Tuesday 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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