Image Gallery: OpenStack Summit

OPENSTACK SUMMIT —  People love to predict the death of OpenStack, said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, opening the company’s 2017 summit in Boston. And in fact, pundits have recently made some prognostications to that effect, at least on the public cloud side.

“I prefer to use data,” said Bryce. He cited 44 percent year-over-year growth in the use of OpenStack in the foundation’s latest user survey, which also showed more and larger clouds running on the platform.

The 2017 survey of some 1,400 users shows 37 percent of clouds have 1,000 or more cores – up from 29 percent in 2016 – and 16 percent are running 1 petabyte or more of object storage, up from 4 percent.

“Our tech has matured; it’s been put into production,” said Bryce. “Fifty percent of the Fortune 100 is running OpenStack; we support 5 million cores of compute power.”

While confident that OpenStack will continue to grow, despite a recent retrenchment by Intel, Bryce says the organization has identified five areas in which it needs to improve, and he welcomed his colleagues Lauren Sell, VP of marketing and community services, and Thierry Carrez, VP of engineering, to the stage to list them:

1. Clearly communicate, “What is OpenStack.” What is inside an official project, and what is not. The OpenStack project map is ambitious, including well-known initiatives such as Cinder, Neutron and Swift.
2. Improve the feedback loop to translate user requirements into action. That will be enabled by a new forum.
3. Address complexity. “We continue to get dinged,” said Sell. While a lack of OpenStack engineers isn’t helping the situation, she says the Foundation plans to remove some little-used features, prune configuration options and cull projects.
4. Communicate with adjacent communities. Many of these entities were on the expo floor. Sell stressed that OpenStack is a “set of building blocks” and has invited Ansible, Ceph, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and others to collaborate.
5. Grow new community leaders. Evolve the development process to be more friendly to part-time and global contributors.

“Things get done by participation and involvement,” said Bryce, who told the audience that filled the cavernous Hynes Convention Center auditorium that we’re at “a cloud inflection point.”

“We’ve entered the second generation of private cloud,” he said. The first generation was massive-scale deployments in carrier and similar environments. Now, the technology has advanced to the point that smaller shops are moving workloads back on premises, often with hosted options from the likes of Rackspace, which will help deploy an OpenStack cloud in a customer site and then manage it remotely. He cited online-shopping site SnapDeal, which moved from public to private cloud and realized a 78 percent infrastructure cost savings. 

AT&T’s DirectTV division also uses OpenStack to deliver a consistent viewing experience across all viewing platforms, in line with the AT&T Domain 2.0 initiative.

Red Hat had a significant presence, a week after it held its own summit in Boston, with leadership making the case that open source software is key to digital transformation.

“Everyone’s worried about being Uber-ized,” said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, welcoming attendees who stayed the weekend after his company’s meetup. “Traditional companies are terrible at driving innovation.”

Verizon’s Beth Cohen demonstrated a “Cloud in a Box” CPE offering built on OpenStack. Cohen said customers demand security, high performance and speed without complexity.

“The coffee shops of the word just want something to work,” she said. “OpenStack to the rescue.” 

The compact CPE device has LTE built in and is backed by Verizon’s Virtual Network Services for manageability. In one of many live demos on the main stage, Cohen added a new prebuild Viptela SDWAN bundle to an account. The dashboard presents a range of size and security options that partners could enable.

“Automation is the key,” she said. “Orchestration is what delivers that.”

Patrick Weeks, GE Digital Healthcare’s senior director of digital operations, says don’t forget to invite security to the table at the outset, along with problem solvers. Weeks spoke on his company’s strategy of a remotely managed private cloud, delivered in partnership with Rackspace.

“You have to have an impossible goal to achieve what you’re looking for,” said Weeks. His team has been able to migrate 530 applications to the managed private cloud and retire an additional 608 applications while realizing more than $30 million in annual savings and a 49 percent reduction in the on-premises footprint.

Rackspace was a founder of OpenStack, along with NASA. It has a major presence at the Summit and announced a deal with Dell EMC to offer a private cloud as-a-service offering built on Dell EMC compute and storage hardware.

At the Summit, Channel Partners sat down with Rackspace GM of OpenStack private cloud Bryan Thompson and CTO John Engates; watch for more soon.

SUSE drew crowds on the expo floor. The company has a long history in open source and recently closed on its acquisition of OpenStack technology and talent from HPE. SUSE plans to use the assets to expand its IaaS and Cloud Foundry PaaS offerings.

