On Wednesday we held an OpenStack Day in London — the first for our community in Europe. It’s very obvious we should have done this much sooner. We never know how many people to expect at these events, and had planned for 125 or so. In the end, about 350 people attended. The catering held up well to the surge in attendees, but the wifi didn’t fare so well. We will adjust going forward. Here are some of my observations from the day:
1. Not only was a substantial portion of the audience very familiar with OpenStack, many had already deployed it. I met individuals and companies from around Europe who have already deployed OpenStack clouds. Because we don’t track software installations, we have little idea how many of the 35,000+ downloads from Launchpad are actually running. However, identifying yourself in the community is very critical as it allows us to help tell your story, helps other users get information, and in general helps move OpenStack forward. So if you have deployed OpenStack, please let us know by contacting Stephen Spector ([email protected]). We are putting togther case studies and if you participate we will get you some free OpenStack schwag!
2. Many of the attendees had traveled from other parts of Europe to attend including the France, Hungary, Norway, Finland and Spain. We are working hard to establish user groups around the world so that anyone wanting to learn about OpenStack or chat about the project with peers will have the chance to do so. If you are interested in running one, please also contact Stephen.
3. The ecosystem is rapidly maturing with existing members increasing their investments, new ones continuing to join, and new businesses getting funded around OpenStack. In particular, the discussion about OpenStack distributions from companies such as Citrix, Canonical and StackOps indicates how companies are investing in this technology as the right cloud solution for their customers. Citrix highlighted how their acquisition of Cloud.com was a doubling down of their commitment to the project. All of this activity bodes well for the creation of a broad range of OpenStack solutions for customers.
4. We have some smart developers, system administrators and operators working on this project. Vish Ishaya, Jonathan Bryce, Josh McKenty and Chmouel Boudjnah all gave excellent overviews of the technology. The audience questions and hallway conversation also indicated that our flock of community members is well above average.
An installfest was held over pints right after the event. We filled up the one room we booked and had to take a second. There was some good community bonding going on for hours. Lots of discussion was also had about a future event in Europe, so we have become looking at Paris for September. Stay tuned for more details.
I want to thank Canonical, Equinix, Dell, Citrix, Rightscale and Rackspace for their sponsorship of the event. If you have feedback for us, don’t hesitate to drop me a line at [email protected] or @jimcurry on Twitter.
