OpenStack Summit Showcases Interoperability Strides

Here’s a look at key takeaways from the summit. Executives from the OpenStack Foundation pledged that the work of OpenStack will continue for many years to come.

The OpenStack logo and branding was created in 2010 and now it is time for a refresh. Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, unveiled the new logo and branding during his keynote.

A keynote highlight on Oct. 26 at the OpenStack Summit was a live, on-stage demonstration with 16 OpenStack vendors, all showing a degree of interoperability. Participating companies included AT&T, Canonical, Cisco Systems, DreamHost, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OSIC, OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and VMware.

Andrew Mitry, lead architect for Walmart’s OpenStack effort, and Megan Rossetti, part of the OpenStack Operations team at Walmart, detailed how the open-source model is working for the retail giant. “Today, 100 percent of our e-commerce runs on OpenStack,” Mitry said. “We are now focused on transitioning our retail back-office workloads onto OpenStack, as well.”

Among the early adopters of OpenStack is CERN, which got started using OpenStack in 2013 to help analyze data coming from the Large Hadron Collider. Tim Bell, who leads OpenStack efforts at CERN, said he has 190,000 compute cores running OpenStack and he’s looking to add another 100,000 cores in the next six months.

OpenStack is set to help enable the next big science effort, known as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope. Rosie Bolton, SKA Science Data Processor Consortium project scientist, told the OpenStack audience that, when fully operational, SKA will generate 1 petabyte per day of data and will use up to half an exaflop per second of computing power. She expects that OpenStack is well-suited for the task. The SKA currently is expected to be operational for 50 years.

Multiple sessions through the OpenStack Summit dealt with security, including one from the OpenStack Security Project Team Leader Robert Clark. In a session Oct. 27, Clark detailed how the OpenStack Security Team performs threat analysis and what tools are available to projects to help identify potential security vulnerabilities.

A key element of every OpenStack Summit is the exhibit hall, where vendors provide demonstrations and answer question about their products and services.

The jobs board has been part of every OpenStack Summit, providing a location for vendors to advertise open positions.

A core element of every OpenStack Summit has been the Design Summit, where developers gather to discuss and plan for the next major OpenStack milestone. The Design Summit is being replaced in the next development cycle by two different events: the OpenStack Forum, co-located with the main OpenStack Summit and where developers will focus on strategy and goals, and the Project Teams Gathering event, which will focus on actual development.

As the Design Summit is no more, the new Project Teams Gathering (PTG) is set to take its place. The first PTG is currently scheduled for Feb. 20-24, 2017, in Atlanta.

The next OpenStack Summit is scheduled for May 8-12, 2017, in Boston.