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Prepping for the next OpenStack app dev hackathon

From zero to launch before lunch, Intel’s Travis Broughton takes you behind the scenes at these free training sessions.

August 5, 2016
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I recently found myself in a computer lab at the Guadalajara Campus of the Tecnológico de Monterrey for the first of a series of community-led training sessions leading up to an OpenStack Hackathon in Guadalajara focused on app development.

As reflected in the OpenStack Foundation’s April 2016 User Survey, application developers are seeking tutorials and other training materials tailored to their specific needs, and this series of pre-training events aims to remove any of those barriers to successfully participating in the hackathon. What struck me was the vitality and commitment of the local community, and the diversity of the attendees’ experience.

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The room was packed with nearly 30 local students—and a slew of volunteers from the local developer community—willing to give up their Saturday to learn about OpenStack, and to support this event.

Over the course of the morning, Gonzalo De La Torre from the UTSA Open Cloud Institute in San Antonio took us through a practical, hands-on overview of OpenStack basics, entitled “OpenStack 101: My Path to Revolution.” After giving a brief history of OpenStack, he talked about the excitement of working in the cloud in comparison to traditional, legacy IT systems. He also contrasted the OpenStack approach with that of proprietary cloud platforms. He concluded the overview with a quick description of the core OpenStack Services.

Then came the day’s main event—the opportunity to dive in and get our hands dirty. Gonzalo assigned each of us our own resources for the day, using Chameleon Cloud as a playground for the live classroom exercises. We got to work with Glance, Nova, Neutron, Swift, Cinder, and Keystone; downloading an Ubuntu image and provisioning an instance into newly-provisioned networks on freshly-created projects; and uploading some static assets to Swift.

By the end of the day, students with no prior OpenStack experience—and some with only Linux but no cloud background—had launched a collection of instances on their own networks and had connected via SSH, well on their way to being able to use OpenStack to power their own applications.

Gonzalo closed the day shouting “¿Estamos listos para el hackathon?” (“Are we ready for the Hackathon?”) The collective answer from the class was an emphatic “¡Sí!”

Come join us for weekly training sessions and don’t miss the OpenStack App Dev Hackathon in Guadalajara, September 9-11.

Cover Photo // CC BY NC

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