News

OpenStack Days Silicon Valley 2016: unlocking infrastructure

The third edition of the two-day conference promises retail giants and “romance”

August 2, 2016
image

The third edition of OpenStack Days Silicon Valley, August 9-10, bills itself as the “unlocked infrastructure” conference.

Held at the Computer History Museum, attendees will hear the latest from the technology trenches with speakers from IBM, EMC and and visit the annals of yestertech (an Apple-1, anyone?).

Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Foundation executive director, will be delivering a keynote on the future of OpenStack, examining new possibilities for what has become the most widely adopted open source cloud software on the planet.

Other sessions include heavy-hitting retailers Staples and Walmart plus a number of talks delving into the ongoing “romance” between Kubernetes and OpenStack. (In case you missed it, the pair are officially an “item.”)

We talked to Nick Chase at Mirantis — who will also be on hand conducting interviews for Superuser TV — about what’s new this year and what attendees can expect. Tickets for the two-day conference are available here, and you can use this discount code for a $99 ticket: CAossv16-disc.

How long has Staples been working with OpenStack and what will Tom Conophy, the CIO of Staples, be sharing?

Staples is the third largest e-commerce vendor after Amazon and Apple. They use a variety of cloud technology, including a meaningful public cloud footprint. As the company makes steady progress to evolve into a digital enterprise, they are tasked with re-architecting many of their internal services to fit with the cloud paradigm.

Having done a bit of internal research the company has found that a) because in cloud paradigm, applications are more tightly coupled to the infrastructure, it is important to architect to an open target instead of throwing all eggs into the basket of a single public cloud vendor; b) for the majority of use cases, a private cloud can be 30-40 percent more cost effective than going public. To that effect, Staples is looking to open technologies like OpenStack to underpin their next-generation infrastructure.

SAP is deploying OpenStack on Kubernetes – what is the scale of this environment and how has it impacted SAP’s business model?

SAP is the number one enterprise software vendor in the world. They also own 20+ software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings that they’ve either built of acquired over the years, all of which are use slightly different infrastructure. The company is looking to implement a single, integrated cloud fabric to drive cost efficiencies across infrastructure and is looking to open standards based technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes to accomplish that.

AT&T, winner of the Austin Superuser Award, is also speaking at the conference. What’s next for AT&T’s OpenStack strategy?

When AT&T spoke at the Summit, they had OpenStack in 74 datacenters. Since then, their OpenStack footprint has expanded to 90 data centers. Keys to their success include standardizing a limited set of reference architectures that are tied to a workload (DevOps, NFV etc.), testing these architectures with specific workload use cases in mind and then scaling in a standards-based fashion rather than building 90 OpenStack snowflakes. They’ll share more on that approach.

This is the third OpenStack Days Silicon Valley, what’s new this year?

OpenStack Silicon Valley aims to be more than just about OpenStack, but about the broader ecosystem of open source technologies that OpenStack is a peer to. “Collaborate or die” (as Mark Collier Foundation COO has put it) has been the theme that OpenStack Silicon Valley has always tried to promote.

Last year, we focused on OpenStack and containers at large. This years conference has a particular focus on collaboration between OpenStack and Kubernetes communities. Members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the OpenStack foundation will be on stage discussing the business benefits and technology caveats of the two communities collaborating to build a universal fabric for virtual machines (VMs) containers and bare metal.

Cover Photo // CC BY NC

Tags: ,

Superuser
Latest posts by Superuser (see all)