OpenStack Summit: From Containers to Gaming as a Service

The OpenStack community gathered in Tokyo to learn about the latest developments in the open-source cloud world, including the upcoming Mitaka release.

Approximately 5 thousand people attended the summit, which was one of the largest that OpenStack has held to date and was spread across five venues. Connecting the venues was a Japanese garden, complete with a koi pond and tea house.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, highlighted the strong deployment of OpenStack in Japan during his opening keynote. In a media question-and-answer session, he argued that OpenStack is well-positioned against Amazon.

Among the large users of OpenStack in Japan is Yahoo Japan. Takuya Ito, senior manager of infrastructure engineering and OpenStack black belt at Yahoo Japan, said his organization is running more than 50,000 virtual machine instances on OpenStack today.

Mobile gaming is big business in Japan and around the world. Tokyo-based GMO Internet Group discussed how it is enabling developers to build mobile games on top of its OpenStack infrastructure.

Among the new projects discussed at the OpenStack Summit is Project Kuryr, which enables Docker container networking inside an OpenStack cloud deployment.

During the Summit, Rackspace announced its new containers-as-a-service offering, Carina, which runs on top of OpenStack and makes use of the OpenStack Magnum container project.

Security is always top-of-mind when it comes to the cloud. Jacob Sendowski, product manager at Intel Security Group, discussed the Intel Security Controller platform, which can be used alongside SDN technology from Midokura to inject security controls into an OpenStack Cloud.

Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, discussed the results of the latest OpenStack user survey, showing continued global growth and identifying fear of lock-in as a driver for OpenStack adoption.

The Mitaka Design Summit was a core element of the OpenStack Summit, providing a venue for developers to discuss and map out Mitaka, the next major update of OpenStack.

The OpenStack Marketplace was packed with vendors, all aiming to show and explain their respective technologies and solutions for OpenStack cloud deployment.

Among the many vendors on the OpenStack Marketplace floor was Mirantis. As part of the Mirantis booth, the company had a race car driving simulator.

No technology conference is complete without a conference party, and the OpenStack Tokyo Summit party was one for the ages, including Taiko drummers and even a Sumo wrestler demonstration.