Last Monday saw the latest meetup of the Australian OpenStack User Group in Sydney. Following on from our inaugural social meetups in December and January that were all about discovery of OpenStack, we moved to a more technical focus with presentations and real world demos.
We had 4 presenters for the evening:
John Dickinson – OpenStack Swift Project Technical Lead – “A Swift overview, what it is, how it’s used.” An admirable effort from John to speak to us via WebEx at his local time of 2.20am in the morning. With many of the attendees working on Swift deployments John’s time was valuable and his words very well received.
Han Li – University of New South Wales – “Installing OpenStack and UNSW’s experiences with migrating Eucalyptus to OpenStack.” Han’s presentation was informative and entertaining and I could see our group acknowledging throughout his presentation that they had experienced some of the same issues Han had. His presentation is available here.
Matt Sherbourne – Rackspace – “Cloudfuse Demo.” Matt took us into Cloudfuse and how he is able to seamlessly connect to Rackspace Cloud Files. His presentation is available here.
Phil Rogers – Aptira – “Connecting clients to Swift.” Phil wound up the evening with presenting how we might keep family and friends at bay by demonstrating several Swift client applications that can back up or move their data up into the cloud, in anticipation of the inconvenient and inevitable “my PC has crashed and I’ve lost all my x” phone call.
On behalf of the User Group and the evening’s sponsors Aptira, my thanks to our presenters. Photos of the event are here.
Thanks to Andrew White from Cisco for organizing WebEx for us. We would certainly like to make this a permanent part of all presentation meetups. Many thanks to the organizing team – Phil, Justin, Evan, Andy, Caroline, Matthew, Corrine and Katrina. We had great feedback on the meetup and taking all that feedback into account we will continue to improve the meetups in every way we can.
Many attendees thought the event was from 6pm to 8pm due to the calendar appointment sent out by meetup.com, and not 6pm till 10pm as we had planned. It turns out that you cannot specify a duration for a meetup at meetup.com and ALL meetup calendar appointments have a duration of 2 hours, something IMHO MeetUp need to fix immediately.
The next AOSUG meetup is planned for early May in Melbourne, between now and then I’ll be at the OpenStack Conference in San Francisco. I look forward to seeing you at either event!
