OpenStack Summit Portland 2013 - Unconference Edition

Just as the Nicira NVP session by Dan Wendlandt wrapped up, I checked out the handy OpenStack Summit schedule app on my Android platform to find that none of the upcoming sessions were of particular interest - so I headed over to check out the Unconference schedule.

What is Unconference you may ask?

Unconference was an opportunity for anyone with an OpenStack-related topic they wanted to discuss to write their name and topic in a time slot on a set of easels in the main hallway.  Slots were given out to speakers on a first-come first-served basis - once the slots were all claimed the list was finalized.  I was rather delighted by the list of sessions being offered. Unconference was a smorgasbord of OpenStack-related content that had some really interesting topics throughout the summit.  In fact, Unconference was somewhat of a regular destination for me.  Any time I couldn't find something of interest in the general sessions Unconference came through for me.

I figured out that Room A104 was my next destination as I wanted to see Mirantis present on Savanna - Hadoop as a Service on OpenStack.  I walked into a packed room with standing room only, found my place over against the side wall and tuned in to hear what the Mirantis team had to say about their new project.  The back of the room filled up with other attendees and Mirantis team members smiling proudly - and rightfully so, these guys are doing some really interesting things with OpenStack.  By the time they were ready to start, the room was as packed as could possibly be.  I don't think Mirantis expected this much hoopla over Hadoop as a Service.

Before we get too far, lets just put it out there - I'm weary about calling everything 'X' as a Service on OpenStack.  Sure you can call it 'X-as-a-service' but isn't that the whole idea of addressing a pool of resources and shouldn't everything be made available as a service that's available in a service catalog?  I would have put this up as my own Unconference topic had I gotten to the easel early enough - and it probably isn't the last you'll see of this subject from me - but I digress.

The developers went through a 20 minute presentation on the features of Savanna, talked about the future road map a little bit and then they did something that defied all odds - a live demo which actually worked!  The Mirantis team was able to demonstrate how the Savanna GUI integrates fairly simply with the OpenStack Horizon dashboard as a plugin.  In the interface, the user can easily pick the base snapshot image on which to base their Hadoop deployment, type in a number of worker and tracker nodes and away OpenStack goes building out the requested Hadoop environment.

Just a few minutes later, the presenter from Mirantis logged into the tracker node and submitted a job to the cluster to calculate Pi - a job that it did with relative ease and kicked back the result in what seemed like almost no time at all.  I was fairly amazed at how quickly the Hadoop cluster was stood up with a name node, a tracker node and 5 worker nodes - from the first provisioning steps to running a job in under 10 minutes.

After the demonstration the floor was opened up to questions and comments - of which there were plenty.  Interest in Savanna was high and there seemed to be a number of developers from other projects watching this one closely.  After the tasty preview offered in this session, I'm looking forward to seeing more of what Savanna can do in future releases.  During the conference, it was announced that Hortonworks, Red Hat and Mirantis will be working on this project jointly, so I would expect to see some really amazing developments in the not-so-distant future.

Keep up-to-date on the Savanna project at http://www.savanna.mirantis.com

OpenStack Summit Portland 2013 - A Week in Review, Day 1 Part 1

It's been just over a week since leaving the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon and what a crazy week it has been so far.  Prior to the OpenStack Summit, I can honestly say that the amount of cloud opportunities I discussed on a regular basis - well, let's just say they weren't that regular....

In the past week, I have had so many opportunities to discuss private cloud with our customers, and I am becoming very optimistic about the opportunities being presented to me.  I came home with a ton of enthusiasm for OpenStack clouds and I'm just keeping that momentum going.  That said, I'm going to provide a detailed review of my OpenStack Summit experience here over multiple posts.  This is, in part, to share my love and joy for the OpenStack community and what I experienced in Portland - and also for my own selfish joy of getting to re-live the experience all over again.

I arrived in Portland late on Sunday night and flew in on a plane that was full of stackers.  After a horrible night of sleep thanks to being in a hotel right along the 1st. street train line, I decided to walk into the city and get myself a green smoothie for breakfast before walking across the Steel Bridge and just over a mile to the convention center.  It was a nice morning out, and I like the idea of walking around a city I haven't been in to get a feel for it.  I used Yelp to find Kure, ordered myself a delicious green monster for breakfast and walked on over to the convention center.

The line for registration seemed to go on forever - until I figured out I was in the wrong line.  I found the right line and got checked in by a team of guys with iPads running some custom app.  I wonder if it was powered by Nova Compute?  After some wait, my badge printed, I was handed my OpenStack hoodie (which has become like my security blanket) and off I went to my first day of sessions.

First up was "Getting from Grizzly to Havana: A Dev Ops Upgrade Pattern" which was very well presented by Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) from Dell.  But first, an interlude - Rob started off by having the group record the chorus to his upcoming hit parody of Pawn Shop based on OpenStack (http://t.co/rX8V8WqMAc) ....  Then he went on to talk about  Dell's Crowbar management toolkit which can be used to manage an OpenStack deployment on Dell reference hardware.  Since I had been asked this question earlier by a customer, my favorite takeaway from that session was "Upgrading from Essex to Grizzly is probably not a good idea."  The real focus of the session was on using the layered DevOps approach to managing infrastructure as being a key component to upgrading.  In a layered methodology, configurations are applied first to bare hardware, then at an operating system level and, at each step, additional custom configurations can be applied.  This allows for a more granular approach to managing infrastructure and all of its components using a organized, systematical approach which is much simpler to manage than using legacy methodology.  More focus is spent on delivery of platforms and applications, which is where real business value is realized.

Today, we don't have a clear upgrade path as OpenStack moves from one release to the next, but the need for this type of support has a tremendous effect on OpenStack's acceptance in the enterprise.  I've been working on a variety of these solutions, and I just find that there are features in one platform that others are lacking - and vice versa.  What if you have a truly commodity infrastructure?  Which tool set do you invest in?  This will all be discussed later in a session by Jason Cannavale from Rackspace...