Keynotes

It’s quite apparent that Red Hat is taking a more assertive — and sometimes aggressive — stance against closed source, overpriced solutions that prevent consumers from getting things done. Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst had a slide that showed “Open or Die” with a live plant on the left and a dead one on the right (see the photo in the post just below this paragraph). You could hear the gasp in the audience from some of the less technical crowd. Red Hat is making a big push to deliver on OpenStack and to modernize their RHEL and RHEV platforms. Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president and president, products and technologies, detailed some of the upcoming offerings and the overall strategy seems to be a double-down on virtualization via OpenStack and further enhancement of Enterprise Linux.

Of the vendor keynotes, the Intel keynote from Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, was superb. He seemed a bit nervous at first and we were quickly losing interest but he brought us back in with some good anecdotes. Dirk went into detail about how a company with a ton of intellectual property could also embrace open source. Surprisingly, the speech really moved me and there were no slides involved; it was just Dirk talking.

You can watch the keynotes on Red Hat’s Summit site. If you only watch one of them, watch Dirk Hohndel’s talk (direct link to MP4).

Sessions

The most memorable was Red Hat Chief ARM Architect Jon Masters’ demonstration of the 64-bit ARM platform (AArch64). Although there was no bicycle or spandex involved this year (he apologized for the lack of both), it was amazing to see some firsts. It was the first time AArch64 has been demonstrated in public and the first time Gluster ran on 64-bit ARM. He had a 2U rackmount chassis and the fans were extremely loud. Jon commented that the chips are “rarer than gold” and that he wasn’t going to chance turning the fans off. The server performed quite well during the demonstration and certainly outperformed what I’d expect from an ARM system.

Dan Walsh, Red Hat Senior Principal Software Engineer, led two informative sessions that I enjoyed. The first was a session on Linux containers. LXC confused me quite a bit before the talk but Dan and the product manager went through how containers work step by step. They gave real world use cases and made comparisons to the more prevalent virtualization methods, like KVM. As you might expect, Dan sprinkled in some useful security tips to make containers safer to use.

Another of Dan’s talks was about how to use SELinux in a large enterprise. He started it off with a brief explanation of SELinux and made us all stand up and say the words on his first slide (“SELinux is a labeling system”). He offered some tips on how to manage SELinux on multiple machines with Puppet and Ansible. In addition, he showed how custom policies could be easily exported and then passed around as RPMs or within configuration management systems. We also saw how to send auditd logs to remote systems for aggregation and alerting. You can certainly manage SELinux on many machines simply by treating the policies and configuration just like you treat any other service’s configuration files.

Even after the Pub Crawl on Thursday night, the Friday morning presentation about systemd was packed with attendees. The presenters went through SysV’s shortcomings and what systemd can deliver. It will replace init in RHEL 7. Adding systemd reduces the complexity of managing services and allows you to automate many of the things that are annoying to do manually (like cgroups). Its default method of handling cgroups allows CPU share to be carved up per service rather than per process. That means that if httpd has 10 workers and MySQL is running two processes, each service will receive a 50 percent share of the total CPU (rather than httpd getting a lot extra since it has multiple processes).

The RHEL 7 talks were extremely informative and I was writing until my hand almost fell off. I probably missed a lot of the new features so it might be a good idea to wait for the slides to be published. If you’re eager to use RHEL 7 as a desktop, you’ll see GNOME’s classic mode on the desktop (and it looks great).

After-hours

As usual, the Red Hat Certified Professionals reception at McGreevy’s was a great networking opportunity. I met other Linux users from around the world and enjoyed some pretty decent beer and food. I stayed after the reception and received a detailed lesson about how hockey works. The Bruins pushed through three OTs but eventually lost.

The rain ruined Thursday night’s plans but the Red Hat marketing folks put together a great alternative in less than 24 hours. We ended up at Royale and were treated to a ton of food and drinks. Some musicians set up late in the evening and we were all wondering what type of music they’d play. It was a group called Alter Ego from Montreal and they really rocked the place. They’re famous for “60 costume changes in 90 minutes” and they took us through oldies, disco, and contemporary music. They hit every single music genre I could think of (except country) and everyone was amazed that they entertained us for 90 minutes without a single break. If you get the chance to see this group in person, don’t miss it.

Wrap-up

The Red Hat Summits continue to be a good opportunity to learn, network, and experiment. The ratio of attendees seems to be tilting more toward the non-technical side, and this is a problem that the organizers will definitely need to improve. There were several technical sessions packed wall to wall with plenty of non-technical people playing on their phones or checking email on their laptops. It’s a tough problem to fix and many conferences have the same issue.

