On May 31st, more than 200 people from around the world  gathered to learn about how to automate OpenStack deployments with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. This day-long, world-wide event brought  together developers, operators, users, ecosystem vendors and the open source cloud curious.  The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in four physical locations, where more than 70 enthusiasts gathered for the event:

• Austin Tech Ranch
• Harvard University, Cambridge
• Dell Solution Center in New York
• Silicon Valley Cloud Center, Sunnyvale, CA

In addition, nearly 125 participants joined online on the live webcast and various online channels.

We have validated our deployment against the Essex release and our objective with this Essex Deploy Day event was to test deployments of Open Stack in a variety of environments.  Accordingly, we reached out to the OpenStack and Crowbar communities for training, testing, deployment, and collaborative development of the OpenStack Essex release.  The response was amazing!

The Deploy day offered two parallel tracks for OpenStack newcomers and experts.

The Introductory Track: In this  track, we focused on basics of OpenStack, Crowbar, and DevOps and discussed their value and benefits. In five three-hour sessions that spanned  three time zones covering the East/West coast and the Asia pacific regions, we demonstrated  LIVE (the recorded sessions are available here: http://bit.ly/crowbarOSED) ) how to automatically deploy OpenStack .

Here are the slides used for this track:

http://www.slideshare.net/kamesh001/essex-deployday

Additionally, this track featured presentations and demos from ecosystem partners including enStratus, InkTank, Suse, MorphLabs, and OpsCode who discussed how they are leveraging Essex and bringing unique value-add to the OpenStack community and customers.

The Experts Track: The expert track was intended for people that already had some familiarity with Crowbar, Chef, and DevOps, and wanted to take a deep dive into new features of OpenStack Essex and Crowbar and how Crowbar works under the hood. The expert track had a separate screencast, and featured live and online collaboration with Crowbar developers and engineers.

The expert track explored  several advanced topics such as upgrading OpenStack  and developing barclamps etc.

Success By the Numbers

The overwhelming response and the large number of attendees makes this the most successful deploy day by far.  The breadth of companies and individuals that participated makes this a truly collaborative and international event  and is an  impressive indication of the excitement that is building around OpenStack. Here is look at broad participation metrics:

• 200 people participated from 9 different countries
• 70 people attended in-person in the four locations: NY, Boston, Austin, Sunnyvale
• 250 downloads of the software from zehicle.crowbar.com and the build server
• 20+ companies represented world-wide
• Great participation from ecosystem vendors including enStratus, MorphLabs, Suse, InkTank, OpsCode

We wish to thank everyone who participated in making this event a huge success!