OpenStack Summit Days 4&5 – The Suits Have Left the Building

The OpenStack Summit consists of two somewhat separate parts – the original OpenStack Summits were all about getting developers together to share ideas and plan the next release. In Atlanta this week, that means the Juno release planned for October. With the increasing interest in the project (estimates are over 4500 attendees in Atlanta) the OpenStack Foundation added separate sessions for hands on sessions and tutorials targeted at end users.

The Summit has also become the place for vendors that participate in the OpenStack ecosystem to meet with each other and with customers to help create complete solutions. As my colleague Doug Jarvis pointed out earlier, the Atlanta Summit was the first to feature the OpenStack Marketplace which was designed to foster that interaction.

HA session at OpenStack Summit

The marketplace only ran through the end of Day 3. With the end user portion continuing on Thursday and the design summit running through Friday, the focus turned to the technology and how to use it. In other words, the suits flew home.

As part of this focus, the SUSE team had two well attended sessions designed to help educate the community on two issues important to enterprise deployments of OpenStack. In the first session, Cameron Seader turned up the Heat in a hands on session explaining how the OpenStack Orchestration service enables users to coordinate multiple VMs to deliver a single workload. The hands-on session used SUSE Cloud as a demonstration platform to walk 160 attendees through the process of creating and deploying WordPress the “totally easier way”.

The other session focused on cloud availability and highlighted the recently released HA capabilities in SUSE Cloud 3. Adam Spiers from SUSE development and Florian Haas from Hastexo explored the reasons why high availability is needed, explained the various ways it has been addressed in OpenStack and walked through an automated installation of OpenStack services running on a high availability cluster.

All in all the summit provided us a great opportunity to participate in the future design of OpenStack, meet with customers and partners and have some great barbecue.