OpenStack Summit Tokyo - Day 1

Kon'nichiwa from Tokyo, Japan where the 11th semi-annual OpenStack Summit is officially underway! This event has come a long way from its first gathering, more than five years ago, where 75 people gathered in Austin, Texas to learn about OpenStack in its infancy. That's a sharp contrast with the 5,000+ people in attendance here in what marks Asia's second OpenStack Summit.

The event kicked off this morning with Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation welcoming the crowd to the largest OpenStack Summit ever outside of North America. He was then followed on stage by technologists from various organizations focusing on real-world use cases, including Egle Sigler from Rackspace, and Takuya Ito from Yahoo, who shared their experience and use case with OpenStack at Yahoo Japan.

Red Hat had its share of news and sessions as well. A press release hit the wire yesterday highlighting FICO's use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, along with Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Ceph Storage as the basis of its cloud infrastructure. As the announcement noted, moving to an OpenStack and Ceph-based cloud has not only helped FICO reduce time to market by 50 percent and costs by 30 percent compared to previous infrastructure implementations, but it has helped transform FICO into a Software-as-Service (SaaS) company, helping to bring in more than $10 million in sales to new customers in expanded markets.

In another press release, it was announced that Dualtec Cloud Builders, part of the UOLDiveo group, selected Red Hat to deploy Brazil’s first OpenStack-based cloud. Working with Red Hat to design and deploy its integrated, OpenStack-based cloud environment in just 45 days, Dualtec has improved operational efficiency by 35 percent.

A third press release, with Dell, announced that Yale-NUS College, Singapore's first liberal arts college, has created a hybrid cloud – one of the region's first – based on Red Hat and Dell solutions. With Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, a comprehensive solution that supports organizations on their journey from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-powered clouds – running on a certified platform of Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell Networking, Yale-NUS College has created a hybrid cloud platform to gives its researchers, students, and administrators access to automated, self-service processes for server requests and enable faster deployment.

There were also eight Red Hat-related sessions at OpenStack Summit today. One of the most interesting was a customer panel, moderated by Red Hat's Darrell Jordan-Smith, VP of Worldwide Service Provider Sales, entitled “OpenStack's Success with NFV in the Telecommunications Industry.” Customer panelists represented TELUS, China Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, exploring how OpenStack and network functions virtualization (NFV) has become one of the telecommunication industry’s first choice for meeting rigorous networking requirements of high reliability, low latency, and massive scalability. They also shared real-world experiences and lessons learned deploying OpenStack for NFV.

Vijay Chebolu and Vinny Valdez, led a popular session entitled “A Day in the Life of an OpenStack & Cloud Architect.” The pair detailed all of the tasks required to be an OpenStack Architect, while stressing that careful and proper planning of OpenStack product-grade deployments is fast becoming a necessity.

In his session “Building Web Applications using OpenStack Swift,” Christian Schwede explained how Swift makes an ideal storage solution for web applications that need to store large volumes of data, be it photos, videos, or any other larger type of media data. He then highlighted several useful features within Swift and detailed how application developers can leverage these features with AngularJS and Django, two increasing popular web frameworks.

In the afternoon, Ethan Gafford teamed with NetApp to deliver a talk entitled “Manila and Sahara: Crossing the Desert to the Big Oasis.” After defining the two services and their inherent synergies, they explained how Manila and Sahara act in concert to solve a variety of Big Data challenges. They also examined the joint integration work occurring between the two projects, and ended by presenting a Sahara data processing job running with binaries, data sets, and results hosted in Manila file shares mounted on a Sahara cluster.

Later, in “Running an OpenStack Cloud for Several Years and Living to Tell the Tale,” Alexandre Maumené and Gaëtan Trellu shared common issues, and lessons learned from the Essex release to the present. Their talk included interesting first hand accounts such as recovering from outages, storage issues, monitoring and more. Throughout the session, they highlighted frequent challenges as well as tricks and tips for OpenStack success.

Ethan Gafford then led an interesting session entitled “Data Processing Is Made of People: A Case Study in Role-Empathic API Design in Sahara.” Data processing users left Ethan's talk with details on a powerful model for easing communication between development and operations in Sahara. OpenStack contributors on the other hand received a refreshed perspective on the importance of understanding not only the use case, or even “the user,” but the many roles within an OpenStack customer organization.

Red Hat presented in two partner sessions as well. In Dell's guest session, Nick Barcet, Red Hat's Director of OpenStack Product Management, presented his perspective on exactly what it will take to make OpenStack completely mainstream. Reviewing feedback compiled from enterprise users, he identified features and key capabilities for mainstream deployments. The discourse then shifted to how Dell, Red Hat, and Intel are collaborating across multiple OpenStack projects to fill the gaps between requirements for mainstream adoption and the features and capabilities available today.

In an Intel session, entitled “Cloud for All: Rapid Deployment of OpenStack Clouds,” Nick Barcet presented again, discussed our collaboration with Intel to drive enterprise-ready features upstream. He then detailed the collaborations with Dell and Cisco under the Red Hat-Intel OnRamp to Enterprise Private Cloud program to deliver a complete private cloud solution. He explained that the jointly engineered solutions allow enterprise customers to transform their data centers into public cloud-like infrastructure, while retaining the existing security, compliance and control needed for internal and external customers.

Needless, to say it was a busy first day, and a great way to kick off the conference. If you're at the event, make sure to stop by our booth, located at space P7 in the exhibit hall, watch one of four demos related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and related products, and pick up a free tee shirt while you're there.

Heading up tomorrows schedule (Wednesday) is another full day of Red Hat-related sessions. Here's an easy list for reference and be sure to stop by:

Wednesday October 28th

We look forward to talking about OpenStack with you at our booth or one of our sessions tomorrow. Remember, for real time event updates, follow us on Twitter at @RedHatCloud or @RedHat. We’ll also post Wednesday’s daily recap tomorrow by the end of the day, so keep an eye out for it. See you tomorrow for another exciting day in Tokyo!

Sayōnara (さようなら)!