OpenStack Summit Returns to Austin With Much Fanfare

With live music, demos and lots of users, the 2016 OpenStack Summit in Austin was vastly different from the cloud technology’s first summit six years ago.

The first OpenStack Summit ever was held in Austin, and there were only 75 attendees. In contrast, 7,500 people showed up for the 2016 event.

As opposed to the first OpenStack Summit event, which was operated by Rackspace, the 2016 Austin summit benefited from the sponsorship of many vendors, including Cisco, Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, EMC, Dell and many others.

Though the first OpenStack Summit was only six years ago, there is now a steady release cadence for the technology—two per year. The 13th and most recent release of OpenStack is Mitaka, which officially debuted April 7 and was the subject of much discussion at the summit.

At the time of the first OpenStack Summit, there was Rackspace and NASA as users. At the 2016 Summit, more than half of the Fortune 100 companies use OpenStack.

Among the big pieces of news that came from the summit is that Verizon is working with Red Hat, Dell and Big Switch in building out a large OpenStack environment for network-functions virtualization (NFV).

Mario Muller, corporate director, IT operational services and infrastructure technologies at Volkswagen Group, detailed how the organization is set to use OpenStack, which includes helping enable future autonomous vehicles.

Another key difference between the first OpenStack Summit in Austin and the one in 2016 is an exhibitor show floor, known as the OpenStack marketplace, where vendors showcase their products.

Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, issued a call for more collaboration. However, he wasn’t calling for more collaboration inside OpenStack but, rather, for collaboration with other open-source efforts, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Among the many projects in the OpenStack ecosystem is the OpenStack Security project led by Rob Clark. In a well-attended session, Clark explained the different tools and processes in place to keep OpenStack secure.

At the first summit, OpenStack was generating no money for anyone. That has changed dramatically. According to data presented at the 2016 summit by 451 Research, the OpenStack ecosystem generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2015 and is forecast to approach $3.4 billion by 2018.

While keynotes, case studies and the vendor marketplaces are all core elements of the OpenStack Summit, so too is the Design Summit, where developers gathered to plan out the next major release of OpenStack, dubbed Newton.