OpenStack Israel 2015 – The Road to The Enterprise
What an adventure! This year’s OpenStack Israel event was an awesome end to the EMEA tour of the OpenStack conferences. We heard from top telecoms firms, big banks, and some of the biggest OpenStack proponents in the tech world. The conference had over 400 stackers from many small and large enterprises from around the world as well as ten sponsors with some great demos and swag for the crowd.
The Vibe
The day started off with great morning weather with the warm sun and blue sky making way for what was sure to be a really stellar event.
The event was held at Cinematheque Tel Aviv, since we wanted our Stackers to be sitting in style, as we knew we had some great sessions in store for the day, on top of the good food (thanks to our amazing sponsors and the Foundation who made it all possible), and overall good mood, which really set the pace for the entire day. This rocking vibe held all the way through the after party at the nearby pub, capping off a jam-packed day full of OpenStack goodness.
Of course, the most important part of any conference is the sessions. And we had loads of different talks.
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It’s All About the Enterprise
Our keynotes really cemented the notion for us that OpenStack is ready to break out into the enterprise. We had both Deutsche Telekom’s Axel Clauberg and TD Bank’s Srinivas Sarathy talking about what brought them to the realization that OpenStack was the way forward from an agility perspective as well as technological. They also gave us a look into the cultural change, from a DevOps perspective, of what needed to change internally in order to get the whole company on board with OpenStack. Nick Barcet of Red Hat echoed the notion that OpenStack is really ready for the enterprise, and automation is the key to making OpenStack work.
Looks like OpenStack has really matured so much in just five years that it is ready for the big leagues.
The Talks
With three inspiring tracks to choose from, OpenStack Israel really pushed to give the community the variety they asked for. Our tracks consisted of Network, Compute, Storage, related OSS projects, Ops, and Orchestration, and workshops on OpenStack automation and deployment.
Monty Taylor opened the set up with a great session about how to move OpenStack forward now that it is a “household” name in the world of cloud engineering. Rackspace’s Kevin Jackson walked us through a Disney-inspired, and quite amusing, talk about how to architect for the cloud (the talk was call “How to Build a Snowman”). Florian Haas, the man behind hastexo and OpenStack wizard, gave the most technical talk, a mini-workshop, which introduced users to OpenStack Heat, cloud-init, and “the hidden gems in cloud-config.” Users actually learned how to deploy Heat orchestration templates and optimize instance configuration with cloud-init and cloud-config.
On the Network, Compute, Storage side, talks ranged from Docker to Neutron and Swift, all the way to big data. The OSS, Ops, and Orchestration talks also saw great talks on how to get moving with OpenStack as well as deep dives in configuring your OpenStack environment.
This classic OpenStack track began with Red Hat’s Nir Yechiel going right into a review of the various plugins for Neutron. Yaron Haviv then gave us some insight into the optimal ways to build Big Data and IoT applications on top of OpenStack infrastructure. Toni Segura Puimedon from Midokura gave us the skinny on the issues with Docker networking and how to use network virtualization to enhance Docker Swarm. From there, we moved on to High Availability with Livnat Peer and Arthur Berezin from Red Hat, followed by running compute inside Swift, and ending with a session on the convergence of storage and compute in OpenStack.
Looking For More?
We had such an awesome time at this year’s OpenStack Israel event and we hope you did as well. If you couldn’t make it, we look forward to seeing you next year!
And for those looking to watch the superb talks, look no further:
You can watch all the talks in full right here.
Grab all the slide decks at this link.
Pore over the photos over here.