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Paris Summit Recap, Day 1

If you’re not in Paris, catch up on the OpenStack Summit here.

November 3, 2014
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More than 4,600 developers and users — an attendance record — have gathered in Paris at the Palais des Congrès to share best practices and user stories and to plan the 11th release of OpenStack cloud software, Kilo, due in April 2015. Here’s a recap of today’s events.

Software Development is Strategic

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, illustrated how OpenStack users are embracing the power of agile infrastructure to accelerate software development and compete in a software-defined economy.

“Passive consumption in IT is dead,” said Bryce. “The old model of, ‘buy what they sell us, upgrade when they tell us and use the gear they tell us to use’ is gone. It’s been replaced with an expectation you can get the resources you want, when you want them, configured the way you want.”

OpenStack users are at the center of this revolution.

Cloud is insurgent by its nature, driven by users around the edge of the business, while virtualization was driven by IT department’s need to cut cost and increase efficiency. Now that users have IT resources at their fingertips with the swipe of a credit card, IT departments need to think more like product organizations and make their offerings attractive and useful.

Bryce pointed out that focusing on technology to operate legacy applications misses the point.

“In the new software-defined economy, we drive value to the business via innovation through software development. Software is strategic. Innovation no longer takes place in large institutions with proprietary models. It now happens with thousands of people working together from hundreds of companies in dozens of countries.”

Companies that understand this are rewriting the rules of business in their favor.

Bryce then welcomed onto the stage Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, who confirmed this view of the world from the perspective of the world’s largest open source software project.

“There’s too much software to be written for any one company to write it,” observed Zemlin. In fact, the Linux Foundation observes users adopting a “Pareto principle of software,” in which 80 percent of their software development leverages open source, while only 20 percent is proprietary.

A series of major companies embracing this philosophy then came onstage to talk about how they are using OpenStack with other open source technologies to power software development for strategic value.

Jose Maria San Jose Juarez of BBVA Bank talked about his company’s deployments of OpenStack in Spain that will soon move into Mexico, with hybrid models and continuous delivery approaches that would be almost impossible with traditional infrastructure.

Next, a car horn blast from stage left announced the arrival of several Stackers driving a BMW i8 electric supercar.

The new i8 was the centerpiece of a presentation by Dr. Stefan Lenz of BMW. He outlined how BMW is using OpenStack to drive innovation, allowing their engineers to do amazing new things.

“This car is innovative, elegant, efficient and a joy to the driver, which are all of the things we at BMW want to be. Just like OpenStack!”

BMW is using OpenStack as the core component of a cloud strategy to drive consistency across all of their data centers. Lenz estimates that BMW’s infrastructure is 25 percent more cost efficient to operate compared to their most-efficient competitor. At approximately 16 TB and 100 cores of capacity at the moment, Lenz expects his OpenStack footprint to continue growing.

“We know that if our engineers develop in OpenStack, in production it will be stable. Everyone in the industry wants more stability in the future, but that doesn’t prevent us from using OpenStack now.”

Also, he noted that when their software drives success and growth, no one outside the company earns money on that growth and success, echoing a key theme of the software-defined economy that Bryce described in his keynote.

Summit attendees get to enjoy the BMW i8 all week, on display in the “OpenStack Marché” expo hall.

Wrapping up the morning user presentations was Matt Haines of Time Warner Cable. He explained how his company is evolving into a devops culture, remarking that “for a cable company, these are exciting times.”

Time Warner Cable is using OpenStack to power a self-service platform for its developers, offering automation, geo-redundant cloud environments, live migration and more.

“I’ve been working with OpenStack since Diablo,” reflected Haines. “So, I know it is ready.”

The morning wrapped with the presentation of the first Superuser Awards. The winner was CERN, with the OpenStack Infrastructure team receiving an honorable mention. Congratulations!

The Ops Summit: Users Speak Up on the Future of OpenStack

Operators of OpenStack cloud play a key role in making each iteration of the software better. In March of this year, the OpenStack community launched it’s first-ever Ops Summit in San Jose, a focused effort to bring the voice of OpenStack cloud operators into the development roadmap.

At the OpenStack Summit in Paris, the fourth Ops Summit is taking place. With approximately 500 participants, the Ops Summit is a place where OpenStack cloud operators can gather to share best practices and develop a focused, unified voice of feedback about their experiences using OpenStack.

The audience includes operators of massive public clouds, enterprise clouds, research-focused academic clouds and everything in between, across multiple industries and application use cases. Some are hardcore systems administrators, and some are simply representing their teams. All of them have experience actually using OpenStack on a daily basis.

Feedback from operators is incorporated into the next integrated OpenStack release in one of two ways. First, there is a collating and distribution process from the collective notes of the group, utilizing Etherpad technology and a group of ops editors. Second, devs participating in the Ops Summit interact directly with operators, hearing firsthand what needs to be addressed and why.

This Ops Summit was organized and led by Tom Fifield of the OpenStack Foundation on behalf of the OpenStack User Commitee: Tim Bell, Subbu Allamaraju and Jon Proulx. Today’s sessions focused on big-picture feedback, and the second day of the Ops Summit (Thursday) focuses on specific action items that need to be taken to address issues raised on Monday.

Topics generating substantial interest at this Ops Summit include improvements to rolling upgrades, Ironic bare-metal provisioning, high-availability and the distributed virtual router project in OpenStack Networking (Neutron), and logging.

Today, Ops Summit attendees formed a new working group. Called the Application Ecosystem Working Group, the team is focused on bringing software developers into the OpenStack roadmapping process.

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