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Okinawa OpenStack Ops Workshop rides wave of interest

OpenStack operators from the region met during Okinawa Open Days to share insights

January 7, 2016
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In summer, tourists flock to Okinawa, Japan for the white sand beaches and bold cuisine. This year the quiet season was enlivened by the first Okinawa OpenStack Ops Workshop.

An all-star roster of around 30 people from the region participated in the event, including NTT, GMO, Yahoo Japan, Rakuten and Bit-isle Equinix Inc. About 70 percent of them are running OpenStack in production, the remaining 30 percent are learning about it or evaluating it. Akihiro Hasegawa (Bit-isle Equinix Inc.), Shintaro Mizuno (NTT), Toshikazu Ichikawa (NTT), and Mahito Ogura (NTT Communications) put together the event which was held as part of Okinawa Open Days, December 14-18.

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The Ops Workshop kicked off with Tom Fifield, OpenStack Foundation community manager, who spoke about the history of Ops Meetups and what to expect. Then participants, many of whom are involved in the OpenStack Japan user group and the OpenStack Taiwan user group, launched into 15-minute architecture show-and-tell sessions that lasted two-and-a-half-hours total. You can check out details from the entire workshop on the Etherpad.

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Photo: Tom Fifield.

Shintaro Mizuno, one of the organizers, notes that the most active discussions were around networking (Neutron) and the logging/deployment tips session. He says it was interesting to see some local preferences emerge, especially around logging tools i.e. more ops tend to use Fluentd than logstash. Mahito Ogura’s show and tell detailed how his team harnesses Fluentd, Norikra and Slack to collect OpenStack logs. You can see his slides here.

After a break, participants launched into a discussion session that stretched over two hours. Topics included logging and monitoring, deployment tips, large deployment issues, networking, and distributions, patching and support.

The free event was at capacity. Mizuno says the organizers learned a few things from this initial run — including that they should have announced the event much earlier. Another issue was that many of the operators found it difficult to hold presentations and discussions in English. In the end, participants made their presentations or asked questions in Japanese and translated them on the Etherpad in near-real-time with help from other participants, Mizuno says.

“Since this was the first time experience for most attendees, the biggest takeaway was that the people recognized the unique value of the ops meetup, where operators get together and share experiences with other operators,” he adds. “For the organizers, it was great to find out that there was huge interest in major Japanese ops to contribute to future ops meetups.”

How to get involved

The next event in Japan will be held as a part of the OpenStack Days Tokyo in July 2016. That will probably be a local event, Mizuno says, but if you’re interested in a larger event in the Asia Pacific region, contact one of the organizers or get your voice heard on the ops-mailing list. If there is enough interest a regional Ops Meetup could be organized in the near future, he adds.

Cover Photo// CC BY NC

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