Next year’s summit will be in San Francisco in April. I hope to see you there!

While most companies leverage product roadmaps and rigid structure, open source projects operate differently.

Let’s look at the Linux kernel, for example. The Linux kernel is among the most fascinating pieces of software ever written. There is no corporate structure of development behind it, yet it has evolved to be one of the most amazing technological advances mankind has created.

The kernel does away with armies of product managers, project managers and office managers. It wastes no time on things that managers love to do. The kernel is very much the evolution of code: the good ideas stick and the bad ideas leave (or elements of them turn into good ideas).

When we started Mailgun, we wanted to minimize the requirement of a centrally-planned structure and used this evolution to our advantage. Here are some open source principles that were applied to our startup.

Kill The Meetings

Open source projects run on mailing lists, IRC channels, Wiki pages and occasional beer parties. This lends itself to a couple of advantages over traditional meetings.

1. First, all of the discussions and conversations are naturally documented and searchable. This creates a treasure trove of information that can be used later. This is very different from traditional meetings where people come face-to-face to discuss issues and ideas, but typically leave the room with a lot of undocumented knowledge. Mailing lists and Wiki pages make everyone on the team equally productive regardless of their physical location (more on this later).
2. Second, we found that the most interesting conversations often occur after hours. Something happens when people get home, relax, pop a beer and get on the mailing list or IRC to discuss technical things. Thinking about these difficult problems throughout the day often results in inspiring ideas and novel solutions. Having this information recorded for future documentation or blog posts makes it that much better.

No HQ Required; Hire Across The Globe

There is not a single building that has “Offices of the Linux Kernel” plastered on the outside.  Just as open source projects know no boundaries, you can employ people from all over the globe to help you with your startup. You don’t have to have everyone located in the same place, which can be liberating.

Instead of having to hire from a pool of people in your city, the Internet has connected the entire world and enables teams to hack together from thousands of miles away.  Moreover, the quality and caliber of talent you can attract increases significantly if you’re not encumbered by a single location.

At Mailgun, we never had a proper HQ.

Contributions Trump Conjectures

Each startup is like a young organism at the start of an evolution. The business is about to go through the grinder in a full survival of the fittest mode against other startups. At this point in time the business is in an extremely fragile state. If your startup consists of two people and it is time to hire a third one, you are about to increase the size of your company by 50 percent. Making the wrong hire could be devastating. Making this decision based on a single interview is like marrying someone after a single blind date!

Instead, at Mailgun we approached new hires in the same way people contribute to open source projects. As developers and engineers were interested in working with us, we did not rely on interviews. Instead, we always maintained an open invitation for anyone to contribute on a part time basis, usually remotely. Folks who “clicked” with us have naturally transitioned to full-time roles, others remain contractors to this day.

Leveraging some of the key principles of open source projects helped us take Mailgun to where it is today. We built a great company on these principles and are confident that following some of tenets of open source can help you build a great startup yourself.

As someone who has taken an enterprise to the cloud globally, I understand just how much of an impact the cloud can have on a business. I have been a vocal supporter in the belief that the cloud can open all sorts of possibilities. It’s not just about cost mitigation and scalability.

Businesses looking to learn more about what cloud computing can offer are faced with a plethora of suppliers purporting to have cloud services. Many of the potentially transformational benefits can be lost in the confusion of conflicting ideas, and these businesses sometimes gain a false sense that the cloud sounds like stuff they have heard before.

The truth is that real cloud is a service that’s hard to fake. The key is that the products, services and technologies offered by a vendor enable an enterprise to focus on its business imperatives without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is always a tough question: does a company invest in expensive infrastructure just in case it becomes successful beyond expectations? Does it allow a huge opportunity to slip through its fingers simply because of a conservative approach to investing in infrastructure? Both are risks that all businesses have to traditionally face.

These risks become real concerns when businesses do not use the cloud. Cloud approaches mean that businesses can effectively forge ahead knowing that the infrastructure will cater to their usage needs. Imagine starting a fishing business and not having to worry about how big a boat and net you should buy. Instead, you can rely on being able to start with modest equipment and elastically expand the ship and net at sea if you happen to come across a huge school of fish.

The freedom from encumbrance that results from this elasticity has the potential to change the way businesses approach their strategic planning, innovation and related areas of risk management and process streamlining. More agile methodologies ensue that facilitate experimentation and allow changes to happen organically, leading inevitably to a focus on the business goals rather than the potential impediments such as not having enough infrastructure.

