OpenStack Summit Recap – Rolling Through San Diego

Several of us at SUSE spent last week in San Diego at the OpenStack Summit, which combined design discussions to drive the next release as well as a user conference. In addition to engineering participation in the design sessions, we did the standard trade show routine – networking, presenting and listening (maybe even some dancing) – but we also helped out the local community as well. More than 40 volunteers from the project helped clean a local beach. During the exercise we learned quite a bit about the types of trash hurting our beaches and what we can do to conserve our coast. Check out this great post from the OpenStack project for a rundown of the results.

On the OpenStack community front, a few key themes stood out from last week’s event:

Community Growth Remains High
With OpenStack riding high in 2012, many have been wondering about when the growth rate of participants will start tapering off. The show (the first since the creation of the OpenStack Foundation) provided an answer to this question: No time soon. There were 1,400 participants, up from 1,000 in April. That’s a sign that the community is still growing, which is great news for our future and helps validate our continued support of the OpenStack Foundation.

Folsom’s New Additions
We learned a little more about the latest and greatest with Folsom – including “Cinder,” a new block storage project that provides persistent block storage to guest VMs.  This will work very well with the RBD and RADOS solution we shipped with Essex and will see tighter integration in future versions of SUSE Cloud.

Praising our Partners
We noted that the SUSE Cloud release could not been the success that it was without the strong support of our partners. As we continue to develop SUSE Cloud to support future versions, we’re relying on and developing a broader ecosystem of partners to help us deliver an even stronger solution to our customers. We left the show excited about the companies we had the chance to talk with the booth.
We had a great time at the show last week and encourage anyone interested in the OpenStack community to check out the next summit which is tentatively planned for April 2013.