Deploying OpenStack” books, written by one of our panelists – Ken Pepple. Roman (pictured above) did not get a copy.

More details about seminar “Open and safe in the cloud” in Ljubljana, Slovenia

 

On December 14th company CHS d.o.o. hosted seminar on Open and Secure Cloud Computing, which was held in Tehnološki park in Ljubljana. This unique occasion assembled 49 attendants from academic and government representatives to small businesses and additional 17 students. Participants were eager to get to know leading IT trends in building own cloud environments with emphasis on open-source IaaS solution OpenStack. Crowd of participants started to gather from 9.30. a.m. and we began shortly after.

We were very honored to host our distinguished guest and OpenStack Community Manager, Stefano Maffulli, who gave an opening lecture about OpenStack. The lecture was a great hit and excited participents gave mister Maffulli numerous questions on the topic. Next up was Robert Dukarić, a member of first Slovenian Center for Cloud Computing, who presented Open Source IaaS solutions and gave a practical demonstration of OpenStack framework. Andrej Pančur, member of Laboratory for Computer Communications at the Ljubljana Faculty of Computer and Information Science talked in depth about security in the cloud and about new paradigm called “Security as a Service”, following Primož Cigoj, representative of Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks (E5) at Institut “Jožef Štefan“, who gave an overview of security in OpenStack.

After the first part of the seminar we had a break and the opportunity for participants to continue conversation regarding OpenStack experience aroused by itself. The vivid and pleasant talk was done while enjoying coffee and delicious croissants and after the short break the seminar continued.

Dalibor Baškovč was next, talking about KC Class and eurocloud.si. Ivan Tomašič and Aleksandra Rashkovska, colleges from the Institute Jožef Štefan, from department of Communication Systems, gave an insight of storing data in OpenStack. Next was once again Andrej Pančur, who talked together with his college Andrej Krevl about affordable and available tools for building high-performance data storage systems, based on ZFS and Nexenta solutions. Last up was Aleš Justin of RedHat, who gave his experience with developing clouds with application server Jboss.

Event came to an end but there was one more surprise for the participants who seemed to have really great time talking with lecturers at the end of seminar. In the spirit of upcoming holidays we offered warm buffet for everyone and the unofficial part of the seminar continued by the delicious wine. Experiences were shared and we concluded the event with the promise of future meetings to come, where gained knowledge from the seminar will be continued.

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Brief report from Ljubljana, Seminar “Open and safe in the cloud”

 

On December 14th I completed my talk about OpenStack in Slovenia, in front of 66 people (49 registered, 17 more showed up last minute) from Slovenian small businesses, government agencies and academia. Incredible vibe, very competent crowd about cloud computing and IaaS in general.

The agenda of the day (full agenda, in Slovenian)

  • OpenStack – how and where — Stefano Maffulli, OpenStack Community Manager
  • Overview of Open Source “IaaS” solutions and practical demonstration OpenStack framework – Robert Dukarić, MD. Matjaz B. Juric, Laboratory for Information Systems Integration, Faculty of Computing and Informatics Institute (FRI), www.fri.uni-lj.si
  • Security in the cloud — Dr.. Mojca Ciglarič, Assistant Professor and Head of the Laboratory for Computer Communications at the Ljubljana Faculty of Computer and Information Science. Is a member of “Cloud Security” Alliance and  research director of the Slovenian section of the association. www.fri.uni-lj.si
  • Security in OpenStack — Primož Cigoj, dipl. ing. Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks (E5), Institut “Jozef Stefan” www.e5.ijs.si
  • KC Class and eurocloud.si / eurocloud.org – Dalibor Baškovč, www.KC-Class.eu
  • Storing data in OpenStack – mag. Ivan Tomašič, Electrotechnical Faculty in Zagreb and Rashkovska Alexander, BSc. ing. Inv., PSI International Postgraduate School, Department of Communication Systems (E6), Institut “Jozef Stefan” www-e6.ijs.si
  • How to use tools, build affordable high-performance data storage system – Dr. Matjaz Krevl Pančur and Andrew, BSc. ing. Inv., Laboratory for Computer Communications, Faculty of Computing and Informatics Institute (FRI), www.fri.uni-lj.si
  • Development of the clouds in RedHat – Ales Justin JBoss by RedHat

Most of the event was in Slovenian, so I cannot comment too much on it. I found extremely interesting the presentation from the Slovenian representative of Eurocloud.org, a pan-European organization whose mission is to create awareness of Cloud Computing within the industry and public administrations. It reminded me how much of the demand for IT in Europe is created by regulations, at the local and European level.

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OpenStack Sydney Australia Meetup Dec 13

 

Openstack Sydney Australia Meetup December 13Tuesday night December 13 saw the inaugural meetup of the Australian OpenStack Users Group at the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

There was obvious enthusiasm right from the start because even though we weren’t meant to start until 6.30pm there were already about 30 people there at 6.00pm. By 7.30pm we peaked at about 55 people and we filled the venue! What started in October as 5 of us going for a beer had become something awesome.

The purpose of the night was to be an in formal get together to stimulate the community and get interested “OzStackers” talking to each other, and it was clear that we got people talking. I got to meet almost everyone and we had many attendees with purely a personal interest, but we also had folks from our telcos and service providers, universities, manufacturers, retail and finance industries.

