OpenStack Summit Day 1 Quick Notes

It’s quite an amazing to be here in Paris watching the OpenStack Summit unfold in front of us. With #vDM30in30 in full flight, this seemed like the perfect way to bring some of my experience from the City of Light.

eiffel-tower

The backdrop of the Champs-Elysées is like a perfect stage for me as a long time cyclist and fan of the Tour de France. While I won’t be riding the cobble stones along the base of l’Arc de Triomphe, I will be walking the route, but the focus of what is happening in Paris is all OpenStack right now!

Focus on Enterprise, and Operations

While some of the most compelling use-cases for OpenStack stemmed from the ability to enable developers to simply manage environments in the same way that AWS has become the de facto tool of choice for developers on a public cloud platform. OpenStack has found its stride with many of the development-focused environments, but one of the areas that organizations have questioned whether OpenStack is ready is for the traditional enterprise.

When we say OpenStack for enterprise, we aren’t talking about Netflix, eBay, LinkedIn and those types of organizations. While they are enterprise by definition because of their size, enterprise in the more “traditional” sense includes everything from soup to nuts as far as infrastructure. If you look at companies that are heavy on file-sharing, but lighter on rapid application development, you will see how making the move to OpenStack doesn’t have the same draw that it may for other companies.

Beyond the type of workload as far as file sharing and such, the classic discussion around HA (High Availability) and live migration is once again at the fore when browsing potential incubation projects for the Kilo Design Summit.

Orchestrate All the Things!

Heat is getting lots of…well, heat. I’ve seen a lot of great work around using Heat, leveraging for external configuration management systems, and much more. Triple-O has many administrators building out some powerful orchestration recipes, and as Docker continues to draw attention, we are seeing more about the orchestration to build and scale applications.

Again, these are powerful DevOps enabling features, but the focus is on building up the strength on the operations side.

A Neat Little Package…or Distro in this Case

Want a private OpenStack cloud? Not a problem! The distributions are being developed at a decent pace, and the work being done by folks like Cloudscaling (now a part of EMC), Rackspace, Metacloud (now a part of Cisco), Piston, and Mirantis to name a few, is really laying the groundwork for a greater adoption by enterprise customers.

Despite all that we promote not the power of the OpenStack ecosystem, it will hold much more weight in many people’s minds when more easily deployable, upgradeable, and fully supported distributions are available. If anything, we should regard this as a win. An OpenStack customer, regardless of how they got there, is an OpenStack customer just the same 🙂

LTS FTW!

Discussions are happening on creating LTS (Long Term Support) editions of OpenStack. It is still early on in the process, but this could also be an important step. Major revisions on a 6-month cycle can be challenging for some organizations to think of adopting. It’s not that there is no capability to make the updates work, but there are changes in process that will need to be in place to let companies stay up to date with limited disruption.

If we see LTS OpenStack become an option, I think that it could be an interesting and positive option to help more people enable their business using the powerful open cloud environment.

There will be much more excitement tomorrow at OpenStack Summit, and if you want to prepare for the next steps, it’s a good time to tap into the excitement and start looking at how OpenStack can be a part of driving your business.

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