Cloud facilitates this change in thinking, but it has failed to overcome the concerns around privacy, security and data sovereignty. Despite all the advocates who have effectively said that the benefits outweigh the risks, the fact remains that some businesses stand to lose more than they can gain if their data is exposed. In some cases there are legislative impediments, PCI compliance, health records, national sovereignty rules to name a few, that render the potential gains seemingly academic. Further concerns around the high dependency on single cloud providers have further limited the uptake.

But Rackspace has largely addressed these concerns by open-sourcing the cloud. By working with NASA, Rackspace has given birth to what is now among the fastest growing open source projects in history – OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation now has more than 8,600 contributing developers and has been adopted by more than 100 companies, including IBM, Dell, HP, NTT, Red Hat and Canonical. Rackspace has very publicly gone “all-in” on OpenStack and is one of the largest contributors to the code base. Rackspace’s approach is that Fanatical Support will be the key differentiator that enables the company to excel.

As a result of OpenStack, businesses have the freedom to build on the hybrid cloud, an infrastructure platform that uses a combination of public multi-tenanted cloud infrastructure, dedicated servers and private cloud facilities that are on their own premises if necessary. The technical barriers between each of these topologies are being eliminated, making for one platform that truly allows businesses to have freedom from worrying about their infrastructure as they focus on driving their business forward.

The freedom to choose a mixture of topologies, suppliers and service levels really allows businesses to focus on what they do, not how they do it. Adding Fanatical Support to that freedom allows cloud computing to fully realize its potential. And that excites me.

—-

Oh, and for those who want to understand more about my role at Rackspace, I have come on board as the Director of Technology and Product – Asia Pacific. My functions include promoting how cloud computing concepts can help businesses achieve their goals, expounding on the concepts of the open cloud, as well as helping ensure new Rackspace products and services are ready for the market in the Asia Pacific region.

I welcome the opportunity to talk about my journey to the cloud and how thinking cloud and related topics such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and social media can change our approach to business.

According to UTSA President Dr. Ricardo Romo, cloud computing is a crucial component of UTSA’s strategic plan to help the school become recognized as a Tier 1 university. The initiative, called “A Shared Vision UTSA 2016,” aims to propel UTSA into a select group of nationally competitive research universities. The open cloud and open technologies are helping UTSA achieve Tier 1 status, which relies heavily on the quality of a school’s academic research.

There’s no doubt the cloud is revolutionizing the way researchers and scholars use technology to accelerate their research efforts. By offering increased computational capacities, the cloud allows you to process data in real-time while removing dependency on physical infrastructure. It also frees scientists from managing IT equipment, leaving scholars more time to focus on their research initiatives.

Rackspace and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) recently showcased an advanced OpenStack-powered platform designed to fuel academic research and solve complex scientific and engineering problems. Traditionally, these intensive models were implemented on high maintenance computing infrastructures.

UTSA’s hybrid cloud computing platform features Rackspace Private Cloud and public open cloud solutions and provides scientists with massive scale, flexibility and speed in its world-class research efforts.

“As an increasing number of the society’s current and future challenges require integration of ubiquitous and distributed sensing,  smart data extraction and fusion, and redundant and flexible communications among computational and mobile platforms, open cloud is the natural enabling technology for us to implement integrated solutions to these challenging problems,” said Dr. Daniel J. Pack, chair of the school’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Rajendra V. Boppana, chair of the Department of Computer Science, says a hybrid cloud platform is a key tool for faculty conducting high-impact research in computer architecture, cyber security, big data applications and high performance computing.

“The computer science faculty will use this hybrid cloud to…develop new technologies such as high performance computing as a service and to explore and solve large-scale bioinformatics problems,” he says. “The UTSA hybrid cloud is also an important pedagogical tool that facilitates hand-on experiments and learning activities in computer systems, parallel computing and cloud security.”

And Dr. Romo says he is confident that the power of the open cloud will extend beyond UTSA’s campus. Earlier this week, he told dozens of local movers-and-shakers at a Chamber of Commerce event that he is set on making San Antonio a true hub for the open cloud and innovation.

Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston’s non-profit, the 80/20 Foundation, is also working to make San Antonio an open cloud innovation center. The foundation helped kick-start UTSA’s cloud initiative through a recent donation.

“We collaborate closely with academia and industry to create economic value and help shape San Antonio’s future workforce,” said Lorenzo Gomez, the 80/20 Foundation’s executive director. “The idea of an open cloud enabling research that creates economic value for San Antonio and improves the velocity of scientific research is very compelling.”

Check out this video for a more in-depth look at how UTSA leverages the open cloud and Rackspace Private Cloud for scientific research.

