With thousands of delegates from over 50 countries coming to the OpenStack Summit 6-8 November 2017, the “future of open source cloud computing” will be “mapped” alongside talk of “multi-cloud strategies, cost savings and increasing agility".
OpenStack. It is a “global community of 80,000 members supported by the OpenStack Foundation, which facilitates the development of many innovative projects in the open infrastructure space".
The organisation advises that the “community delivers two software releases each year, which are Apache 2 licensed and productised by a large ecosystem of technology vendors in our Marketplace.”
Now comes the 2017 summit, with “agility” in its description. Nowadays, whenever “agility” is mentioned, one is sadly reminded of the agility Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull is not showing in his quest to turn dismal Newspoll results around, suffering his 18th straight loss, a feat presumably causing the dear leader to blow his stack at his misfortune.
{loadposition alex08}Unfortunately for the people, politics isn’t open source either, with so much skullduggery going on behind closed doors, and those who seek to blast politics open usually falling foul of the “losing one’s soul” problem.
So, perhaps politicians can learn from the world of open source, and the great, multinational co-operation this appears to encourage.
Disconnected with mainstream politics and presumably still engulfed in technological politics of its own is the OpenStack Summit, being held on 6 to 8 November at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, dubbed the “world’s largest” and being held in Australia for “the first time".
It will see users like “American Airlines, China Railway, Saudi Telecom, Commonwealth Bank, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Sprint and Tencent/WeChat”, among others, “talk about multi-cloud strategies, cost savings and increasing agility with OpenStack".
It is a biannual affair, previously held in “major cities like Paris, Tokyo, Vancouver, San Francisco and Barcelona—will draw thousands of developers, operators, cloud architects, business unit leaders and CIOs from the world’s centres of IT innovation".
While the event will no doubt be a grand affair, it would be remiss of me not to note that OpenStack isn’t just all fans – there are critics, with an article from TechRepublic back in 2015 from Matt Asay entitled: “Public cloud’s very public failure.”
Here, Asay warns that “private clouds are doomed to fail” and that “OpenStack may not be the answer”, quoting Gartner analyst Tom Bittman asking why “95% of private clouds are failing".
That said, OpenStack has presumably had the last two years to answer these questions, and to prove critics wrong, with the organisation and its software still in existence and clearly drawing big name users, customers and sponsors.
Indeed, we are told that the “headline sponsors of the Summit include Sydney-based Aptira, global networking leader Cisco, and WeChat provider Tencent, as well as premier sponsors Huawei, IBM, Intel, Mirantis, Red Hat and VMware.”
In addition to global enterprises users, OpenStack advises that participants will hear first-hand how A/NZ companies are using OpenStack, with speakers to “report on strong regional OpenStack adoption among financial services, telecoms and research organisations including: AT&T, Monash University, The Garvan Institute, DragonFly Data Science, Paddy Power Betfair, Verizon, Workday, University of Melbourne , PayPal, Catalyst IT, GoDaddy and Overstock.com".
So, while a zillion users doing something doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right, there’s a heck of a lot of firepower using OpenStack’s solutions, so what you do and how you do it will be entirely up to you.
I personally have no opinion as I am not an expert on open source, or OpenStack, but it is certainly wise to do your own homework and due diligence, and upon having done so, choose the solution that best meets your needs, which may well be OpenStack, as it is for so many thousands out there.
Naturally, OpenStack hopes to encourage you, dear reader, to take advantage of its discounted early-bird registration options, available until 8 September, with sponsorship packages for those inclined available until 27 September.
Discounted Early Bird Registration is available until 8 September. Sponsorship packages are available until 27 September.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said: “Enterprises and service providers in Australia were among the earliest adopters of OpenStack, so it’s exciting to bring the Summit and thousands of community members globally to Sydney.
“The rapid growth of OpenStack — in excess of 40% year over year — means there’s lots to talk about at the Summit in terms of compelling new use cases, instructive new user stories and proven best practices for both developers and cloud operators.”
So, what are the summit themes for Sydney?
We are told that “themes at the Sydney OpenStack Summit include current topics for enterprises like how to build effective multi-cloud strategies. Attendees from carriers and service providers will learn more about how OpenStack is leading in edge computing.
“Other themes include innovation in open and composable infrastructure, collaboration with adjacent open source communities, digital transformation and infrastructure control. The CFO perspective on business growth and infrastructure cost reduction will feature prominently in many sessions.”
There is also the advice that “OpenStack Summits help IT leaders plan their cloud strategies while sharing real-world experiences operating or consuming OpenStack clouds. During the three-day event, attendees will have the opportunity to hear keynote presentations featuring innovative use cases and live technology demonstrations".
“They can choose from hundreds of sessions and hands-on workshops for every experience level and organisational role. The Summit offers networking opportunities during the Monday evening Marketplace booth crawl happy hour and the Tuesday afternoon Melbourne Cup viewing party. Learn more about OpenStack Summits and users at the official OpenStack publication, Superuser.”
And what of the obligatory hackathon of the modern era summit?
Yes, it wouldn’t be a modern summit without a hackathon, this one being around cloud applications to “kick off the week".
OpenStack states that “the weekend prior to the summit, a cloud application hackathon will be hosted by the Sydney OpenStack User Group to kick off the event.”
“Hacking Up the Stack” will be held 3-5 November, at the Doltone House in the Australian Technology Park.
OpenStack application hackathons are “intended to educate developers on how to build and migrate applications to distributed cloud environments, as well as showcase the diverse use cases for OpenStack. Recent application hackathons have been held in Mexico and Taiwan”, with more information on the 2017 Sydney hackathon due to be published here soon.
