We sent three guys down to attend the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, 25-28 October. What we didn´t count on was the fact they did not want to leave. But rest easy, we got them home safely and here are some thoughts and ideas that they brought back.

For those of you unfamiliar with OpenStack and the Summit it´s a community-based event where all the participants are involved in developing and discussing the most widely deployed open source cloud platform. This year OpenStack celebrate their 6th birthday, and the community now consists of 54 000 community members, 80 global user groups across 179 countries and more than 600 supporting companies.

Say Hello! to Maxime Guyot  OpenStack – Technical Team Lead at ELITS and Jonathan Herlin – Cloud Engineer

What did you expect from the Summit before attending?
– I expected an action-packed summit with interesting discussions and presentations, says Maxime.

– I expected to see a lot of cool and interesting presentations as well as deep-diving into discussions regarding OpenStack and the technology around it. But also how other developers and companies apply OpenStack, Jonathan answers.

How were the expectations met during the actual summit?
– Oh, it was 100% and more. Fantastic people, presentations and community networking, Maxime replies.

– It was amazing! The sheer number of interesting topics and discussions was staggering. And on top of that you have the entertaining keynotes from the Foundation, says Jonathan.

What talks would you like to share with those who couldn’t attend?
– That´s a tough choice because there are so many to choose from. But maybe one that takes a very practical approach on how to get started with a private cloud and deploying OpenStack. You can check it out here…

Another session that really nailed down the organisational challenges of adopting a private cloud was BrokenStack. It highlights how business units can work together to deliver the best experience. Check it out here…

But on a more general note, the Operator Sessions (aka Ops-Sessions) were fantastic! It felt great to be part of the community and exchange experiences with other cloud operators from across the world, Maxime summarise.

– Walmart talked about how they are using OpenStack to help them with their business, as well as some information on how they are using Ceph for and object storage to handle data. Check it out here…

Another interesting presentation was a presentation regarding dynamic over provisioning resizing VM´s live when they need more performance without having to launch new instances. Check it out here…
There were a lot of presentations running at the same time, we tried to spread out during the event to catch different topics to discuss in the evenings before preparing for the next day of OpenStack presentations, Jonathan concludes.

What do you feel are the trends for 2017 in regards to the OpenStack community?
– I am going to say that we are likely to see more OpenStack adoption in production and containers, containers, containers everywhere. Exciting times!, says Maxime

– The trend we are seeing and that cause a lot of discussions is that OpenStack is being used to replace traditional IT. Traditional IT is killing the creativity but with the help of OpenStack people who are not into traditional IT have an easy way of getting things done faster than before.

Something that also had a lot of attention was containers, mainly on how to use containers to deploy OpenStack to simplify upgrades and add more flexibility as you grow, says Jonathan.

Any final thoughts?
– Well, going to the OpenStack Summit is always amazing. I can highly recommend it if you are in the industry, or just getting started in the community. But from a personal point of view, it was amazing to see how diverse the community is both in human terms, you could clearly see all the efforts around gender equality, but also in technological terms, the wide variety of companies and use-cases, Maxime ends.

– OpenStack is travelling fast and traditional IT is not keeping up. It was surprising to see that so many global companies are using OpenStack and how they have adopted it. I would recommend going to the summit even if you aren’t into OpenStack yet, there are a lot of entry level presentations that could benefit you immensely. And also you will meet a lot of experienced people and have a big community where you can get help answering your questions, Jonathan finishes.

Would you like to talk to Maxime, Jonathan or any of our other cloud experts at ELITS, just drop us a note, and let´s start sharing knowledge!