Developing for OpenStack APIs – My Experience Giving My First Summit Talk

Last month, I visited Austin, Texas to participate in the latest Openstack Summit. It was my first visit to Austin and, boy, did I fall in love with this city. Great vibe, nice southern look and feel and amazing nightlife. The Summit, of course, was great! It was packed, people were energized, and everyone was excited to learn about the new trends in Openstack. The keynote sessions were especially interesting with some great live demos.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised with how Openstack momentum just keeps growing in light of all the new technologies that are popping up left and right.

Cloudify – Intelligent Cloud Orchestration Done Better. Download Free.  Go

Back to the talk. So, Ran Ziv and I gave a talk called “Developing with Openstack APIs” where we shared our combined experience building Cloudify, a cloud orchestrator, which has to work with nearly every aspect of the OpenStack API (and any other cloud API)  and do it at scale and high concurrency.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Building a cloud orchestrator is not like building any other cloud application. Not because it is more challenging, they’re all challenging…but because an orchestrator needs to expose the full range of functionality that the underlying cloud exposes. If the orchestrator can’t provide the full range of cloud services, what good is it ultimately?
That is why integrating with the cloud SDK correctly requires users to have access to the full range of API functions and parameters through the orchestration template. In this talk we’ll describe the techniques we used to expose the full OpenStack SDK to Cloudify blueprints, some of the pitfalls encountered, and how we overcame them.

In addition, we wanted to share our approach of how exposing the cloud API through TOSCA can make interacting with OpenStack programmatically, an easier and more consistent experience.
My impression was that the part where we covered pitfalls and potential gotchas we encountered drew the most attention from the audience and also invited reactions and stories from the audience about similar experiences they had.
This was the first Openstack Summit talk I have ever given after participating in several Summit events, as well as instructing some Openstack classes in Israel, and it was a really fun experience. I look forward to doing it again.