Raise your OpenStack IQ with these free tech talks

There’s a lot of knowledge you can drop about OpenStack in 15 minutes — tips, tricks, resources. That’s the idea behind #vBrownBag TechTalks.

They’re part of the upcoming OpenStack Summit Tokyo and there’s a packed schedule ranging from how to organize your own OpenStack Day, security provisioning and user stories from Adobe and Comcast.

Sponsored by Cisco and Hewlett-Packard with the support of the OpenStack Foundation, you can catch all three days of these talks live from Tokyo, October 28-30.

If that doesn’t work for your time zone, no worries. The sessions are all recorded and posted to a YouTube channel and the schedule will turn into direct links to the videos. If you’re at the Summit, come check them out live in the Wakashiba room – they’re available as a schedule track, too.

A few of these talks were submitted as regular sessions for the Summit — and that means some of the speakers are on double duty.

Gal Sagie, an open source software architect at Huawei, will talk at the Summit on “Kuryr – Docker Networking in an OpenStack World" but he’s also presenting a talk titled “Dragonflow – Neutron done the SDN Way” at the #vBrownBag sessions.

Dragonflow is an open source project implementing Neutron API as a distributed control plane with an embedded SDN controller (leveraging Ryu framework) he’ll be talking about key features (pluggable distributed database architecture, hybrid OpenFlow pipeline, topology service functions injection architecture and distributed network functions) as well as the future roadmap — all in about 12 minutes.

Sagie says he submitted several ideas for talks at the Summit — all open-source projects that have recently held his interest — and since the Dragonflow talk ended up on a waiting list, he decided to pitch it as a lightning talk.

The same thing happened to Red Hat’s Diane Mueller whose pitch for a talk on “Scale or Fail: Containers on OpenStack” got towed under in what she called a “tsunami” of Summit talk proposals but made it into the #vBrownBag schedule.

“Scale or fail is a fact of life in the new cloud-native world order,” Mueller, the director of community development for OpenShift, says. “If your application strategy is not architected to take advantage of the cloud and containers, and doesn’t have technology like OpenShift with Google’s Kubernetes under hood to orchestrate them – you are doomed to fail. It’s not all gloom and doom though, there’s loads of incredible new frameworks, services and tooling available to help you succeed.”

The shorter talk frees her up in a number of ways. She’ll have more time to hang out and answer any further questions at the company booth in the Marketplace, and be on hand to answer queries over Twitter. Red Hat will also host a follow-up session post Summit.

“I totally get that most of us have day jobs that don’t let us leave our desks and eat sushi with each other in cool places like Vancouver or Tokyo,” says Mueller. “So live streaming is a great way to share the experience, thus I’m thrilled to be doing my first virtual brown bag live from Tokyo to share the experience.”

Cover Photo // CC BY NC