Eric D. Schabell: Impressions at OpenStack Summit Boston 2017

Monday, May 15, 2017

Impressions at OpenStack Summit Boston 2017

impressions openstack summit
This year in Boston, MA I was lucky enough to join the thousands of enthusiastic Stackers at the OpenStack Summit.

This was a chance to take a closer look at the community and direction of the OpenStack as a platform.

The main event is the first day kickoff and features an extended morning of keynotes along with background on progression of OpenStack in the wild and within active enterprise users.

It started with an initial look back at the past year and how much the community has grown, but also showcasing that this growth wasn't just in the development space.



impressions openstack summitLook at the numbers and note the focus on production based deployments:
  • 44% year on year growth of deployments of OpenStack
  • ⅔ of monitored OpenStack deployments are in production
  • Last year, 50% Fortune 100 running OS, this year 5 million cores of compute monitored in the wild
This was followed by keynotes by a series of enterprise users that built their business around OpenStack deployments:
  • GE talked about healthcare migrations into OpenStack private Cloud
    • impressions openstack summit
    • +500 applications migrated
    • +600 applications retired
    • +$30M savings 
  • Verizon telco talked about full solution in NVF, CBN and Edge solutions using OpenStack platform, a company working with Red Hat for years now.
  • US Army talking about cost savings in the Cyber School where they are using OpenStack private Cloud solutions.
    • demo showcased infrastructure as code, uses pipelines to generate new network deployments for a new course deployment.
  • Mirantis talking about their Cloud Platform using crazy noisy intro comic book video.
  • AT&T Entertainment Group with DirectTV Now on OpenStack, pursuing CBN, NFV and Cloud-native culture using programmable infrastructure.
    • impressions openstack summit
    • featured a hybid-cloud strategy leveraging microservices
    • Future is containers, Kubernetes, and more
    • demoed using AppleTV and their app to deliver content
  • EBay running massively scalable containers and Kubernetes deployments on OpenStack
  • Red Hat CEO fire side chat and Red Hat CTO Chris Wright on OpenStack contributions and collaborations for the last 12 years.
While this is just a small sample (there were more), it should give you the basic feel for the massive scale of OpenStack across a variety of enterprises. 

It's supporting private clouds, remotely managed private clouds, programmable infrastructure solutions and hybrid-cloud deployments. Booths in the Marketplace were well attended and spent my time at the demo pod for container based applications delivery in the Cloud with my friends from North America.

impressions openstack summit
There was also a lot of interest in getting hands-on with these projects so pointing them to Boston Java User Group workshop this week which is online.

OpenStack is not dead, it is thriving as it is used throughout the world to support many of the services you personally are using today.

Until next year Stackers, thanks for the fun!