OpenStack Summit San Diego 2012

The OpenStack Summit in San Diego was the place to be last week. I attended and wanted to share my observations. There was a lot of participation and energy. It was sold out with over 1300 people attending and about 35 vendors displaying their products.  Previous summits were developer forums. This time the format was expanded and there were hundreds of sessions in many categories including case studies, industry analysis as well as the usual develop sessions. See, http://openstacksummitfall2012.sched.org/ for a list of the session.

What is Openstack and What Does it Do?
OpenStack (www.openstack.org) is a foundation that manages an open source cloud computing platform. It was founded in 2010 out of a project that was started by NASA and RackSpace to build their cloud infrastructure. Their mission is “To produce the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.” OpenStack focuses on the core infrastructure for compute, storage, images and networking. There is a large ecosystem of vendors providing tools do the things that OpenStack does not do.

OpenStacks consists of modules to configure cloud computing resources. The components are the Nova Compute Service, Swift Storage Service, Glance Image Service and Quantum Network Service. They automate the functions that are required to set up these services. OpenStack lets organizations quickly provision and reprovision compute resources. Even with virtualization it can take days to fully set up a virtual server, networking and storage. Organizations want this to happen in minutes whether they are offering a commercial service or an internal IT service.