OpenStack Summit Helped Bring the Cloud to Earth

by Sean Michael Kerner

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, kicked off the OpenStack Summit with a keynote about the modern state of IT and where his organization fits in. He said we’re now not living in an agile world where every vendor competes with a startup. “OpenStack is the engine of the software-defined economy,” Bryce said.

The OpenStack Marketplace launched May 12 as an online listing of OpenStack vendors and services. At the summit, the virtual cloud marketplace was made physical in the exhibitor hall.

Mark Shuttleworth, the charismatic founder of Ubuntu Linux, made a series of announcements, including a managed cloud services offering and a partnership with IBM.

AT&T’s Toby Ford, assistant vice president for IT Operations Strategic Realization, told OpenStack Summit attendees that his company has been using OpenStack since 2010. AT&T started with OpenStack in three data centers and expects to have it running in 10 data centers by the end of 2014.

With new cloud federation capabilities in OpenStack Icehouse, Troy Toman, vice president of cloud infrastructure products at Rackspace, said that OpenStack could one day be the basis for a Planet Scale operating system.

During the OpenStack Summit, security was a key focus with multiple sessions addressing best practices and opportunities to secure the cloud. “Cloud is an interesting opportunity to do really good security work,” Bryan Payne, director of security research at Nebula, said. “The cloud has orchestration tools that allow you to roll out consistent configurations and update your software consistently, as well.”

While there are vendors and exhibitors at OpenStack Summit events, there is also a design summit component, during which developers discuss and determine technologies for future OpenStack releases.

During a session at the OpenStack Summit, Linux developer and CTO of server virtualization at Parallels, compared the Linux and OpenStack development communities.

A common theme on the OpenStack Marketplace exhibit floor was the need for more developers with nearly all vendors currently hiring new talent.

One of the biggest parties at the OpenStack Summit was a Red Hat event held at the World of Coca-Cola. At the heart of the World of Coca-Cola is the vault in which the secret formula for Coke is kept.

The next OpenStack Summit is scheduled for November in Paris.