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OpenStack Silicon Valley zeroes in on containers

The second annual event welcomed thought leaders and users this week to discuss the current state of containers and predict what’s next

August 27, 2015
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OpenStack Silicon Valley (OpenStackSV) returned to the Computer History Museum this week for a two-day conference with 700 attendees filling the sessions and grokking the event’s non-official theme: containers.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, kicked off day one by welcoming Amit Tank, principal architect at DirecTV to discuss OpenStack as the platform for enablement and innovation. Before his recruiting-as-a-service plug, a common need for users and ecosystem members searching for OpenStack talent, Tank discussed OpenStack’s ability to integrate with emerging technologies, like containers.

"OpenStack gives you the path to production to solve problems like load times using containers," said Tank.

To meet the community, industry demand for information on integrating container technology with OpenStack, Bryce announced the availability of a containers white paper, as well as additional resources available for application developers who are building apps on OpenStack.

Craig McLuckie, a product manager at Google, took the stage to discuss the current state of integrating containers with OpenStack, as well as how Kubernetes fits into the mix.

After sponsoring the OpenStack Foundation last month, Google has continued to commit to the open source community by contributing its container expertise to OpenStack projects, Magnum and Murano.

"Kubernetes and OpenStack are the path to cloud native, and now it’s time to work together as a community," said McLuckie. "If you are not building open source, you are at a disadvantage to those who are."

To bring the Kubernetes and OpenStack story to life, Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO introduced Lachlan Evenson, team lead of the cloud platform engineering team at Lithium Technologies.

"You need to look at OpenStack as a platform to enable you to go forward," Evenson said. "It was really easy to answer our container story with OpenStack as a platform."

Lithium is working to transition from its VM-based application running on an OpenStack private cloud to a sleeker, container-based model, using Docker and Kubernetes container orchestration and clustering on top of OpenStack.

With any emerging technology, there are myths that surface during the rise in popularity. Alex Polvi, CoreOS CEO, took the stage to debunk four myths related to containers.

  • Containers replace virtual machines (VMs)
  • Legacy applications won’t work in containers
  • You can only run stateless applications
  • Containers are not secure

The container chatter continued with barrage of tweets — including what may be the next hot drinking game.

You can catch more of the conversation and the debates from this week by following #OSSV15 or #OpenStackSV on Twitter.

Cover Photo by Jed Sullivan // CC BY NC

Allison Price
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