OpenStack Design Summit – wrap-up and links

This fall’s OpenStack design summit in San Diego is wrapped up, and we’re all back to being distributed across the globe. I was pleased with the summit, and pleased to see the project I’m helping coordinate (Keystone) move forward with a lot of ideas, growing interest in contributions, and concrete feedback from a wide mix of folks.

The design sessions are definitely less about actually hacking code than they were a year ago, offset though with the increasing diversity of backgrounds and interests participating in the sessions. The core team developers joined me through-out Thursday and drove most of the discussions, with fantastic input from David Chadwick, Khaja, Ryan Lane. There were way more people in the sessions than that, but to me these three represent a set of fresh inputs from folks with a deep academic background, previous experience building identity systems, and active operator points of view. They and the the previous contributors provided tremendous feedback, asked great questions, and set the stage for a lot of interesting ideas.

This year all the project technical leads gave a “state of the project” overview, but we did that on Tuesday – so like John Griffith (the project technical lead for cinder), I was doing the ‘state of the project’ routine prior to getting the feedback and doing the brainstorming in the sessions. The slides from that presentation are online at http://www.slideshare.net/ccjoe/oct-2012-state-of-project-keystone if you’re interested. The coordinators all video-taped those segments, as I understand it, they should be appearing on the OpenStack channel in Youtube in the next couple of days.

There was also a very active session led by Gabriel Hurley seeking to drive more continuity into the OpenStack APIs, and a matching session by Doug Hellman and Dean Troyer for the OpenStack CLIs. The continued focus on bringing in new ideas while keeping the interfaces consistent and clear is a great sign for the project overall, and I was pleased to see a large number of like minded folks wanting to continue to move things forward in those areas.

This was also the first summit under the auspices of the OpenStack Foundation – they all met for an extended period of time early in the conference, and the Technical Committee managed to pull of a first all-in-person meeting over dinner and scattered conversation Tuesday evening.

And not at all related to any core projects or overall effort: check out the very creative riff on the OpenStack theme Dope’n’Stack, (video on YouTube as well). Gabriel and Erik were working their tails off prior to and during the conference to pull this off, culminating in a great presentation Wednesday evening at Piston’s party. (I was disappointed that Gabriel lost the mohawk for the summit, but he said he was sick of wearing it after three weeks).