15 Last week the OpenStack community gathered in Paris, France to celebrate the Juno release of the OpenStack platform, and simultaneously get together to brainstorm and collaborate about the Kilo release, the next cycle. This was the first time I attended an OpenStack Summit and gave quite an impression. The OpenStack community is huge! The sheer amount of companies involved, ranging from small start-ups all around the ecosystem up to the largest IT vendors around (hello HP, IBM, Cisco, RedHat, Intel, Ericsson and so many others!). It amazes me how many companies provide consultancy & training, innovative storage solutions integrations, enhance the operational management of large installations and provide scalable software solutions all around OpenStack. Next to companies backing the project, and investing heavily in it, there’s also a different aspect from most other software targeting large enterprises: the community! The “Open” in OpenStack is not just a gimmick, riding on the wave of Open Source. The development of OpenStack happens as transparently as possible: all designs are out there and everyone can contribute ideas or source code. Everything is peer-reviewed and anyone can jump in to help out, meetings are publicly accessible on IRC. I guess one can say it’s thanks (or rather due?) to this openness so many entities are working with and on OpenStack who provide lots of resources. As a result, the developer community is really big. Just take a look at pictures of the audience during the keynote sessions to get an idea of its size or ask any of the regular guests at Le Meridien, the hotel where the Design Summit took place, how crowded the hotel was with people talking about strange things like Nova, Neutron, Swift and Horizon. Luckily there’s more than tech-talk during a week like this. During lunch breaks (with some pretty great food – French and their cuisine…) one can discuss things in a more informal setting, but let’s not forget the parties either! The Scality/HP party on Tuesday clearly set the bar here for any future Summits (OK, I might be a bit biased, but still… ;-)) I’m looking forward to diving into this community and its projects during the following weeks, months and years. Scality is putting lots of resources in its new OpenStack team, not only to ensure its storage solution integrates seamlessly with OpenStack, but also encouraging the engineers to contribute time, code, and ideas to any OpenStack project. We’re convinced we’re only at the beginning of the impact the paradigm shift of cloud computing has on IT, and OpenStack will play a central role in these developments in the coming years. Did I mention we’re hiring? I’m especially looking forward to work with the OpenStack Swift community to push the product to fit new use-cases and deployment scenarios, enhance performance, provide new features. There’s no limit in sight! See you in Vancouver!
