Poland OpenStack Day

Recently, I was in the beautiful city of Cracow at the Poland OpenStack Day. My colleagues from the Warsaw office had sponsored the event, and had asked me to come along to give one of the keynote talks.

It was great to get to meet some more of my own colleagues, but to get to meet with some of the OpenStack Community in Poland. Attendees had travelled from far and wide across Poland and the surrounding areas to visit, and the event was full of developers, operations staff and even a few less technical people like myself. One of the interesting things that stood out for me was how many of the attendees weren’t yet using OpenStack. The operators and developers were there to learn from others’ experiences, but also to share their own. Some of the sessions held in the two technical tracks were workshops, giving practical experience and on-the-spot advice from experts, including our own Pawel Mironczuk who ran a workshop on our Containers-as-a-Service Platform. In this, he showed attendees how to install and operate it, giving them some best practices advice on implementing and operating Kubernetes in an enterprise environment. Naturally, the attendees and exhibitors all got together in the evening to experience some legendary Polish hospitality, which was a great opportunity to get to know more of the attendees and to hear their stories about OpenStack.

OpenStack – it’s kind of a big deal

This year, OpenStack celebrates 8 years of existence, and during those 8 years it has had its ups and down, but as can be seen from the results of the November 2017 OpenStack Foundation User Survey, it is continuing to grow. This showed that 2017 saw nearly 1,000 unique OpenStack deployments, which was an increase of 95% compared to 2016.

Growth was evident across the globe, with respondents in China alone increasing by 23% against 2016. The survey was translated into seven different languages to make it more accessible to the global audience that is now building and operating open infrastructure based on OpenStack.

Whether you’re building and operating your own OpenStack infrastructure, or are using a distribution like SUSE OpenStack Cloud, it’s clear to see that the OpenStack community around the world is vibrant and full of like-minded souls looking to collaborate and share their best practices.

OpenStack User Survey – now open

If you’re already using OpenStack, then please fill out the OpenStack User Survey, which is open from now until the 3^rd of August, with the results being shared at the Berlin OpenStack Summit in November. This survey is invaluable for all of us working in the OpenStack ecosystem – it helps us to see how people are using it, why they chose OpenStack, and helps to drive improvements.