The keynotes mostly focused on the increased sized of the OpenStack community and the creation of the foundation that now runs OpenStack. Except Shuttleworth’s in which he used Juju to live upgrade from Essex to Folsom which turned some heads. It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak, and he seemed exactly like the kind of person that can sit in-between business and open source. Chris Kemp was good, and took a couple of shots at VMWare which I always think is fun. ;)
Florian Haas of Hastexo presented an update on high-availability with OpenStack. The company I currently work for has, in the past, contracted Florian/Hastexo to consult on OpenStack deployments and I like the things that he says. He’s the go to person for HA + OpenStack.
He talked at length about Pacemaker which is a cluster resource manager. Interestingly he notes that it runs air traffic control systems. Also he mentions that it is extremely friendly to 3rd party functionality via plugins/resource agents,
He also went through the OpenStack High Availability Guide which he was largely responsible for creating, and mentioned that it is in source control and thus people can contribute patches.
The slides for this talk are online.
This was a developer session on the future methodologies of inserting things like firewalls, load balancers and such into Quantum. It was interesting to hear some of the thoughts on the topologies of Quantum and how OpenStack is trying not just to replicate existing networking technologies, but create something new. It was nice to hear the word router with an Italian accent. OpenStack is a global project.
Not much to say, on this. There was tortilla soup though. :)
This session was not what I thought it was going to be. I didn’t realize it was part of the strategy track until I was sitting down listening, and so before knowing that I figured it would be about what comes after puppet/chef/etc…which it was not.
I don’t have a lot to say about this session, other than the speaker liked webhooks and push notifications, that it would be nice to for a guest in OpenStack to be able to write metadata instead of just reading, and that some organizations are working on this functionality. I definitely would like to be able to write metadata from guests so that was good to hear.
This was a great session on lessons learned by an engineer (specifically not a developer), Collin McNamera, who wanted to contribute code to OpenStack. To get his code into OpenStack he had a ratio of 100:1 in terms of time spent figuring out how to contribute and waiting for answers vs actually coding. That was for his first contribution so the ratio is better now, but it was a tough slog at first.
Lessons learned:
While it’s disappointing to hear how hard it is to contribute code, Collin was a great speaker is obviously passionate about doing good open source work and contributing back to the community.
As I mentioned in my previous post I am a big fan of object storage, so Swift is an important project to me. :)
(Nebula logo projected on the pool at the club)
This night I went to both the Rackspace and Nebula parties, though I came back to the hotel pretty early. At the Rackspace party I learned that Miramar, the location of the flight school in Top Gun, is only a few minutes away and actually watched some military jets maneuvering out over the ocean. Surprised no one sang You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling. ;)
