Essential Talks to Catch at OpenStack Summit Atlanta

The OpenStack Summit 2014 takes place May 12-16 in Atlanta, Georgia and this year's schedule is chock full of panels, workshops, and presentations by Red Hatters involved with OpenStack. . 

If you're at OpenStack Summit, you can catch talks on plans for OpenStack Neutron, how to use OpenDaylight with OpenStack, how Heat will help simplify deployment and management of cloud workloads, using Packstack and Foreman to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and much more.

Monday, May 12:

• OpenStack Security Group (OSSG) - An Update on Our Progress and Plans: Nathan Kinder, Robert Clark, and Bryan Payne will discuss the group’s recent work and set the direction for future work. Anyone interested in OpenStack security should attend.

• Scaling Out OpenStack Clouds in the Enterprise: In this panel discussion, Jan Mark Holzer, Kenneth Hui, Caroline McCrory, Jesse Proudman, Manju Ramanathpura, and Boris Renski will focus specifically on scale-out deployment of OpenStack in the enterprise, and they will talk about their experience deploying and managing scale-out OpenStack data center environments.

• The Future of OpenStack Networking: In this panel discussion, Chris Wright, Dan Dumitriu, Kyle Mestery, Nils Swart, and Lew Tucker look at the direction of OpenStack Neutron and discuss how networking can evolve in the future.

• Introduction to OpenStack Orchestration: Zane Bitter and Steven Hardy explain how the Orchestration capabilities of OpenStack, provided by the Heat project, can help make the deployment and management of your cloud workloads simpler and more robust by allowing you to represent infrastructure as code.

• The state of OpenStack Data Processing - Savanna, now and in Juno: Matthew Farrellee, Sergey Lukjanov, and John Speidel provide an overview of project Savanna, its main goals and focus, and offer a tour of new features introduced in the Icehouse cycle.

• Using OpenDaylight Within an OpenStack Environment: Brent Salisbury, Madhu Venguopal, Dave Meyer, and Kyle Mestery explain how to use OpenDaylight with OpenStack, including setup and debug of the environment.

• Divide and Conquer - Resource Segregation in the OpenStack Cloud: Stephen Gordon discusses options for segregating resources in the OpenStack cloud, including their pros and cons, example use cases, and performance considerations.

• Customizing Horizon without Breaking on Upgrades: Matthias Runge covers how to make changes, updates, and upgrades without breaking the Horizon OpenStack dashboard.

• Enterprise-Grade OpenStack from a Scheduler Perspective: Gary Kotton and Gilad Zlotkin will talk about hierarchical-scheduling, cross-scheduling, and re-scheduling in the context of providing highly available and high-performance compute, networking, and storage services in large scale. They also will cover recent developments in OpenStack schedulers in the context of the general Enterprise-Grade OpenStack roadmap.

Tuesday, May 13:

• Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with Packstack and Foreman: Rob Locke and Forrest Taylor deliver a hands-on taste of training from Red Hat’s premiere OpenStack course - Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Administration (CL210)

• Nova's March Toward Live Upgrade Capability: Dan Smith talks about the incremental steps the Nova team has made in recent cycles, and reveals the major new capability that the Icehouse release brings to the table.

• Technical Deep Dive - Big Data Computations Using Elastic Data Processing in OpenStack: Trevor McKay, Alexander Ignatov, and Sergey Lukjanov offer an in-depth look at Savanna’s EDP facilities. They will start with a description of EDP’s general concepts and a definition of terms, and then look at its current status in Savanna, supported Data Sources, Job Types, data locality, and the roadmap for the Juno release cycle. They close with a live demo of EDP. 

• Deploying High Availability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform: Rob Locke and Forrest Taylor provide a hands-on taste of training for one of Red Hat’s newest OpenStack courses - High availability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (CL332).

• Implementation and Lessons Learned from Building a Large Scale Cloud (Massachusetts Open Cloud/MOC): Brent Holden provides an overview of the MOC architecture and its evolution. He will also cover use cases for applications deployed on the MOC cloud, ranging from Big Data analytics, to PaaS and others.

• Deploying Apache Qpid on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform: Rob Locke and Forrest Taylor dish out a hands-on taste of training for one of Red Hat’s newest OpenStack courses - Apache Qpid Messaging with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (CL314). 

• Application Software Configuration Using Heat: Steve Baker explains a number of different approaches to configuring software using Heat, such as cloud-init, shell scripts, Puppet, and golden images. He also explains how to add support for other configuration management tools.

• Deploying the Neutron L2 and L3 Services on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform: Rob Locke and Forrest Taylor deliver a hands-on taste of training for one of Red Hat’s newest OpenStack courses - Neutron Networking with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (CL306).

Wednesday, May 14:

• Extending TripleO for OpenStack Infrastructure Management: In this session, Keith Basil explores why TripleO works for infrastructure management, TripleO management integration points, what TripleO means for hardware/software vendors, and early work in this area.

• Breaking the Mold with OpenStack Swift and GlusterFS: Project leads Luis Pabon and John Dickinson explain how Swift and GlusterFS work together to take advantage of the best each system has to offer.

• OpenStack: Where Continuous Delivery and Distros Collide: Mark McLoughlin and Monty Taylor present OpenStack as a case study for how recent thinking around continuous delivery is influencing open source projects. They examine challenges in running an open source project, building a distro, or maintaining a public cloud, and they provide food for thought around the agile development methodologies used by many application developers versus the methodologies used by open source projects.

• User Experience in the OpenStack Community:  Liz Blanchard tells how the UX group helps shape features and improve overall user experience in OpenStack, and helps verify that designs are meeting target end-users needs.

• Automation, Orchestration, Confusion? Taking the Discussion Up the Stack: Steve Baker, Florian Haas, Georgy Okrokvertskhov, and John Yi discuss the tools, approaches, and frameworks available for OpenStack-based application deployment.

Thursday, May 15:

• Getting Started with OpenStack: In this workshop, Dan Radez, Niki Acosta, and Kenneth Hui walk participants through an overview of the OpenStack components and offer practical suggestions and resources for learning OpenStack. To demonstrate one way to get started, they will assist workshop attendees to set up a multi-node OpenStack cloud, on their laptops, using Red Hat’s RDO and the Packstack utility. Instructions to prepare for the workshop can be found at http://openstack.redhat.com/GettingStartedIcehouse_w_GRE

• Designate - Interactive Workshop - Install and Operate: Rich Megginson et al guide attendees on how Designate can be installed with PowerDNS. For the purposes of the workshop, the various designate components will be installed on a single node.

• The Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) - A New Model to Operate and Innovate in a Vendor-Neutral Cloud: James Cuff, Jan Mark Holzer, and Orran Krieger discuss the vision and status of the  project, the central role OpenStack plays in its implementation, and some of the required changes needed in OpenStack to enable a multi-provider open cloud.

For more information about these talks, visit: /events/#openstacksummitus.

For more details on the OpenStack Summit and to register, see https://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-summit-atlanta-2014/.