OpenStack Summit Austin: Day 2

Hello again from Austin, Texas where the second busy day of OpenStack Summit has come to a close. Not surprisingly, there was plenty of news, interesting sessions, great discussions on the showfloor, and more.

Starting with some announcements, the University of Cambridge, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious academic institutions, has announced they selected Red Hat to support its OpenStack-based high performance computing (HPC) initiative. In addition to deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its HPC-as-a-Service offering, the University of Cambridge also plans to collaborate with Red Hat to bring HPC capabilities to the upstream OpenStack community. To keep the research institution at the forefront of large scale big-data science, the university turned to its longtime partners Dell and Intel to help it create one of the world’s most energy efficient datacenters. Initially, they deployed OpenStack on a community-supported Linux during the proof-of-concept phase, but found that they needed a more reliable, integrated and supported OpenStack platform for production deployment, leading them to Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

In other news, the Ceph Community, a Red Hat sponsored worldwide collection of developers working to build the popular Ceph software-defined storage project, announced the first implementation of an innovative large-scale Ceph storage cluster environment. This cost-effective, energy-efficient four watt converged microserver, developed by WDLabs™, a business growth incubator of storage solutions leader Western Digital Corporation, is the first demonstrated solution offering true flexibility of applications executing on a microserver.

We’re also excited to share that the Red Hat Consulting team launched the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, a service that helps companies integrate people, methodology, and technology to solve business challenges in an accelerated fashion. As part of an Open Innovation Labs consulting engagement, customers will work collaboratively in a residency-oriented lab environment with Red Hat experts to jumpstart innovation and software development initiatives using open source technology and DevOps methods.

Like day one of the event, Red Hat speakers led or co-presented in several sessions.  Starting us off today, Martin Lopes hosted a session entitled Integrate Active Directory with OpenStack Keystone. He explored the changes needed in an Active Directory environment, including multi-domain configuration in keystone v3, high availability options, and, how to encrypt query traffic using LDAPS.

Sadique Puthen and Dustin Black then teamed up to present How to Troubleshoot OpenStack Without Losing Sleep. The pair discussed a variety of issues including troubleshooting load balancers, scaling the rabbitmq message bus, connection problems with MariaDB, and much more.

Thomas Cameron, Red Hat’s global solution architect leader, spoke to a large audience about Container Security. He covered kernel namespaces, security enhanced Linux (SELinux), Linux control groups, the Docker daemon, and more. He also demonstrated how each of these technologies affect security, while providing tips and tricks to implementing a more secure container environment.

Later in the day, Dustin Schoenbrun co-presented with Akshai Parthasarathy, a Technical Marketing Engineer from NetApp, in a session focused on Manila. The duo explained why management of file-shares is exploding with new features, use cases and deployers. They then explored Manila deployment with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director, availability zones for deploying shares in multiple data centers, consistency groups, share replication, and more.

Adam Young, a Red Hat core developer on Keystone, and Henry Nash, an OpenStack architect from IBM, gave a talk entitled Advances in Keystone’s Role Based Access Control. The well-attended session covered a variety of RBAC topics including advanced customizations, domain and project administration capabilities as well as responsibility delegation.

In the late afternoon, Rich Bowen led the RDO Community Meet Up. RDO is a distribution of OpenStack, packaged for RPM-based Linux operating systems, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, and others. The RDO community provides packaging, testing, and community-based support of OpenStack on these platforms. In his talk, Rich covered community governance, packaging workflow, the RDO Manager deployment tool, and other topics of interest.

Following this, Dan Lambert, a Principal Software Engineer for Red Hat, and Alexander Adamov, an Engineer for Mirantis, explored OpenStack security in their presentation Using Open Source Security Architecture to Defend Against Targeted Attacks. The co-presenters explained how a network IPS can defend an OpenStack cloud against targeted attacks, after being enabled as a virtual network function (VNF). They also discussed defensive scripts, open source malware sandboxes, and general security best practices.

And finally, last but certainly not least, John Spray, a Red Hat engineer based in Edinburgh, capped today’s agenda with a talk about Ceph as a Service with OpenStack Manila. John covered a variety of topics including the new CephFS Native driver for Manila, how the driver can be extended to provide an NFS share service based on CephFS, and future developments expected with CephFS/Manila.

For continued Red Hat and industry cloud news, we invite you to follow us on Twitter at @RedHatCloud or @RedHat.

Looking forward to a busy day three!