Openstack Summit Fall 2011 – Wrap-up and overview

I’m back from the OpenStack design summit and conference, just held in Boston, MA. It was a fantastic week, with the first three days dedicated to the design summit – getting down and dirty with the details, and the last two dedicated to the conference portion – talks and panels about folks actively using OpenStack, and a little wrap-up and overview from the project technical leads of the next 6 month roadmap for the core and incubation projects in OpenStack.

One thing that was intended as new, and I think worked well, was the splitting of the conference and design summit. It really made it a lot easier to be involved in the technical details and not have to choose between that and listening to folks talk to what they’re Openstack experiences have been, governance models and choices, and so forth. As an active contributor to (and general jack-of-all-trades with) a number of the OpenStack projects, it’s hard enough to balance my focus between the technical sessions.

There was also a ton of news related to OpenStack that is just fantastic for the community. Rackspace is starting to form out a foundation to run OpenStack long term, and the governance round-table at the conference made it clear that pretty much everyone agreed to a thoughtful, careful process to set it up to really make a long term run with OpenStack. There was notable consensus on ideas and vision of how to set up governance, including taking some long and deep looks at how other successful open source foundations have been set up, and looking to those foundations to learn what’s been successful, and what they might have done differently.

There was also the entrance of Hewlett Packard very publicly actively into the OpenStack world. Back in September, they said they’d be there, and with the conference they have committed hardware and time to continuous integration efforts. They were notably involved in the design summit as well, hosting a couple of sessions and getting actively involved in others. And I think most pleasing to me, they are actively submitting code contributions to the OpenStack core projects. I think it’s a little odd that they’re all coming in as “HP Nova Contributors“, but I’m glad to see it.

With HP running their cloud offering on OpenStack, they’re getting deeper in the details of the code. Dell’s been focusing their efforts on the amazing OpenStack deployment tool: Crowbar, and it seems clear to me that HP is taking their interest quite a bit deeper into the core projects.

I won’t even do justice the the individual project roadmaps from the summit – I think that the most of the project technical leads are likely recovering this weekend from an intensely focused week. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll see them hit the mailing list – and from what I saw from the sessions in the conference, there’s going to be some hard choices coming up on where to expend resources. Every one of the projects has more that they want to do than they will be able to smoothly accomplish in the next 6 months. We’ll see the details hitting the blueprints in the very near future I’m sure. Suffice to say that if you’ve been thinking about getting involved in OpenStack, now is very definitely the time to jump in – there’s a ton to do, and a lot of really interesting problems to solve in getting it done.