OpenStack Summit Showcases ‘Big Tent’ Plans, Containers and More

by Sean Michael Kerner

The Vancouver convention center hosted the OpenStack Summit and Liberty Design Summit, providing attendees with beautiful outdoor views.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, detailed the notion of the “OpenStack-powered planet” during his keynote. The new inter-cloud federation that is part of the recent OpenStack Kilo release enables users to benefit from multiple clouds.

One of the biggest changes in OpenStack is a shift away from an integrated release of selected projects to a “big tent” model in which many more projects are able to participate. As part of the big tent, new projects in the OpenStack Liberty release cycle will include the Murano app catalog and the Rally benchmarking project.

Adrian Otto, project technical leader for the OpenStack Magnum project, and Mark Collier, chief operations officer of the OpenStack Foundation, discussed the new container model. With Magnum, groups of containers are clustered into Bays, which could be Docker Swarm or Kubernetes clusters.

Amandeep Singh Juneja, senior director of cloud engineering and operations at Walmart Labs, discussed why the world’s largest retailer has embraced OpenStack. “We liked that OpenStack is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for vendors up and down the stack, and it’s supported by a large community of individual and enterprise contributors,” he said.

Subbu Allamaraju, chief engineer for cloud at eBay, discussed how both his company and PayPal have widely deployed OpenStack to enable services.

Jonathan Chiang, IT chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, detailed how the space agency is now using OpenStack in its effort to land humans on Mars.

Security is a top-level concern for all cloud deployments, including OpenStack. Robert Clark, lead security architect for Helion at HP, detailed a number of best practices for secure cloud deployment. He emphasized that the recent VENOM exploit is not a unicorn, and other virtual machine breakout exploits are likely to occur, which is why proper configuration is key.

Part of the Vancouver event was the Liberty Design Summit, which covered the next major OpenStack release. Given the beautiful weather, some design sessions were held outside on the terrace of the convention center.

A common feature at all OpenStack events is a job board so vendors can attempt to solicit those with cloud skills to find a new employer.

The vendor marketplace at the latest conference was loaded with vendors demonstrating and discussing their solutions.

Some of the biggest names in technology—including HP, Intel, IBM, Cisco, EMC, Oracle, VMware, Dell, Citrix and Red Hat—sponsored this year’s summit.