My Top 5 Takeaways from OpenStack Summit Berlin | SUSE Communities

My Top 5 Takeaways from OpenStack Summit Berlin

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Another outstanding OpenStack Summit is done and dusted.  As expected, Berlin was a magnificent venue and it was truly a delight to reconnect with old friends and spend valuable time with colleagues and customers across the community.

After such a dynamic event, here are my top 5 takeaways:

1.    OpenStack is a great community doing amazing things

Ever since I attended my first OpenStack Summit (Atlanta 2014), it’s been a privilege to be part of this vibrant, innovative community where open collaboration is the hallmark of everything we do. The core values and guiding principles of open source, open community, open development and open design remain as valid today as when the project first started.

2.    Open infrastructure begins with OpenStack

In his keynote address, Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, highlighted how the connected, smart world we now live in is creating entirely different infrastructure challenges. Open source technology options are increasingly vital for building the software-defined infrastructures needed to meet these challenges. Flexibility, interoperability and integration are all critical factors.

How do we focus on getting all of this done?  We’re going to start by rebranding the OpenStack Summit as the “Open Infrastructure Summit”.

The first of these summits will be in Denver, April 29th – May 1st, 2019, where users, operators and open source developers will get the chance to collaborate on everything from OpenStack; CI/CD; containers; IoT and edge computing; private, public and hybrid cloud; telecoms and NFV; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML); and much more.

3.    OpenStack adoption continues to expand and users are happy

With 70,000 commits over the past year, OpenStack is in the top 3 most active open source projects on the planet, right up there with Linux and Chromium. In addition, OpenStack is being used by organizations of all sizes and from all over the globe. Not only that, but users are increasingly happy with OpenStack, with its Net Promoter Score (NPS) soaring in the latest user survey results.

What’s driving the growth? Increasing operational efficiency and accelerating the ability to innovate are top of the list of reasons for choosing OpenStack.

4.    OpenStack is a great platform for running containers

This fact probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone. Containers are the top emerging technology for OpenStack users and Kubernetes is the most popular Platform as a Service (PaaS) or container framework for managing applications on OpenStack.

We’ve been seeing our customers do this for a while. They are using SUSE OpenStack Cloud for hosting bare metal, virtualized and containerized workloads. We integrated both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry solutions to provide a flexible choice of application delivery solutions for our customers.  And with the new Airship project (see below) that SUSE has been engaged with, you may see folks starting to use Kubernetes to deploy OpenStack, so you can deploy more Kubernetes clusters…that could make your head spin a bit 🙂

5.    Watch out for new features, use cases and products

With the OpenStack Foundation evolving to embrace the wider open infrastructure community, four new pilot projects were the talk of the town in Berlin:

  • Airship. Kubernetes based container deployment and management tools particularly useful for 5G and edge computing.
  • Kata Containers. Secure container runtime providing the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.
  • StarlingX. Cloud infrastructure stack for telecom and industrial IoT use cases.
  • Zuul. CI/CD platform that has been proven at scale supporting the OpenStack project.

Having been at most of the OpenStack Summits since 2014, it seems strange and a little sad to think that Berlin was the last. But as Alexander Graham Bell famously said, “when one door closes, another opens.” This time, that situation is happening by design and for good reason.

We’re moving on to greater things.

See you all in Denver next April for the first Open Infrastructure Summit.

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Terri Schlosser Terri recently joined the SUSE team as the Head of Product and Solutions Marketing. Prior to joining, Terri was at Rackspace where she was a Senior Marketing Manager for their OpenStack private cloud solutions, responsible for developing the solutions messaging framework and delivering a comprehensive integrated product marketing program. And before that Terri spent 16 years at IBM primarily within the Tivoli and Power Systems Software teams as a manager and individual contributor in marketing, product management, development, sales enablement and business development. She was even lucky enough to spend 2 years on assignment in the IBM software lab in Krakow Poland. Terri currently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and 2 boys and loves spending time with her family, traveling and skiing.