Building a cloud-native future

BOSTON — Once upon a time, a distracted computer-science student skipped class to hack Apple IIs and play “Doom” with his buddy. That student was Mark Collier, OpenStack Foundation COO, who says never thought that the whole world would turn to computers and computer geeks to actually build the tools they needed to do “real work.”

“We’ve reached the point where all science is essentially computer science and I didn’t see that coming,” he says. The future, Collier says, is composable infrastructure. If the tools break, don’t play well together or aren’t accessible, we’re not doing our jobs, he added.

“It’s a big responsibility and we’ve got to rise to the challenge,” he says, citing examples of curing diseases and automating transportation. You can catch the whole 20-minute intro here.

Let the demos begin!

For the first demo, Collier brings out Julia Kreger of IBM to bootstrap a mini-data center on DellEMC rack, with
Kubernetes running on bare metal server one node running Ironic and Neutron.

Then John Griffith, principal software engineer at SolidFire and Kendall Nelson, OpenStack Foundation, Upstream Developer Advocate joined Kreger and Collier to deploy Cinder as an independent service using Docker. The pair face the ire of capricious demo gods but remind the crowd of the OpenStack service plugin Loki that helps make OCI-compatible container images.

We’re all in this together

Next, it’s time for Jakub Pavlík, director of product engineering at Mirantis, to demonstrate the power of one platform for bare metal, VMs, and containers with a big data application, utilizing Spark, Kafka, and Hadoop Distributed File System on a common OpenContrail-powered network. (Whew. We’re already tired.) “To make it more fancy, we’re doing real-time social analysis,” Pavlik says, announcing that the demo will show the most popular tweets from the event.

Nice: trending tags from @JakubPav live demo at #openstacksummit – “community” – in Portuguese – is one of them pic.twitter.com/FvrVHqPmto

— SU Magazine (@Superuser) May 9, 2017

Less paper, more code

In a fireside chat (minus the fire) Collier talked to Google’s new CTO of cloud platforms, Brian Stevens. Stevens was a fixture — formerly at Red Hat — in the seven years of the OpenStack community, he’s gone corporate and moved the family to Mountain View to prove it. He assured Collier that the Googleplex isn’t where open source people go to die — “You’re going to see far less white papers from Google and more code. We’re taking the long path and that’s open source,” adding that Google’s looking at how to step up open source contributions and build a tool chain.

Never fear the cockroach

Then it was the turn of Alex Polvi from CoreOS and Spencer Kimball from Cockroach Labs. Polvi asks Kimball why the awful name: “Because it replicates itself and is really hard to kill,” Kimball says, adding that he never thought he’d need to answer in front of thousands. The pair run through a demo of CockroachDB and Kubernetes as below before the second interop demo takes center stage.