June Boston OpenStack User Group Meetup Summary

Yesterday, on June 21st, 2012, I coordinated the June Boston OpenStack meetup at the auditorium located at 85 Wells Avenue Newton, MA.

More than 25 people showed up and participated in great interactive conversations. If you are one of folks who attended the session yesterday, you made this meetup highly interesting and successful. Thanks for coming and a Big Thank You!

Some of the people in the audience had very good working knowledge of OpenStack and added good insights and answered questions along the way.

OpenStack Foundation Update

I gave a short update on some of the developments around OpenStack  independent foundation.  Mark Collier from Rackspace presented the update at the Austin OpenStack Summit yesterday. Major companies such as ATT, HP, Dell, IBM, Rackspace, Redhat, Suse, and Cisco have already signed a letter of intent to provide shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack Mission which is Protecting, Empowering, and Promoting OpenStack software and the ecosystem around it. The foundation has published a schedule and milestones to get the formal launch of the foundation by the fall of 2012. Here’s a link to Mark’s presentation:

Next OpenStack Summits in Shanghai and San Diego

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.

Folsom  is targeted for a September 27th release date and the next Design Summit and Conference will be in Sunny San Diego October 15-18.  Feedback from the San Francisco summit prompted some changes to the next summit in San Diego. Change in conference structure,  registration, and sponsor information is available in the following presentation:

The OpenStack Asia Pacific conference is coming up in August in Shanghai, Check out this link for more details:

http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/06/announcing-openstack-asiapacific-conference-2012/

Deep Dive Into OpenStack Swift and Quantum 

Judd Maltin from Dell led an excellent and a deep-dive technical presentation and lively interactive conversations  about OpenStack Object storage solution Swift: What it is, how it works, what it’s good for, what it’s not good for, and features in the latest release and the upcoming release.

Robert Kukura from RedHat then took us through an in-depth look at the OpenStack Network-as-a-Service component Quantum.

After an overview of the Quantum features in Essex and what’s coming in Folsom, Bob walked us through the key problems  and proposed solutions for  deploying Quantum in existing data centers:

• Problem 1: How can VM’s connect to existing data center networks using Quantum?
• Problem 2: What if the data center includes multiple networking technologies? (OVS, UCS, VLAN, VXLAN, GRE etc)
• Problem 3: What if not all compute nodes connect to the same physical networks?

Check out his presentation slides below:

Andi Abes from our Dell team captured a video recording of the sessions. It’s up on YouTube:

Other resources

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

OpenStack is a fantastic way to build out a cloud environment, however the main challenge is around deploying it and managing it efficiently at scale during operations . Many people forget that cloud is all about highly efficient operations at scale.  Dell (my company) has some great solutions and tools for this. In particular, check out crowbar which is Dell’s tool for automated OpenStack deployment from bare metal which can save you weeks of effort and frustration! You can find the code on github.  More information  at this wiki and Rob Hirschfeld’s crowbar blog.