You know OpenStack is gaining momentum and recognition when your local meetup group attracts a bunch of developers and operators along with sales and marketing people from across different verticals - and that's exactly what I experienced yesterday at the first user group meetings since the Summit in Portland a few weeks ago.
Our local community seems to have grown tremendously since I have become involved. We have some really talented and intelligent people showing up to share ideas and collaborate - and Sean Roberts (@sarob) has been doing a fantastic job of developing a focus for our user groups as he works on community development for the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors. We're very lucky to be able to support three different meetup groups for beginner, intermediate and advanced users of OpenStack thanks to Sean's great efforts - along with those community members who bother to show up and get involved.
This week's Advanced meetup group was focused around a Havanna Summit review - which meant that the members who were in Portland a few weeks ago got to recap some of the more interesting projects and topics we saw. Some of those included:
Refstack.org - Refstack provides a reference architecture and testing methodology in order for a cloud provider to be able to call itself an OpenStack cloud. This is built around Agile development processes used similar to what is currently used to manage code in the OpenStack Continuous Integration systems. Providers will be required to expose an endpoint for testing purposes and must be capable of passing a series of OpenStack systems tests in order for it to be 'certified' as an OpenStack cloud provider.
DevOps requirements - We discussed the real world requirements for implementing a DevOps approach when attempting to implement infrastructure that scales - and how so many companies are incorrectly thinking that 'free' software meant that there was no cost to implement. This is something that is affecting real world companies as we spoke with one operator yesterday who went through this exact pain with his employers while implementing OpenStack over the past 6 months. Based on his estimation, his implementation of OpenStack requires additional services which will cost approximately twice what the hardware costs amortized over 3-5 years. I'm not sure if this is based on a reliable scientific calculation - but I also don't think he's far off. The same gentleman also discussed his difficulty in building out the hardware infrastructure due to a lack of reference architecture to refer to at the time he was building (see above).
Project RedDwarf - Database as a Service - Project Red Dwarf is a mysql database-as-a-service solution for OpenStack aimed at providing scalable, redundant database solutions on-demand to tenants within the cloud. Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) presented on the design he saw where mysql could be scaled as a service - somewhat similar to a popular public cloud solution's implementation of relational database services. This would be a great solution for deploying OpenStack-on-OpenStack, another huge topic at this year's summit.
There was plenty more to discuss during this meeting, but we only had the room until 5:00 PM and there was a crowd gathering outside - so we said our goodbyes (for now) and planned to meet back at the Yahoo! campus for the beginner and intermediate groups at 7:00.
I arrived back at the Yahoo! campus slightly late, and when I walked in the Intermediate group was chatting it up. We were waiting on Vinay Binnai (@vinaybannai) to come present the blueprint he has been working on with other community members regarding Firewall-as-a-Service. We discussed what a firewall as a service should be with regard to tenant networks and a number of people committed to working on the blueprint in order to move progress along on the project.
All in all, the meetups were really well-run this week. I'm looking forward to the next one on the 16th. If you can make it out to Yahoo in Sunnyvale, come join us! We meet every second Thursday and our meetups are organized at http://www.meetup.com/openstack
Oh yeah, Colin schooled me on continuous integration, a topic which is completely new to me. I'm reading Jez Humble's book "Continuous Deployment" as a result. Funny how those things work out.
