The OpenStack Summit event in Barcelona is only days away, and you can still register. According to the OpenStack Foundation, approximately 6,000 attendees from 50+ countries are expected to attend the conference, taking place Oct. 25 – 28 in Barcelona.
This event is a bi-annual gathering of OpenStack community members, technology leaders, developers and ecosystem supporters. Each year one summit event is held in North America and then one additional event rotates between Asia and Europe. Barcelona already has a packed schedule, and here is what you can expect from the event.
The Schedule and Ideas for Attendees. All of the goings on in Barcelona are rounded up in a detailed schedule, available here. There is also a detailed guide to Barcelona published on the summit’s site, available here. It even delves into where to find the best brunch.
Speakers. The roster of speakers for OpenStack Summit is impressive. The speakers include the OpenStack Foundation’s COO Mark Collier and its Executive Director Jonathan Bryce. Also speaking are OpenStack leaders from CERN, China Mobile, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Google, Mesosphere, Telefonica, the United States Army, Verizon, Walmart, and many more organizations. You can find all the keynotes and other addresses here.
There are also “Women of OpenStack” addresses and breakfasts slated for each day at the event.
Announcements and News. There are always many new products and initiative announcements at OpenStack Summit. For example, at last April’s event in Texas, Red Hat announced a slew of new OpenStack projects and deployments it was supporting. Representatives from Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, HP, and many other companies focused on OpenStack are attending the summit.
In Barcelona, you can definitely expect to see many new products and initiatives focused on Newton, the 14th official release of OpenStack. Newton improves the user experience for container cluster management and networking, and addresses scalability and resiliency. OpenStack Foundation members and company representatives have announced that they will be demonstrating these capabilities in Barcelona.
As the announcement of Newton noted: “These new capabilities address more use cases for organizations with heterogeneous environments, who are looking for speed and better developer experience with new technologies like containers, alongside workloads that require virtual machines or higher availability architectures.”
Contributor Recognition Tracks. Contributors are a big part of what has driven OpenStack’s success, and as the OpenStack Summit approaches, there are several plans for recognizing project contributors, ranging from coders to those who don’t code.
“Traditionally, OpenStack has been focused on the people who contribute code,” Maish Saidel-Keesing recently told Opensource.com. “But OpenStack has grown, it has evolved and changed, and it became quite apparent that there are many people who are contributing to community—but they are not writing code. This is an Active User Contributor.” You can review the criteria for being recognized as an Active User Contributor here.
Saidel-Keesing and working group members are presenting a session at in Barcelona on Tuesday at 12:15 focused on recognizing OpenStack contributors who don’t necessarily code. Meanwhile, a special round of community awards will be handed out by the OpenStack Foundation at the summit. Awards will be presented during the feedback session on Friday at the summit. Previous winners have received awards with very campy titles, including the “Don’t Stop Believin’ Cup” and the “Duct Tape Medal.” You can find out more about these awards and contribute submissions here.
Sessions. There are some notable sessions taking place in Barcelona, including industry-specific ones. For example, speakers from the telecom industry are running a session on orchestration options for NFV and OpenStack, with details here. What percentage of players in the telecom industry now consider the OpenStack platform to be essential or important to their success? According to a survey commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation, a whopping 85.8 percent of them do. There are numerous telecom-focused events going on in Barcelona.
Among other notable sessions, the following stand out as opportunities to learn from leaders in the OpenStack space:
Mirantis One-Day Training: Introduction to Kubernetes and Docker – 11:25 a.m. on Wednesday – hosted by Mirantis
IBM: The Open Cloud, A Platform of Opportunities – 12:15 on Wednesday – hosted by IBM
OpenStack Performance Team: The Newton Cycle – 9:50 on Thursday – hosted by the OpenStack Performance Team
Decentralized DevOps with Masterless Puppet and OpenStack Datacenter Automation – 11:00 on Thursday – Multiple Hosts
OpenStack Charms – 9:50 on Friday – Multiple Hosts
Additionally, the folks at vBrownBag are hosting a series of tech talk sessions at OpenStack Summit. The group has a YouTube channel here, and has promised to upload videos of the tech talks as they take place. A good way to keep up with these is to follow this Tech Talk Live page as the summit progresses. There are sessions scheduled on building data centers around OpenStack, and scaling an OpenStack deployment, among others.
There are also brown bag tech sessions coming from Veritas, on the topic of software-defined storage. Storage management and support for enterprise production workloads is becoming critical for many enterprises running OpenStack. The Veritas brown bag sessions are summarized here, and include a session on highly available storage for OpenStack deployments that serve multi-site data centers, and a session on moving data between OpenStack and other cloud platforms. Meanwhile, PLUMgrid is also showcasing software-defined storage at the summit, with more information found here.
Stay tuned for more OpenStack coverage as the event approaches and news from the conference.
