OpenStack Summit Austin: Day 1

We're live from Austin, Texas, where the 13^th semi-annual OpenStack Summit is officially underway! This event has come a long way from its very first gathering six years ago, where 75 people gathered to learn about OpenStack in its infancy. That's a sharp contrast with the 7,000+ people in attendance here, in what marks Austin's second OpenStack Summit, returning to where it all started!

The event kicked off in the morning with Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation welcoming the crowd to the largest OpenStack Summit to date! Shortly after, Red Hat's chief technologist, Chris Wright, gave a great keynote presentation, discussing the overall success and impact OpenStack is having on real businesses and their bottom line. Mixed in there, Chris Emmons, director of network infrastructure at Verizon joined Chris Wright on stage for a quick summary of Verizon's own success with OpenStack for network functions virtualization. Rounding out the keynotes were the Foundation's Super User awards, with AT&T taking the winning spot.

Getting the day started, Red Hat had a few bits of news to share as well! In a press release on Monday, Verizon made it official and announced they have completed the largest known deployment of OpenStack, for network function virtualization (NFV) purposes. The deployment covers five of Verizon's U.S. data centers, and began in 2015 based on a core and pod architecture. In addition, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announces they are using Red Hat OpenStack Platform to process planetary exploration data, including all four Mars rovers. What an amazing use case!

As you might expect, there were quite a few Red Hat-led sessions as well. To start, Darrell Jordan-Smith led a panel of large telecom providers (Verizon, Telus, and AT&T) to talk about their success with OpenStack for NFV. Shortly after Jacob Liberman hosted an informative session with enterprise customers Paddy Power Betfair and Oak Ridge National Labs to talk about the importance of an integrated stack, compatible APIs, and their successful deployments.

Jonathan Gershater discussed pros and cons of OpenStack consumption models. Following that, Mark McLoughlin and Alexis Monville focused on ideas that influence open-source projects. In their talk Contributing to the Success of OpenStack, they discussed principles from Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Learn movements.

Later, in a session with partners NetApp and Tesora, Sean Cohen discussed DBaaS Workloads with OpenStack Trove and Manila. Soon thereafter, Massimo Ferrari and Erich Morisse spoke at a well-attended session entitled 'Elephant in the Room: What's the TCO for an OpenStack Cloud.” Alexis Monville then led a session called “What Science knows about happiness that could transform OpenStack.”

Paul Belanger then teamed with partners Elizabeth Joseph, from Hewlitt Packard, and Christopher Aedo, from IBM, in a discussion entitled OpenStack Infrastructure for Beginners. Following lunch, Jullien Danjou, Christophe Sauthier, Stéphane Albert, Gauvain Pocentek, and Maximiliano Venesio presented in a workshop called “Hands on to configure your cloud to be able to charge your users using official OpenStack components.”

Ihar Hrachyshka then teamed with Matt Riedemann, from IBM, and Matthew Treinish, from Hewlitt Packard in an interesting session entitled “OpenStack Stable: What it actually means to maintain stable branches.” Then, in his presentation “The omniscient cloud: bare metal inspection status update,” Dmitry Tantsur explored Ironic's role in bare metal provisioning, its pluggable architecture, and how it provides smarter processing of inspection data.

Later in the afternoon, Scott McCarty focused on IaaS and PaaS convergence. His presentation, “OpenShift and OpenStack: Delivering Applications together” explored how traditional applications could be containerized and what additional workloads should also be considered.

And finally, Ihar Hrachyshka presented with partners from Intel and SUSE, in a session called “Deep Dive into the Neutron Upgrade Story.” The presenters focused on why it's important to understand upgrade implications.

It was a packed first day at OpenStack Summit here in Austin and we're looking forward to a full week ahead! Remember to check back here for our daily blog recaps or follow us at #redhatcloud.