When it first became apparent we might do something more than just a few beers we thought we might get one OpenStack involved vendor to come along. What we ended up with was an overwhelming response. Each of our attending vendors were given the chance to give a talk about their involvement with the project.

Mark Randall, Rackspace Country Manager for AU/NZ, led the talks with a background and overview. Next up was Daniel Pendlebury, Citrix Lead Systems Engineer for Datacenter and Cloud giving an insight into their Project Olympus. APAC Solution Architect at F5, Adrian Noblett, talked about F5’s involvement, followed by Peter Jung, Cloud Solutions Architect at Dell with some in depth technical news on Crowbar. Nic Rouhotas from Cisco went next overviewing Cisco’s involvement and then Declan Conlon talked about Riverbed joining the community and their purchase of Zeus. Last up was Phil Rogers from Aptira with experiences of his development contributions towards several Swift client applications.

It was pretty clear that everyone had a great time and there was lots of enthusiasm to get together again as soon as possible, and many made it clear they want to see and share config and install demos and real world deployment experiences, so we’ll focus on that for follow-up meetups in the next coming months.

At the moment we have a single Australian Meetup group, the rationale being that whilst we’re still a small community down under we thought it was best to create a single nationwide group. The not necessarily bad trade off of this is that because we do recognise a significant portion of the Australian OpenStack community is not in Sydney we have an obligation to have the inaugural meetup continue in cities where the community resides! So far Melbourne is next on the list, but if there’s more of you interstate please don’t hesitate to join the meetup group at http://aosug.openstack.org.au. The listed location will change for upcoming meetup locations.

Reminder January 17 Meetup in Melbourne!

Next up is the inaugural meetup “part 2” in Melbourne on January 17. We’re hoping to get the same vendors along, there’ll be beer and food, I look forward to seeing you there.

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Community Weekly Review (Dec 9-16)

 

December 16, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 16, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers from Mon Dec 05 00:00:00 UTC 2011 to Sun Dec 11 00:00:00 UTC 2011

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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Results Of Survey After OpenStack Design Summit And Conference

 

December 14, 2011

In preparation for the next OpenStack Design Summit and Conference, I gave a look at the survey results of past edition. The events are a considerable investment for our team that is widely paid off by the good reviews we received from all participants. Looking into the answers it’s quite clear that the format and length were good and we should try to stick to it. We agreed that the attendance on Friday afternoon was not optimal and we’re thinking of ways to improve this aspect.  I’m very happy to see that participants to the Design Summit felt welcomed, included and encouraged to speak all the time (see table below).

Speaking of areas of improvement,  a key criteria for selecting the next venue will be high quality access to Internet or we’ll bring our own equipment (like Canonical does for the Ubuntu Design Summit). We’re also looking for more choice regarding hotel rates.

Both the unconference and lightning talks should be advertised better in order to improve attendance. Probably it’s because both were hard to find, being on a different floor. We should probably discuss how to improve them once we have fixed the venue.

On the Conference side we see a request to increase the presentation of case studies and have more sessions and choices (see table below). We’ll see how to balance this while keeping the format of the event.

Overall the responses were extremely positive and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved so far. For the next Summit and Conference, we’re targeting the week of April 16 in New Orleans. We will post more information as soon as it is confirmed: keep watching this space for announcements.

14. Please rate how you felt the Design Summit sessions were managed:
Not at all Rarely Sometimes All the time N/A Rating
Average		 Response
Count
Did you feel welcomed, included, and encouraged to speak for yourself? 0.0% (0) 2.3% (1) 22.7% (10) 72.7% (32) 2.3% (1) 3.72 44
Were the sessions well-moderated, focused and productive? 4.5% (2) 4.5% (2) 56.8% (25) 34.1% (15) 0.0% (0) 3.20 44
Did session leaders go out of their way to solicit your personal feedback? 4.5% (2) 9.1% (4) 65.9% (29) 18.2% (8) 2.3% (1) 3.00 44

 

15. How would you rate the sessions during the Conference (1-4):
poor (1) fair (2) good (3) great (4) N/A Rating
Average		 Response
Count
Morning keynotes 0.0% (0) 8.9% (5) 50.0% (28) 32.1% (18) 8.9% (5) 3.25 56
Technical sessions 1.8% (1) 7.1% (4) 44.6% (25) 41.1% (23) 5.4% (3) 3.32 56
Panel sessions 1.8% (1) 21.4% (12) 46.4% (26) 21.4% (12) 8.9% (5) 2.96 56
User stories 0.0% (0) 8.9% (5) 44.6% (25) 35.7% (20) 10.7% (6) 3.30 56

Read the full results of the survey.

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Community Weekly Review (Dec 2-9)

 

December 9, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 9, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers from Mon Nov 28 00:00:00 UTC 2011 to Sun Dec 04 00:00:00 UTC 2011 (week 48)

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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OpenStack Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes

 

December 6, 2011

We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.

This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg Althaus and Rob Hirschfeld), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya from Rackspace, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.

We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build.  Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!).  We need Keystone support.  Anyone up for that?

Highlights

There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.

  • After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
  • The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
  • There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
  • Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level.  The Quantual Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.  
  • HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
  • We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
  • Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).

Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!

Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.  Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts!

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