OpenStack in Action! - Paris, France

Last Wednesday was held a one-day event about OpenStack organized by Rackspace, UShareSoft and eNovance. OpenStack is a rising open-source Cloud framework.

The project was started last year and succeeded in gathering a vibrant community and getting support from companies. It is interesting to note that OpenStack is entirely community-driven: no "self-appointed dictator for life" nor "leading industrial sponsor".

The event was structured around various presentations by the OpenStack community. The first speaker was OpenStack founder Vishvananda "Vish" Ishaya who presented the project (how it started, its architecture and gouvernance), followed by Thierry Carrez (OpenStack Release Manager) who dived into the internals of OpenStack. Dell presented their contribution to OpenStack, including Crowbar, an open-source deployment solution for OpenStack, and their new all-inclusive, turnkey OpenStack commercial package.

OpenStack will be the core of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Cloud solution, Canonical presented their OpenStack orchestration solution "Juju". Talks from eNovance and UShareSoft were more geared towards best practices for Cloud-infrastructure management and sharing. Clouds bring more flexibility but they also change the way we manage computing infrastructures: when a node is down, you just migrate the service to another node (hence the Cloud motto: "replace, then repair"). eNovance announced the upcoming beta of the first commercial OpenStack offer in Europe.

Haïkel Guémar is software engineer at SysFera, and a veteran Fedora contributor. He is interested in Cloud computing and the new challenges it brings to manage large infrastructures.