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OpenStack Days Ireland zeroes in on networking

From containers to network functions virtualization (NFV), participants connected the dots at Dublin’s first event.

July 21, 2016
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Everyone was seeing green at the first OpenStack Days Ireland complete with local community members, users and fresh faces.

Hosted in Dublin and organized by Intel with support from the local user group, the gathering exceeded expectations by selling out five weeks before the event with 160 people from 35 different companies registered to attend. When Ruchi Bhargava, director of datacenter and cloud software engineering at Intel polled the audience to see how many attendees were new to OpenStack, almost half of the people in the room raised their hands.

Structured around OpenStack manageability, network functions virtualization (NFV), networking, service assurance and security, the agenda featured 15 sessions, including case studies, demos and updates from the Product Working Group.

"The demand displays that Ireland is indeed at the core of this cutting edge technology as evidenced by the number of companies both presenting, attending and collaborating in real life OpenStack activities and deployments," said Haidee McMahon, one of the event organizers and SDN/NFV Orchestration Engineering Manager at Intel.

Embracing the diversity of the event, the Women of OpenStack kicked organized a breakfast to welcome female attendees who accounted for 15 percent of attendees.

Carol Barrett, an active leader in the Women of OpenStack community, opened the breakfast, welcoming women attendees and allies to provide tips on how to get involved in the growing community. With recent OpenStack Summit growth up from nine percent to 12 percent at the Austin Summit, Barrett encouraged attendees to get involved and join the different programs, including the mentoring program that launched at the OpenStack Summit Austin.

Echoing the results of the March 2016 user survey, containers and NFV were focuses of the event’s breakout sessions.

Alex Gabert, senior systems engineer at Midokura started a game of networking Buzzword Bingo, but introduced a term that was not familiar to the new Stackers attending the event: Kuryr.

"OpenStack Kuryr is a project where vendors from network overlay companies work peacefully together and try to reach the goal of bringing Docker networking closer to the Neutron plug in," he explained.

Carrying the theme of OpenStack networking, Mark McLoughlin, director of engineering, OpenStack at Red Hat and member of the OpenStack board of directors, discussed the opportunity for OpenStack and even more broadly, open source for NFV.

"The telco industry is really transforming its data centers, adopting the cloud model and changing how its applications are architected and provisioned," he said in an interview with Superuser TV. "And that’s something that works really well with OpenStack."

Catch videos of the full lineup of sessions, and learn more about the first OpenStack Days Ireland and what it means for the community from McMahon and McLoughlin in the SuperuserTV clip below.

Cover Photo // NC by CC

Allison Price
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