The OpenStack Summit in Berlin: A Touch of Nostalgia and a Great Deal of Pride

The next OpenStack Summit will be hosted in Berlin from November 13-15. With the event now only a few weeks away, I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking back over the history of OpenStack with a touch of nostalgia and a great deal of pride.

I’m reminded of the old proverb “mighty oaks from little acorns grow”.

That’s certainly true when it comes to OpenStack. What started way back in 2010 as a joint project between Rackspace and NASA has grown into a truly global community. It now boasts over 94,000 members from 676 supporting companies spread across 186 countries. It continues to be one of the fastest growing open source projects, largely because of its ability to adapt and remain at the forefront of all the relevant technology trends.

Given that so much has changed over the past 8 years, this is truly inspirational. OpenStack now goes way beyond its initial remit of simply delivering IaaS services for private and public clouds. It now embraces DevOps, CI/CD, IoT, Edge computing, HPC, Telecoms, NFV and many other use cases, technologies and initiatives.

From a personal perspective, I first heard about OpenStack when I worked at IBM. There were discussions about which open source cloud project the company was going to support.  Once it was decided OpenStack was the way to go, the IBM Power Systems team that I was part of began working on and delivered a solution based on OpenStack – IBM PowerVC.  It was a great introduction to OpenStack and that experience guided me to my next job at Rackspace, where I worked on their private cloud solution powered by OpenStack.  This was at a time when organizations were starting to realize the genuine benefits it could deliver and it was also my first chance to attend an OpenStack Summit (Atlanta 2014).  The excitement and open collaboration of the community was infectious.

These days, I lead the product, technical and solution marketing team at SUSE, which just so happens to have an OpenStack powered solution. SUSE is a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation and was the first to launch a commercially supported enterprise-grade OpenStack distribution back in 2012. Since then, SUSE OpenStack Cloud has become the ideal OpenStack platform for hosting bare metal, virtualized and containerized workloads, with all the agility and scalability needed to support business innovation.

In fact, the beta program for SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 has just been announced. If you want to try out the latest version of the OpenStack platform of choice for enterprise business, you won’t be disappointed. Here’s the link for more information.

At the Berlin Summit, we’ll have live SUSE OpenStack Cloud demos running at our booth, great folks to talk with you about how we can help address your challenges and of course we’ll have some great give-aways. We’ll also be showcasing SUSE CaaS Platform on OpenStack to highlight the benefits of deploying and integrating Kubernetes, as well as SUSE Enterprise Storage to show how Ceph can play a key role in your cloud environment.

We’re also delivering a host of sessions with topics ranging from OpenStack training; monitoring and troubleshooting; security principles; Kubernetes integration; container performance and security; and OpenStack project updates.