I recently returned from San Diego after attending the OpenStack Summit. Estimates are that 1300-1400+ people attended the summit. Most times the conference rooms had standing room only. All the vendors kept busy and I have to give special kudos to the very friendly vendors I talked to. Dell, HP, Nebula, SuSe, Cisco, VMWare, Redhat, and Ubuntu were the vendors I managed to visit. Can’t say enough about how friendly everyone was.
Note: I work for Rackspace so the opinions I’m making are 100% my own – they do not reflect my employer Rackspace.
The keynotes are what really stood out from the people I talked to. Troy Toman of Rackspace, Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical (Ubuntu) and Chris Kemp of Nebula were the ones I heard people discussing around the main floor.
First off, Mark Shuttleworth demo’d a new web tool for JuJu. The demo went smoothly and he managed to upgrade Ubuntu servers in production using JuJu. It was a gusty demo and it worked flawlessly. Hats off to the team working on JuJu! JuJu definitely fills a need to make orchestration easy on OpenStack and EC2. You can try the demo here.
Troy Toman explained how Rackspace is currently using Quantum (Melange), Glance, Swift, and of course Nova – all in production. Continuous delivery is a big deal at Rackspace and Troy stated that Rackspace is running trunk/master in production and a deployment takes about 47 minutes. The crowd was buzzing after that. He also stated the API has been hit 120 million times with a 99.97% availability. The OpenStack Private Cloud (Alamo) software was discussed and has had downloads from almost every place on Earth including Antartica. If you haven’t yet tried the private cloud software give it a try, its a fast easy way to get OpenStack up and running especially if you want to learn how it all works, etc. Its free and open source.
For the other keynotes check out the write-ups here.
So what is the take away from all this? Well, it was four days of learning, making connections, and being part of the ground swell that is OpenStack. As you walked between sessions you would see developers writing code and talking with each other. Everyone was excited and you could feel it in the air. The up and coming projects (like Ceilometer) got full attention and the future looks brighter each time for OpenStack. There are two points I would use to sum it all up:
- OpenStack is a Juggernaut
- OpenStack is production ready
On a side note, every vendor was hiring. One of the Dell guys had a homemade badge on his shirt that read “I’m hiring”. Demand is high for OpenStack superstars. An HP representative told us that they had 90 OpenStack positions available right now. If you want to find a job it shouldn’t be too hard. Brush up your Python skills and contribute to the OpenStack community in any way you can. OpenStack has definitely made Python a first class player in the enterprise now (not that it wasn’t before).
I would recommend you attend the next OpenStack Summit if at all possible. It’s one of the more informative and contact building conferences I’ve been to.
