Atlanta OpenStack Summit: OpenStack Grows Up
Have you been waiting to jump into an OpenStack cloud deployment in support of your business or application but were afraid it's still an unsupported mess? Based on the recently published upcoming Atlanta OpenStack Summit list of presentations, OpenStack is finally coming into its own as a maturing project.
There are still plenty of rough edges, but the upcoming Atlanta Summit, with a wide variety of presentations to suit all tastes, promises to demonstrate the validity and viability of the OpenStack approach for both public and private cloud infrastructures.
The event is no longer just a major geek fest. Really, the company in Boston that thought it was a good idea to give away boxer shorts with their company logo on them wasn’t really thinking about building a professional community. Don't worry. For the folks who really want to see the bleeding edge in action, the lightning talks are still a highlight, and the design sessions themselves are always a mix of very enlightening, entertaining, or scary.
The session tracks demonstrate this new maturity. Not only is there the usual assortment of deeply technical discussions of new features for the developers, training opportunities and vendor presentations for the newbies, and forums for odd-ball ideas, there is also a Cloud Strategy and Business value track that fills the business perspective that has long been missing at past Summits. This is welcome news to the increasingly large numbers of vendors and users that have been attending the event.
For the operations people who have long complained about the lack of tools and processes, the Operations and Hands-On Workshops have an encouraging number of sessions from which to pick. These range from the hardcore—an interactive workshop on Designate, which is a DNS as a Service module—to several sessions on deploying and managing large-scale production public, private, and hybrid OpenStack cloud environments.
Here is just a sample of the sessions that look particularly promising. The battle of the Distros and Openstack:: Where Continuous Delivery and Distros Collide are both addressing a well-known open source development model flaw that encourages companies to fork distributions to minimize the problem of building products on a continuously evolving platform. Hopefully the related upgrade path issue will also be addressed in the session titled Nova’s March Towards Live Upgrade Capability. Maybe it will take Lessons learned from building the Massachusetts Open Cloud.
So those of you who have not yet registered for the upcoming Atlanta Summit, hurry and sign up for what promises to be a dynamite conference. See you in Atlanta—May 12-16!
