With our mascot, Kangy the Kangaroo, we at Host-Telecom have been bouncing our way around the marketplace on the first day of the OpenStack Summit, talking to other event sponsors about their offerings, where they see the technology going, and also about the consolidation and elevated level of OpenStack user friendliness that we as vendors are enabling to expand the OpenStack user base.
What attendees and vendors are saying
Of course, we’ve also been talking to Summit goers about our OpenStack on bare metal solutions, including data backup and disaster recovery, as well as VMware-to-OpenStack migration. The migration issue has been a hot topic among attendees from both large and small organizations as well as vendors looking toward platform consolidation on one hand, or using specialized services for specific tasks on the other.
It’s common for visitors to tell us they are using OpenStack, VMware, and other proprietary cloud solutions depending on the needs of the projects they are running. And while OpenStack is the theme, there’s something of a throwback to referencing “open source” code with OpenStack taking its place as a cloud technology that is paired with other open software solutions. However, open source isn’t necessarily ubiquitous here in Sydney.
Storage stories vary with the vendor
As I chatted with other Summit vendors, I got multiple perspectives on storage solutions. While Swift is the OpenStack offering for object storage, not everyone sticks to that narrow path, and many never traveled it. IBM folks explained their deep OpenStack roots while mentioning their proprietary storage solutions were completely compatible with OpenStack cloud. Of course Red Hat raises the flag high in favor of Ceph, which is open source code that provides object, block and file storage, while many other vendors are sticking with Swift as they try to bend it to their will, both in terms of code and optimal data infrastructure for reliable scaling. In fact, I’ll be covering optimizing the IT infrastructure to support Swift on Wednesday at 1:50pm.
Meanwhile, our Host-Telecom developers have had a busy day, so let’s take a look at what’s interesting them today.
The developer’s take
Host-Telecom’s development team was busy attending technical presentations all day, including explanations of using OpenStack block storage for workloads, and selecting the best backend from selections such as LVM, Ceph, and other options. While they didn’t come to any conclusions, they learned more about Cinder and the factors to consider when building storage.
Meanwhile our guys also sat in as the Ceph team and folks using it for large OpenStack deployments got into more details with OpenStack+CephFS. With OpenStack deployments integrating distributed file storage solutions for virtual servers to provide fault-tolerance, mobility, and shared states between servers, our experts listened in to the role Ceph is playing in that area, providing horizontally scalable and POSIX-compatible file stores for OpenStack operators.
Speaking of containers… OK, we weren’t, but Roman and Vladimir, our developers on the scene were as they got caught up on the Zun project, which is container orchestration developed for OpenStack. Here they learned about how issues and user needs are being addressed, with new features in the Zaqar Pike release, including dead letter queue, notification retry policy, and other improvements.
And how can we talk about containers without Kubernetes? Roman and Vladimir were hot on the details. They learned about integration points between Kubernetes and OpenStack and how to affect the various automatic processes, with insights into the guts of Kubernetes code and architecture. Our brains are full for today, so let’s talk about some humanitarian issues, including our kangaroo mascot.
Help us give Kangy a real name
Aside from the technical concerns we’re tracking, we are also trying to free our kangaroo as it floats to the top of its enclosure on a sea of business cards. Not only that, if you hate the name “Kangy” as much as our intern Erin Walters does, feel free to head on over to Host-Telecom and offer your suggestions for more inspired appellations! Get on over there anyway as we are broadcasting video live from the Summit three times a day and collecting your questions and input about the topics you’d like us to cover while we are here.
We’re back tomorrow with interviews with industry luminaries, including the Cloud Don, seer of all things OpenStack. See you here on Tuesday, same bat time, same bat channel! In the meantime, Kangy needs your help! Give him/her a real name. Free Kangy!!!
BY
Denise Boehm
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