OpenStack Summit Highlights Cloud’s Global Influence

by Sean Michael Kerner

The traditional Lion Dance greeted attendees of the OpenStack Summit with a lively show of sight and sound.

Daniel Lai, government chief information officer of Hong Kong, helped kick off the conference with comments about OpenStack and its global nature.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, doesn’t care much about acronyms such as IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service). In Bryce’s view, OpenStack is all about the impact on the user.

During his keynote address, Hewlett-Packard Distinguished Engineer Monty Taylor said it’s critical for companies to contribute to the core of OpenStack and not just their own plug-ins. “If your amazing plug-in works but the OpenStack core doesn’t, your plug-in is sitting on a pile of mud,” Taylor said.

Danny Sabbah, CTO and general manager, Next Generation Platform, at IBM, is bullish on OpenStack. In his view, the cloud is one of the most important evolutions in the history of computing.

Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, emphasized during his keynote that open source is the key to OpenStack’s success.

While OpenStack got its start in the U.S., Beijing is now home to more OpenStack developers than anywhere else in the world.

Chinese online security and mobile vendor Qihoo 360 is using OpenStack to provide cloud-based security for 450 million users.

Ctrip is now using OpenStack to help power its back end and as the platform for a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) service that is replacing 13,000 call center desktops.

In an effort to be assessable, the OpenStack Summit provided live Chinese language translation for some of the English language sessions.

An increasing number of new projects are likely to become part of the OpenStack platform in the next year. One of the most hyped at an early stage is Solum, which aims to bridge the gap with application development services.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, announced during the event that his company will be partnering with Pivotal’s CloudFoundry PaaS.

As the first OpenStack Summit outside of the U.S., the event gave attendees the chance to explore one of the world’s great cities.