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Where the present and future meet: OpenStack Day Israel

Sharone Zitman of Cloudify on the seventh edition of this global nexus.

May 30, 2016
image

Tel
Aviv is the crossroads where present and future OpenStack
innovation meets.

This
year’s OpenStack
Day Israel, held on June 2, brings together more than
400 local and international professionals with a roster of sponsors
and speakers that range from IBM, Rackspace, AT&T to local
startups with global reach like LivePerson.

The event
provides diverse
tracks on everything OpenStack – from compute, networking and
storage, to hands-on workshops and case-study sessions. These case
studies include OpenStack
innovators and leaders like CERN alongside Israel’s Defense
Intelligence Agency. IDI’s session, titled
“A Colossal Evolution – Migrating Legacy to Open Source,” is
testimony to the fact that OpenStack is no longer a theoretical
exercise in open source cloud, but a leading player for even the most
conservative organizations providing the complex and mission critical
services.
An
amazing evolution has taken place with disruptive and refreshing
young startups beginning to prove themselves leading players and
giving enterprises a run for their money; the same holds true for
Israel’s community serving as a driving force behind the global
community.

This
event builds
on the recent OpenStack
Austin, where
the
Israeli
community earned
quite a few keynote nods, in
addition to a
significant
presence on
the ground. Koby
Holzer,
fellow OpenStack Day Israel organizer and director
of cloud
engineering
at Liveperson, was interviewed during Mark
Collier’s
keynote address at
the Summit, creating
a frenzy on the
OpenStack
Israel
Twitter
account.

Holzer
spoke about Liveperson’s OpenStack clusters spanning seven data
centers and 8,000 virtual machines on more than 20,000 physical
cores, as well as their new challenge of taking 150 microservices and
going full scale with from VMs to containers, using Docker and
Kubernetes. The underlying infrastructure runs on OpenStack, which
provides a single solution for managing bare metal, virtual machines
and containers.

Liveperson
is
an early
adopter of OpenStack and
the cutting-edge chat software company was featured
as a use
case of OpenStack
in
2013.  Liveperson’s OpenStack deployment has since grown
exponentially since
then,
and diversified to new and exciting technologies. You can listen
to Chen Leibovitz’s take on Liveperson and OpenStack in the most
recent
episode of the OpenStack
& Beyond podcast.

Leaders
of Related Open Source and OpenStack Projects

In
that same keynote address, Mark Collier discussed the three primary
use cases for OpenStack,
as established by the biannual OpenStack
user survey,
which provides invaluable data not only on the state of the union of
the OpenStack project itself, but the open
source landscape
as a whole.  The top use cases identified by OpenStack users is
containers, NFV,
and bare metal. (Hybrid
cloud…being
a close fourth), where you can find Israeli companies diligently
working towards providing solutions on top of OpenStack for all of
these use cases.

A
major contributing factor making this possible is the fact that
OpenStack is open source, makes it easy to provide native integration
to OpenStack by external projects without having to be officially
under the auspices of OpenStack, thanks to the rich set of OpenStack
APIs, as was described in this session at the Summit by Ran Ziv and
Yoram
Weinreb
from
the OpenStack Israel community: How
to Develop for OpenStack APIs.

Mark
then went on to present the leading players in this revolution on the
screen.  Among the projects cited were the Google-backed
Kubernetes
project,
Red Hat’s OpenShift,
and Cloudify,
the company that drives the Israeli OpenStack
community
(and
where
I am proudly employed), infrastructure agnostic-orchestration.  The
most interesting part of this analysis is that while Kubernetes,
Mesos, and Docker Swarm (Docker’s own project), are all
container-specific, and OpenShift and CloudFoundry are PaaS, Cloudify
is the only product among those driving this revolution that serve
all three of the top use case for OpenStack – containers, NFV MANO,
bare metal, and even the close fourth – hybrid cloud.

Israeli
technology

AT&T,
sponsors of the OpenStack Israel event, recently acquired the Israeli
internet of things company Interwise to act as one of their few
innovation centers worldwide who are contributing a large part to the
strategic Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy
project (ECOMP) for AT&T and to their cutting edge IoT
frameworks.

AT&T’s
ECOMP announcement shook
up
the industry, setting
a high bar that many will not be able to uphold, says
Nati Shalom in a post titled
Where
AT&T Leads, Cisco cannot
follow.
  AT&T offer
a deep dive into this new project at the Tel Aviv keynote. They are
not the only ones to invest in Israeli technology: Huawei
and HPE
(also
sponsors of OpenStack Israel) have both bought Israeli technology
companies recently, too
– TogaNetworks & Contextream respectively, to help drive their
OpenStack strategy.  

From
Big Tent to Project Neutron – leading in code

OpenStack
Neutron,
the OpenStack networking project, was announced as the project with
the most lines of code contributed at the last OpenStack Summit in
Tokyo.  Among the top
code contributors in this project are Livnat
Peer
(who
will be speaking at OpenStack Israel this year), and Assaf
Muller
(former
speaker at OpenStack Israel), Israelis of Red Hat (sponsors of
OpenStack Israel).  Additional notable major code contributions
by the Israeli community are from Gal Sagie of Huawei Israel, leading
Project
Kuryr
–
the container networking project, leveraging everything good in
Neutron and bridging the gap for the container revolution.

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