Showing posts with label Vancouver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vancouver. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Getting ready for the OpenStack Vancouver summit

Yesterday, I just realized that in the month of April I did not published any blog post.

Today is already April 21.  What have I done in these 21 day?

I was in fact getting ready for the OpenStack summit in Vancouver next month.  After pondering for quite a long time I decided that I will make the investment and attend the OpenStack summit.  It is unfortunate that my employer will not sponsor me to go to this conference. :(

While I was making the decision to see if it is worth going to the summit, I made a tweet about my contemplation and Jesse Proudman (@blueboxjesse -Founder and CTO of .) replied - What do you want to accomplish by attending?  That helped me to make the decision as well as helping me to define my objective for this trip.

There are 2 objectives that I wanted to accomplished in the summit:
  1. Get a jump start on OpenStack
  2. Meet people in the OpenStack community.

Get a jump start on OpenStack
I have discovered that the weekend before the summit there is a upstream training.  This is a hands on training in which all the students will pick a bug in OpenStack and fix it.  The great thing about this upstream training is that it does not end after the 2 day training in Vancouver.  We are assigned a mentor to help us with another 10 hours so to make sure we are able to commit our fix to OpenStack.

To prepare for this training, I have also invested in getting a previous generation Dell XPS 13.  I had the Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD drive.  Incidentally, Dell pick XPS 13 to ship with Ubuntu and advertise as "Designed for Developer".

The Dell XPS that I bought is loaded with Windows 8.1 and I did not want to wipe out the Windows OS and I decided to configure the XPS to duel boot from Windows and Ubuntu.  The process is smoother that I thought.

Last night I have picked 3 bugs and replied to the upstream training stating that I am interested in fixing them.

On this coming weekend, I am going to load DevStack onto my desktop running Ubuntu 12.04 first and play around it and the load DevStack on my Dell XPS which I will bring to the summit.

Meet people in the OpenStack community
There is a Chinese proverb saying "to talk to a knowledgeable person is better than studying a book for 10 years". I still remember the inspirational conversation with Gabriel Chapman (@Bacon_Is_King) at the Puppet conference and that changed my perspective in being a generalist in the technology field and he had motivated me to engage in giving presentation as well as becoming a blogger.  I have signed up for the vBrownBag TeckTalk at the OpenStack summit.

I have picked my sessions to attend and all of them are networking related.  I have been working on networking for over 20 years.  With this background in networking I think I should jump into Neutron.  Plus this also align my desire to take the VMware VCIX-NV certification exam this year.  VMware NSX and Cisco ACI both interface with OpenStack Neutron.

There are a lots of people that I follow on Twitter, and I am hoping to have a chance to meet them in person.

Let's see what inspiration I can get by talking to one of you.




Tuesday, February 17, 2015

My Journey to the Cloud - a slight chance for a big jump



OpenStack has 2 summits each year where developers, users and administrator gather together to share their knowledge, experience, concerns or ideas about OpenStack.

Usually the first summit is held around the April or May time frame in North America and the second summit is held around October or November time frame. Starting 2013 the second summit is held in other parts of the world such as Hong Kong and Paris.

In 2015, the first OpenStack summit will be in Vancouver Canada from May 18 to May 22.
 image source: http://www.hitechagenda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/OpenStack-Summit-2015.jpeg

One thing unique about OpenStack summit is that the OpenStack community can vote for what is being presented in the summit.  While a lot of other technical conferences have the Call for Paper in which everyone can submit their speaking proposal, the sessions are selected by a committee. 

I have wanted to attend an OpenStack Summit for a long time.  I believe this is a good chance for me to get more knowledge as well as to meet different people in this OpenStack community.  Last year when I participated in the Virtual Design Master, it taught me the value of a community.

On my journey to the cloud, I am on my own.  My company will not send me to any conference.  Last year I have written 20 blogs on OpenStack and I though this will be good if I can translate what I have written into a presentation. Speaker at the OpenStack Summit got a full conference pass for free.

Well, here I am, I have submitted a proposal to present at the OpenStack Summit and the topic is “What a Beginner should know about OpenStack”

I believe my presentation will be beneficial to those who are new to OpenStack.  I have learned that there are a lots of attendees to OpenStack summit are beginners.


If I can attend the OpenStack Summit, for sure I will write about my experience and share in this blog what I learned during that intense and exciting week in Vancouver.

