Atlanta Summit, Day 1: Introducing Superusers, the Marketplace

The age of the Superuser began with the opening day of the Atlanta Design Summit. Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation delivered his keynote address to a standing-room-only conference room of developers, operators, users and more.

It was only 18 months ago in San Diego, where 1,200 members of the OpenStack community joined for the Design Summit. This week, 4,500 people will join for the Atlanta Summit.

Jonathan asked the standing room only crowd, “How many of us made their first contribution to Icehouse?” Dozens stood up to a round of applause. Jonathan, as well as the other speakers this morning, all recognized that there are many new faces, and more opinions. And that’s a big reason why OpenStack is so successful.

These new voices represent perspectives, energy, and potential to innovate that makes OpenStack unique and able to keep infrastructures agile.

“Every company now competes with a startup” Jonathan told the crowd. “More and more companies are using OpenStack to reduce their expenses, increase experimentation and increase innovation.”

But it isn’t just what people are doing with OpenStack. What’s more important is that they are changing their businesses. “Superusers are using their capabilities to bring about change, and more competitive in the software defined economy.”

Wells Fargo and Disney were featured Superusers in this morning’s keynote session. When asked why Wells Fargo uses OpenStack, Glenn Ferguson, head of private cloud enablement, focused on being part of a strong community.

“It is in my best interest to let the community know what we’re doing and what we’re interested in and what our use cases are. We’re running a serious business on this technology, and this is what we have to do to remain competitive and flexible in this environment.”

Chris Launey, Direct Cloud Services and Architect at Walt Disney Company, spoke passionately about why he uses OpenStack. “Like many others in this audience, I’m trying to lead a revolution to help empower people when they come to work in technology.”

“If you give somebody enough fast, they can get their make their own cheap. They can get their product to market quickly. You can make your own good by shrinking your own dev cycles.”

The Marketplace & Superuser Publication 

Also this morning, Jonathan introduced two new initiatives from the Foundation, aimed at extending the support for users and operators well past the bounds of the twice-yearly summit.

First, the Foundation announced the launch of a new OpenStack publication called “Superuser”, built by operators and users for operators and users.

The content will highlight organizational issues that users face when bringing OpenStack into their organizations. Featuring a mix of original journalism and user-generated content, the publication will emphasize a range of technical to business-level issues with feature stories, case studies, tips and videos for OpenStack cloud architects and administrators.

The Foundation is asking for your help, feedback and involvement: Check out: http://superuser.openstack.org/about to learn more.

Subscribe to the Superuser newsletter, or send ideas for content or posts to [email protected].

The second announcement was the launch of the OpenStack Marketplace. This new service for OpenStack users is “oriented around the path to adoption”, and designed to help users and operators to make informed decisions. It will be the go-to spot for information-gathering in the early stages of Openstack adoption and for evaluating various production options.

Learn more about the Marketplace and how you can join at openstack.org/marketplace or contact [email protected].

 
Around the Web

In addition, there was a good deal of news and activity on the web coming out of today’s Summit. We’ve highlighted a few below, there will be more to come!

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