Boston OpenStack Meetup Update

Yesterday, on May 16th, 2012, I coordinated my first Boston OpenStack meetup at the Harvard University Maxwell Dworkin building.

If you attended the session yesterday, thanks for being there and for the active participation.  You know the value of the community in opensource projects. It’s all about collaboration, a sense of shared mission, and passion.

OpenStack, in particular, has come a long  way since it’s humble beginning just 2 years ago because of the very passionate and vibrant community world-wide, with OpenStack  meetups springing up in places as far as Argentina, Australia, Japan

OpenStack Foundation

The most recent development in OpenStack  is the formation of an  independent foundation with 18 platinum and gold members including major companies such as ATT, HP, Dell, IBM, Rackspace, Redhat, Suse, and Cisco who will be providing shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack Mission which is Protecting, Empowering, and Promoting OpenStack software and the ecosystem around it. The foundation is still working out all the details around formation, legal frameworks, and a number of things  needed to formalize the memberships and its activities..

As OpenStack community continues to grow beyond it’s current 3000+ members and 170+ companies, it’s worthwhile to look at the reasons why there is so much momentum behind this. What’s happening in the market is that OpenStack is effectively commoditizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer of the cloud stack. VMware and Amazon already recognize this and are moving up the value chain to the next layer up the stack, namely Platform-as-a-Service. Interestingly, VMware is open sourcing it’s Platform-as-a-Service offering called CloudFoundry allowing developers to build cloud-scale applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure services. This might  be their strategy to keep their current customers on their infrastructure (virtualization and cloud services).

OpenStack Value Proposition

In any case, what we are hearing from our customers is that they are looking at OpenStack because of the following value proposition: (BTW,  I work for Dell with our own OpenStack-powered cloud solution)

• Limits expensive software licensing
• Allows for massive scalability (bring Amazon like capabilities in-house)
• Limits lock-in by proprietary standards and software
• Provides Open Standards and Open API’s for expanding the ecosystem
• Provides Open Source software including support for broad  hypervisor support (including Open Source ones KVM, Xen)

OpenStack Folsom Summit and Conference takeaways

At the OpenStack meetup last night, we talked about the key takeaways from the Folsom OpenStack summit which took place in San Francisco in mid-April. Then, we had excellent and highly content-rich presentations and discussions led by Peter Pouliot of Microsoft talking about Hyper V support in OpenStack and  Beth Cohen of cloudTP who provided some great insights into  a real-world, large-scale, OpenStack deployment. The links to their presentations are the end of this post.

I think we are at a critical inflection point in the evolution of OpenStack getting ready for production environments. I spent the whole week at the recent OpenStack summit and conference with a number of my Dell colleagues. See my previous blog post1 amd post2 on the updates from the event. I was looking for evidence of production-readiness and user acceptance throughout the OpenStack Folsom Summit and conference

Here are some of my takeaways from the OpenStack Folsom summit and conference I shared last night at Meetup:

1. In terms of raw numbers, this summit and conference had 1000 participants from 26 countries, 159 sessions during the summit and 56 sessions during the conference
2. There was a track dedicated to documentation which is a sure sign of increased user demand
3. Folsom gets an entire DevOps team showing that Operations is becoming critical as users begin to deploy OpenStack into production
4. High-availability was a topic of hot discussion again highlighting the need for increasing availability and reliability needed for production deployments
5. There were plenty of user stories and large scale deployments going on out there:
•  HP, Rackspace, Canonical, and Nebula all spoke of their OpenStack based solutions they have in the  market already
• Large number of user stories: Deutsche Telekom, Radio Free Asia, San Diego Super Computer Center, Argonne national lab (HPC)

Meetup Presentations and other resources

Microsoft Peter Pouliot’s Hyper-V presentation

cloudTP Beth Cohen’s presentation on a real-world OpenStack deployment

Other resources and events coming up

The OpenStack wiki is where the foundation documents are formed: http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation

Beth talked about how they implemented Crowbar for automating the deployment process for their client. BTW, there is ton of great information on crowbar out there. Check out some these links: You can find the code on github.  More information  at this wiki and Rob Hirschfeld’s crowbar blog.