The SUSE Flight Crew at the OpenStack Summit

One of the biggest (and certainly my favourite) events in the open source calendar is the twice-yearly OpenStack Summit. This week, SUSE and thousands of other IT professionals have been in beautiful British Columbia visiting Vancouver to discuss the latest developments in the world of OpenStack, share learnings and network. Held at the Vancouver Convention Centre, situated next to the Olympic Cauldron from the 2010 Winter Olympics on Vancouver Harbour. Conference delegates had the most incredible views from the marketplace floor of seaplanes taking off and landing throughout the day.

The SUSE Flight Crew were one of the most visible teams at the show, thanks to our striking pilot uniforms, replete with authentic caps, jackets and epaulets. In fact, they were so authentic that actual pilots in a nearby hotel mistook some of us for colleagues! In addition to our booth team, we were also joined by a number of our excellent developers and engineers – many of whom were speaking at the event and are renowned experts in their fields.

The topics covered at the event were many and diverse – the keynotes saw experts from around the world sharing their experiences, providing live demos of exciting developments and giving their thoughts on the future of open source and specifically OpenStack.

The OpenStack Summit Keynotes

Jonathan Bryce and Lauren Sell from the OpenStack Foundation introduced and compered the keynote sessions on Monday. Mark Collier, also from the OpenStack Foundation, began by stating that we all “build and operate open infrastructure”, and then talked in more detail around the operators of open infrastructure. Some of the case studies that he highlighted included the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research’s “Collaboratory”, in which they are combining lots of different open source technologies to power their infrastructure, which then empowers the scientists who are searching for a cure for cancer. Mark said that they were able to operate their infrastructure at 40% less cost by using open components. Operators are seeing increasing pressure for cost and compliance, as well as to do more for their businesses and their end users, to incorporate emerging technologies like containers and serverless.

They’re also being asked to do more in more places – cloud isn’t just limited to data centres any more, with the rise of edge computing, we need to be able to run systems in locations and on technologies that we wouldn’t have expected to previously (i.e. edge computing).

Other hot topics covered included Zuul, which is intended to drive CI/CD teams with a focus on project gating and interrelated projects; Kata Containers, which promises “the speed of containers with the security of VMs”; and Airship, which aims to help make lifecycle management for open infrastructure projects repeatable and predictable.

Sessions with the SUSE team

One of the most popular sessions from the SUSE team was presented by Keith Berger and Nicolas Bock – “Leveraging your OpenStack Troubleshooting Toolbox”. This was a collaborative workshop, which aimed to help builders and operators of OpenStack clouds to better understand the tools and techniques available to help them to troubleshoot their environments. This proved so popular that a repeat session is already being planned for the OpenStack Berlin Summit in November this year. Our free OpenStack Administration training was fully booked as it always is, and meant that a good number of attendees left armed with the skills and knowledge needed to pass the Certified Exams. We were also lucky to have Colleen Murphy from our cloud dev team speaking about Enabling Cloud-Native Applications with Application Credentials in Keystone. As a very highly regarded authority on Keystone, this was a great opportunity for her to share her experiences and passion with a large audience. There are plenty more recorded sessions available online at the official Summit website, so if you missed any of them, check out the site.

Whether you attended the Summit to learn, to teach, to pick up swag or to network, there’s no denying that we have a vibrant, multi-cultural community of builders, developers, operators and more all collaborating to ensure that OpenStack continues to grow and to power some of the largest software-defined infrastructures in the world. I’m looking forward to meeting more of our European community next month at the Poland OpenStack Day in Krakow, and of course at the Berlin Summit in November.

SUSECON 2019

Speaking of swag, it’s hard to deny that the SUSE booth won the best in show award (note, not an actual award!). We had attendees lining up to try their luck on our scratch cards, with many walking away with Bluetooth speakers, headphones, cuddly Geeko the Chameleons, SUSE socks and more. Our grand prize was a trip to the legendary SUSECON, which is being held in April 2019 in Nashville, Tennessee. One very lucky person walked away with that, but if it wasn’t you, tickets are still available. This event is one that is widely looked forward to for the chance to learn through keynotes, take certification exams, meet our partners and sponsors, and of course to enjoy some German hospitality in Tennessee. Put the date in your diary (April 1^st-5^th 2019), and I hope to see you there!