At the event, Channel Partners spoke with Mark Smith, OpenStack marketing manager, and Pete Chadwick, who is responsible for cloud infrastructure strategy and products. Both said the company’s newly revamped channel program will help partners resell open source technology via better training and certification and profitability structures. The channel program focuses on enterprise Linux, software-defined storage, OpenStack cloud and systems management.

At the Summit, the company unveiled SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring, based on the OpenStack Monasca project, for monitoring and managing enterprise OpenStack cloud environments and workloads.

“For the first time, open source is considered the best way to solve hard problems,” said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, addressing the primacy of technology in everything from medical research to manufacturing. “The days of a monolithic application that’s trying to solve every aspect of the stack? That’s dead.”

Instead, work is being chopped up into smaller and smaller components that can be reused.

“Sometimes we talk about OpenStack as one project,” Collier said. However, OpenStack comprises five major projects addressing everything from storage to SDN and identity.

Collier also warned attendees against the “Not Invented Here” syndrome, where the OpenStack community fails to recognize work being done by other OSS groups.

“I know this community can overcome that,” he said. “We have people from 63 countries here.”

The crowd at the Summit numbers around 5,000.

At the Summit, Datera and vScaler announced an official partnership to deliver scalable private clouds for a wide variety of workloads, from high-performance databases to archival storage.

Datera brings its Elastic Data Fabric for policy-driven back-end block storage, and vScaler delivers hardware for multiple tiers using a mix of all-flash and hybrid flash nodes. The idea is to duplicate the ability to assign storage based on data types that’s available in public clouds like AWS on a private cloud infrastructure.

At the Summit, Channel Partners spoke with Flavio Santoni, CRO at Datera, who said target customers are carriers and enterprises and that the company’s EDF software is ideal for MSPs, given its ability to support multitenancy and tailor software-defined storage to customer needs via pre-built policies.

Mirantis had a large presence on the floor and was among nine providers to offer remotely managed private cloud solutions powered by OpenStack through a new category within the OpenStack Marketplace.

Others include Aptira Managed Cloud, Canonical BootStack, Cisco Metacloud, EasyStack ESCaaS, IBM Bluemix Private Cloud Local, Platform9 Managed OpenStack, Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud and UnitedStack UOS.

Fresh off its own summit, Red Hat announced this week its OpenStack Platform 11, the latest version of its IaaS offering, based on OpenStack Ocata.

Continuing the theme of linking operations and services, OpenStack Platform includes CloudForms for managing all Red Hat and OpenStack infrastructure components, continued support for Red Hat Ceph Storage, and introduces the co-location of Red Hat Ceph Storage with OpenStack compute nodes to help simplify data replication among sites, improving disaster recovery for customers.

MSPs will appreciate the ability to create customized profiles for individual services and processes to meet customer needs, as well as expanded support for network function virtualization and VLAN-aware virtual machines.

Veritas announced at the Summit its HyperScale for OpenStack software-defined storage bundle. The product is built on commodity direct-attached storage hardware and includes pre-built integration for Veritas’ data protection offering.  

The channel-focused company says a key feature is a new architecture that distributes storage functionality between separate compute and data planes, with the goal of offloading data management tasks, thus increasing performance. Veritas is a premier sponsor of the OpenStack Summit. 

Imad Sousou, VP of Intel’s software and services group, says Intel engineers presented 33 sessions at the OpenStack Summit.

“OpenStack is enterprise ready,” said Sousou. “We are committed.” He showcased Intel Clear Containers, which have been integrated with both Docker and Kubernetes for security, and a project with Dell EMC on an open-source Intel Rack Scale Design that aggregates compute, networking and storage.

Deutsche Telekom VP Dr. Clemens Hardewig encouraged large telcos and cloud providers to feed code back upstream for long-term success.

“Keep the community strong,” said Hardewig, who also touched on another ongoing theme at the Summit: multi-cloud versus hybrid cloud.

While it may sound like semantics, it’s far from theoretical for companies with an interest in keeping customers within their cloud ecosystems, open or not.

With a hybrid approach, services are run in on-premises and external clouds of the same variety – such as OpenStack. This makes it easier to move workloads, in theory. In a multi-cloud setup, a customer would have a mix of public, private or hybrid clouds, but from different providers.

We spoke with Scott Sneddon, senior director of SDN and cloud at Juniper Networks, who said multi-cloud is the future – along with VMs, bare metal and even mainframes. Watch for more on our discussion with Sneddon.

Target underwrote the Women of OpenStack lounge, complete with a tea bar and s’mores.