It’s the Victoria Day long weekend in Canada, but it’s business as usual at the Vancouver Convention Centre where the OpenStack Summit, running May 21 – 24, is in full swing. It is the second time the conference has been hosted in Vancouver. Summits are held every 6 months alternating between North America and the rest of the world. The next one is in Berlin in November and the previous one was in Sydney.

 

 

OpenStack is a set of opensource software tools used to build a private cloud. There are some providers like our sister company, AURO, that offers OpenStack as public cloud for companies to consume compute, storage and networking resources on a utility basis.

 

 

The Keynotes

 

We started off the day with a keynote by Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Executive Director and Lauren Sell, OpenStack Vice President who discussed the recently released OpenStack Queens – the 17th version of OpenStack – and the maturity of the software. They claim that in the latest user surveys, over 10 millions physical CPU cores are on OpenStack. Zuul, an open source CI/CD platform became a top level project. Zuul, originally developed for OpenStack CI testing, is the third project managed by the OpenStack Foundation, joining OpenStack and Kata Containers.

 

 

They briefly mentioned Fast Forward Updates to provide easier upgrade paths to later versions. They also talked about Airship, basically a platform to build clouds easier. Edge computing is the hot topic these days and OpenStack created a whitepaper earlier this year which can be found on their website. Finally, they discussed OpenLab, a group of cloud providers across six continents that provides resources for testing, reporting and development of tools and applications.

The summit’s top sponsors, Intel, Red Hat and Canonical were given keynote speaking time to talk about their products. Red Hat demoed their OpenStack offering using OpenShift with a rack of servers from Dell, HP, Supermicro and IBM.

 

 

Mark Shuttlework, the CEO of Canonical (company behind Ubuntu Linux) had the most interesting and controversial talk. Mark presented a series of slides that showed their offering of OpenStack is 1/3 the cost of Red Hat. There were some chuckles in the crowd. Mark Collier, COO of OpenStack who talked afterwards showed some displeasure. After all, both were top sponsors.

 

 

Intel was next and they talked about releasing Kata Containers as v1.0. It is the combination of Intel Clear Containers and Hyper.SH runV. Unlike traditional containers, each container resides on its own kernel instead of shared kernel. This will alleviate security concerns. They then talked about Starling X, new open infrastructure project aimed at telecommunications companies. It’s basically a carrier grade OpenStack based on code from Intel and Wind River. Akraino Edge Stack is another project they are contributing to. It is an open source software stack to improve the state of edge cloud infrastructure for carrier, provider, and IoT networks.

 

 

The last presentation was from Progressive Insurance detailing their journey from the early 2000s with bare metal servers to virtual machines by the end of the decade. They now use OpenStack along with VMware to manage their infrastructure globally.

 

 

The OpenStack Marketplace opened following the morning keynotes. Along with a smaller number of attendees, the number and size of the booths were also smaller, but like the previous conferences, vendors were giving out t-shirts and pens in exchange for your contact information.

 

 

Are you at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit this week? Let us know in the comments!