Randy Bias at ccevent chi 13

If crowd size and quality of audience participation are any indication, the OpenStack community in Chicago is keenly interested in the project, and they’re actively engaged in learning more.

Randy Bias and Narayan Desai (Argonne National Laboratory and OpenStack pioneer) led an OpenStack boot camp on Monday for a near-capacity crowd. Topics covered included 

  • OpenStack 101

  • History, momentum and success drivers

  • Project governance

  • A tour of each OpenStack project

  • What’s working, and what needs work

  • Who’s using OpenStack?

  • Automation options

  • OpenStack is NOT a system

  • Deployment options

  • Choices in OpenStack

What was most impressive was the quality of the questions asked, indicating not only an understanding of infrastructure, but an active interest in OpenStack.

On Tuesday, Randy led an OpenStack content track, along with help from speakers Boris Renski of Mirantis, Sean Lynch of Metacloud, Scott Devoid of Argonne National Laboratory, Joshua Buss of Brightag, and capping off the day in a debate with Jay Cuthrell of VCE. Topics included:

  • OpenStack and hybrid cloud

  • Federation

  • Three case studies of OpenStack in production

  • Storage options

  • Networking

  • Building an elastic cloud versus an enterprise virty cloud