OpenStack Summit Showcases Innovations in the Open Cloud

The OpenStack community held its semiannual OpenStack Summit in Boston May 8-11, showcasing the latest innovations and directions in the open-source cloud platform. The event also marked the first OpenStack Forum, providing developers with an opportunity to discuss technical issues for upcoming releases. Among the highlights of the event was a keynote conversation with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who praised OpenStack while warning of the “silent vulnerability” present in non-open public cloud platforms. The U.S. Army also made an appearance at the event, detailing how it is using OpenStack to power its Cyber School platform that is training the next generation of cyber-warriors. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights from the 2017 OpenStack Summit.

In his opening keynote, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce detailed the expansive growth in deployment, with OpenStack now running on over 5 million compute cores.

The OpenStack Summit in Boston marked the debut of the OpenStack Forum, a venue for developers to talk about strategic development requirements. Previously, OpenStack Summits had a Design Summit, but that has now been split out into two events: the Forum and Project Team Meeting (PTG).

Beth Cohen, cloud networking product manager at Verizon, used his time on the keynote stage to announce a new “Cloud in a Box” product powered by OpenStack.

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, announced that his firm has signed a global partnership with Fujitsu to deliver OpenStack cloud capabilities.

eBay is a large OpenStack user that is now also making use of the Kubernetes orchestration system for containers. To help manage Kubernetes, eBay announced the TessMaster tool as a way to manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple providers.

Major Julianna Rodriguez, director of the Cyber Technical College at the U.S. Army Cyber School, explained how OpenStack has enabled the Army to rapidly update and build its online training system.

Fifteen different vendors got up on the keynote stage to demonstrate interoperability in a live demo that connected resources into a CoreOS-powered Kubernetes cluster.

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden appeared remotely via a video link at the OpenStack Summit in a question-and-answer keynote with OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier. “The point to open source is that we don’t have to compromise,” Snowden said. “We want a better world, so we build it.”

The next major release of OpenStack is code-named Pike and will have enhanced features. Among the new capabilities coming in OpenStack Pike is the ability to extend a storage volume while it is still attached to a cluster.

A core element of every OpenStack Summit is the vendor marketplace where vendors demo their products. The marketplace is also where attendees go to get free coffee.

The OpenStack Summit benefited from the sponsorship of many large IT vendors, including Intel, IBM, Cisco, AT&T and Dell EMC, among others.

In an OpenStack Summit session titled “Dirty Clouds Done Dirt Cheap,” developer Matthew Treinish explained how you can use a $10 table from IKEA as a server rack for a small cloud deployment.

The OpenStack Summit threw a big party at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox.

The next big OpenStack developer event is the Project Team Gatherings (PTG) in Denver, running Sept. 11-15.

The next OpenStack Summit will be held in Sydney, Australia, from Nov. 6-8.