OpenStack Summit Austin: Day 3

Hello again from Austin, Texas where the third day of OpenStack Summit has come to a close. As with the first two days of the event, there was plenty of news, interesting sessions, great discussions on the showfloor, and more. All would likely agree that the 13th OpenStack Summit has been a Texas-sized success so far!

Similar to day 1 and day 2 of the event, Red Hat had several exciting announcements to pass along. The first press release to hit the wire detailed additional customer traction with Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Yesterday, it was announced that Verizon, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Cambridge University had all selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the backbone of their cloud initiatives. Today, we shared the news that several large organizations across Europe, including Fastweb, Paddy Power Betfair, and Produban, have deployed the technology as well and are experiencing great results for their businesses.  

In addition,Interactive Intelligence has moved its all-in-one omnichannel customer engagement cloud service, Communications as a Service (CaaS), to an OpenStack and Ceph-based private cloud from Red Hat. Based on its internal testing, Interactive Intelligence reports that the Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage solution has cut its time to deploy from a few weeks to only minutes.

Alex Smelik, a Chief Architect at Interactive Intelligence, summed it up best:  

“We love the fact that OpenStack has become a more mature architecture. With Red Hat, OpenStack is stable and it works for our deployment. We now have a reliable CaaS architecture. When you put all the pieces together and look at the big picture—the price to keep computer, storage and networking together— the combination of Ceph and OpenStack technologies exemplifies the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the Red Hat solution.”

In addition, nine of Red Hat’s thirty-five sessions at the conference occurred today.  Kicking everything off this morning, Ryan Brown and Victoria Martinez de la Cruz teamed to discuss Zaqar, OpenStack’s Messaging and Notification service. The two demonstrated how to leverage the technology to develop a cloud-based, distributed microservice architecture.

Will Foster and Kambiz Aghaiepour then gave a thorough overview of TryStack.org -- a free way to experience and learn more about OpenStack and it's capabilities in a large, public sandbox. The speakers provided a history of the technology as well as its future roadmap.  They also gave insight into its deployment architecture and underlying components.

Later, Tim Rozet, a Red Hat Senior Software Engineer, and Bin Hu, a Senior Product Manager from AT&T, deep dived into virtual network functions (VNF) and explained how enterprises can leverage a complex service that previously required multiple physical appliances. They also provided an analysis of both BGPVPN and NSH that can help enable many SFC use cases.

A short time later, Miguel Angel Ajo and Gorka Eguileor, Red Hat software engineers, detailed how Ansible and Oslogmerger can reproduce production issues, gather specific logs, and augment them with system probes that will be mixed into the logs themselves.

Jakub Libosvar, a Red Hat Product Manager, and Rodolfo Alonso, an engineer from Intel, then co-presented on Open vSwitch. In their presentation, entitled “Tired of Iptables Based Security Groups? Here’s how to Gain Tremendous Speed with Open vSwitch Instead!,” the pair provided an overview of current implementations of Neutron-Open vSwitch firewall drivers. They then demonstrated two approaches using OpenFlow: a security group firewall and a driver based on conntrack.

In another joint Red Hat and Intel session, Rimma Iontel from Red Hat, and Eoin Walsh from Intel, explored how Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) provides elasticity, cost savings, and increased efficiency. In their talk, Achieving Fine-Nine VNF Reliability in a Telco-Grade OpenStack Cloud, the presenters shared their experiences in deploying OpenStack-based Telco-grade services. They also examined the differences between VNFs and PNFs (Physical Network Function) and what is required in OpenStack an platform to support the former.

In one of the more interesting sessions of the day, Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat’s GM of OpenStack, presented with Kyle Forrester from Big Switch Networks and Chris Emmons from Dell in a talk called Designing for NFV: Lessons Learned from Deploying at Verizon. As detailed in Verizon's press release, the three discussed the OpenStack pod design for NFV that emerged after multiple iterations with onsite stakeholders.  They also covered a series of technical challenges that were overcome, and best practices that we learned by working together across traditional orchestration networking silos.

Finally, last but not least, Sean Cohen, Federico Lucifredi, and Sebastian Han teamed together in a popular session entitled Protecting the Galaxy - Multi-Region Disaster Recovery with OpenStack and Ceph. The presenters explored the various architectural options and levels of maturity in OpenStack services for building multi-site configurations using the Mitaka release. They also discussed the latest capabilities for volume, image and object storage with Ceph as a backend storage solution. The three also covered future developments that the OpenStack and Ceph communities are pushing forward.

As you can tell, it was a busy day at the conference today. Although tomorrow will be the last day of the main conference, we’re looking forward to our continued interactions with the community and partners.

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