OpenStack Spring Summit 2018

Here at SUSE, and indeed across many other organisations, lots of folks are getting ready to travel to Vancouver for the 2018 Spring OpenStack Summit. It’s an exciting time for us all – the opportunity to hear from the team at the OpenStack Foundation about their latest news; to hear from developers around the world on their contributions to the code, their ideas for making things better as well as their advice to other organisations and developers on how to get the most out of OpenStack; the chance to catch up with old friends and ex-colleagues who have moved to different businesses within the OpenStack ecosystem; and of course the chance to explore a new city and to enjoy the best that Vancouver has to offer.

As a relative newcomer to SUSE and a remote worker, it’s a great opportunity for me to connect face-to-face with colleagues around the world that I’ve spoken to and exchanged emails and messages with, as well as some of the team at the Foundation. Having worked with OpenStack since its inception in 2010, I’m also looking forward to seeing lots of familiar faces at various vendor booths, and to talking with customers and prospects about how SUSE OpenStack Cloud can help them to move to a truly software-defined infrastructure. The networking and learning opportunities that the OpenStack Summit offers to attendees are truly invaluable, and with analyst firm 451 Research predicting that the OpenStack market will see a 30% growth rate over the next 3 years, it’s clear that OpenStack is going nowhere but up.

Something for everyone at the OpenStack Summit

With over 200 sessions and workshops over the 4 days that the summit runs for, including 13 from members of the team at SUSE, the opportunity to take a free two-day training course on OpenStack Administration with SUSE, the legendary Monday night Marketplace Mixer and dozens of short talks on a multitude of topics in the SUSE-sponsored Lightning Talk Theatre, there really is something for everyone at the Summit. Whether you want to learn more about using Heat templates to launch pre-configured instances, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes working together, want to get a better understanding of the struggles that non-native English speakers in the OpenStack community may face, or want to attend a workshop on troubleshooting OpenStack clouds, or just want to see who has the best freebies on their booth (I’ll give you a hint – the company name starts with “S” and ends with “USE”. Who else has stuffed chameleons?!), come along to the Summit. We’re in booth B10, looking out over the beautiful Vancouver Harbor. We’ve got a team of experts who can talk to you about software-defined storage, software-defined infrastructure, containers, enterprise Linux and much more. Some of our technical strategists will also be running demonstrations showing how SUSE OpenStack Cloud can interoperate with Ceph and Kubernetes to give businesses an easy way to start using these technologies, and you could have the chance of winning a seaplane tour of Vancouver Harbor by visiting our booth. Did I mention that we’ve also got stuffed chameleons?!