This coming OpenStack Summit has the following tracks:


Enterprise IT Strategies
Enterprise IT leaders building their cloud business case are facing unique requirements to manage legacy applications, new software development and shadow IT within industry regulations and business constraints. In this track, we'll discuss how OpenStack is meeting enterprise IT technical requirements and cover topics relevant to planning your cloud strategy, including culture change, cost management, vendor strategy and recruiting.
Telco Strategies
Telecommunications companies are one of the largest areas of growth for OpenStack around the world. In this track, we'll feature content relevant to these users, addressing the evolution of the network and emerging NFV architecture, the global IaaS market and role of telcos, industry regulation and data sovereignty, and industry cooperation around interoperability and federation.
How to Contribute
The How to Contribute track is for new community members and companies interested in contributing to the open source code, with a focus on OpenStack community processes, tools, culture and best practices.
Planning Your OpenStack Project
If you are new to OpenStack or just getting started planning your cloud strategy, this track will cover the basics for you to evaluate the technology, understand the different ways to consume OpenStack, review popular use cases and determine your path forward.
Products, Tools & Services
OpenStack's vibrant ecosystem and the different ways to consume it are among it's greatest strengths. In this track, you'll hear about the latest products, tools and services from the OpenStack ecosystem.
User Stories
Sharing knowledge is a core value for the OpenStack community. In the user stories track, you'll hear directly from enterprises, service providers and application developers who are using OpenStack to address their business problems. Learn best practices, challenges and recommendations directly from your industry peers.
Community Building
OpenStack is a large, diverse community with more than 75 user groups around the world. In the community building track, user group leaders will share their experiences growing and maturing their local groups, community leaders will discuss new tools and metrics, and we'll shine a spotlight on end user and contributing organizations who have experienced a significant internal culture change as participants of the OpenStack community.
Related OSS Projects
There is a rich ecosystem of open source projects that sit on top of, plug into or support the OpenStack cloud software. In this track, we'll demonstrate the capabilities and preview the roadmaps for open source projects relevant to OpenStack. This presentation track is separate from the open source project working sessions, which allow the contributors to those projects to gather and discuss features and requirements relevant to their integration with OpenStack. A separate application for those working sessions will be announced.
Operations
The Operations track is 100% focused on what it takes to run a production OpenStack cloud. Every presenter has put endless coffee-fueled hours into making services scale robustly, never go down, and automating, automating, automating. The track will cover efficient use of existing tools, managing upgrades and staying up-to-date with one of the world's fastest-moving code bases and "Architecture show and tell," where established clouds will lead a discussion around their architecture. If you're already running a cloud, you should also join us in the Ops Summit for some serious working sessions (no basic intros here) on making the OpenStack software and ops tools for it better.
Cloud Security
The Security track will feature technical presentations, design and implementation discussions relevant to cloud security and OpenStack.
Compute
Computing is a broad topic, but this track will offer technical presentations, use cases, and design and implementation specific to the OpenStack Compute project. Topics will include new features, integration with tools and technologies and configuration as well as hypervisors, HA, schedulers, bare metal computing and databases.
Cloud Storage
The Storage track will feature technical presentations, use cases, design and implementation discussions relevant to cloud storage and OpenStack.
Cloud Networking
The Networking track will feature technical presentations, use cases, design and implementation discussions relevant to cloud networking, specifically topics like SDN, scale, IPv6, policies, HA and performance.
Public & hybrid clouds
The public and hybrid clouds track will cover issues and considerations unique to organizations who are making use of public or hybrid cloud infrastructure, or are considering this approach.
Hands-On Labs (90 minutes)
Hands-on Labs offers a window into OpenStack training for operators and application developers. Sessions are typically 90 minutes and set classroom style for interaction. Bring your laptop and walk away with OpenStack skills.
Targeting Apps for OpenStack Clouds
A large community of application developers and ecosystem of development tools is growing around OpenStack. This track will be for users who are building and deploying applications on OpenStack clouds, and cover topics like automating and managing application deployment, application software configuration, SDKs, tools, PaaS and big data.
Cloudfunding: Startups and Capital
This track will discuss where investors are seeing the most opportunity to fund new startups as OpenStack growth continues in new markets around the globe. The track will also cover how to source and ask for funding if you have the next hot OpenStack-related startup idea.

The above is extracted from OpenStack Call For Speaker site.