Performance matters

When building scalable applications, it is extremely important to have your database servers and web or app servers in close physical proximity. Until this week, ObjectRocket has worked great for people running their applications on the west or east coasts of the U.S. where ObjectRocket has data centers, but there wasn’t an option if you were running your application at Rackspace. Now there is.

We recently benchmarked ObjectRocket against other MongoDB services and ObjectRocket is the fastest MongoDB service on the market, in addition to being highly available and automatically scalable. ObjectRocket was built by engineers for engineers.

What can you build with ObjectRocket?

MongoDB is the best database for building cloud-enabled applications. ObjectRocket eliminates the operational complexities of running and managing a scalable database cluster and allows you to focus on building applications to support your business. MongoDB’s flexible schema, huge community and document model allow developers to iterate quickly and know they’re building on a platform that has proven successes at companies like Foursquare, Disney and Craigslist, just to name a few. You can find many more examples at the MongoDB website http://www.10gen.com/solutions.

Try it free

ObjectRocket offers a free 30-day free trial on 1GB and 5GB instances, so signup today and try ObjectRocket out for yourself. You can read a detailed example of how to connect your Rackspace and ObjectRocket infrastructure over on our DevOps blog.

Server Monitoring: Check The Internal State Of Your Servers

An outage on a web server often isn’t necessarily a catastrophic event, but it is caused by a problem that could have been detected by watching internal statistics like CPU usage or memory. To help detect these problems, we’ve launched a new feature of the Cloud Monitoring platform: Server Monitoring.

Server Monitoring can be enabled by installing the Cloud Monitoring Agent, which allows you to create checks on load average, CPU, memory, filesystem and network usage, as well as more advanced checks (currently available via the API only) including a custom plugin check that uses a user-supplied check to gather any metrics you like. In addition to creating checks, which continuously gather data in the background, you can query certain information “live,” enabling visualizations on the server detail view in our Cloud Control Panel:

There is no shortage of monitoring tools available today; you may already be familiar with Nagios, Munin, collectd or other tools from the open source community and startups. Those tools can work well for some users that are familiar with them. Our new Cloud Monitoring Agent is different. It was built based on your feedback and includes several key features that you’ve asked for.

You said you need redundancy across multiple datacenters, so you can be confident that your monitoring system is up and running. And we know that you’re concerned about performance, so we’ve engineered our monitoring agent to have a small memory footprint. You want first-class support for both Windows and Linux, so we built the agent on top of libuv, the same cross-platform library that powers Node.js. Flexibility is also important, so we open-sourced our agent and offer custom plug-ins. We utilized industry-leading security standards, so you can use it anywhere without having to worry about the security of your data, and we hope you find it easy to manage with the familiar Cloud Monitoring API used in our remote monitoring solution.

Server Monitoring will be free to try out until July 31, and we’re excited to get more of our customers using it! See below for more technical details, or install the agent to get started!

Graphs

Each time a check is run – whether a Remote check or, now, a Server Monitoring check – Cloud Monitoring stores the data it collects. Starting today, we’re giving you the ability to view the history of your Cloud Monitoring metrics with a new graphing feature in the Control Panel.

For each Cloud Monitoring check you configure, we’ll show you graphs of some of the most useful metrics. You’ll be able to find out whether your server responds more quickly from London or Chicago, how much filesystem space you have left, whether or not you run out of memory during heavy traffic and more:

To get started with graphs, all you need to do is create some checks via our Control Panel. Expect to see more features in the coming months that will help you get more insight into your infrastructure. In the meantime, if the Control Panel isn’t enough for you, you can use the Cloud Monitoring Metrics API to fetch, analyze or display this data on your own. Get started with the documentation today.

PagerDuty Integration

Cloud Monitoring can now route alerts to PagerDuty. PagerDuty is a popular incident management tool, which handles alerting (via phone, SMS, email or mobile push), on-call scheduling and automatic escalation of critical incidents.

We use PagerDuty ourselves and love it, so we’re excited to let customers use this feature. Currently the Control Panel doesn’t expose the ability to add the details of your PagerDuty account to Cloud Monitoring, so you’ll have to use the API for that step. But once you’ve got it set up you can begin using PagerDuty just by selecting the appropriate Notification Plan from the dropdown when creating checks or modifying alarms. See our post on the DevOps blog for details.

Integration With Managed Cloud

If you’re a Rackspace Managed Cloud customer, the agent will be automatically installed on your servers when they’re created. When you configure a check, you’ll be given the option to route alerts to your Rackspace support team so we can handle the problem while you focus on your business. If you’re not a Managed Cloud customer but want to be, sign up today!

Multi-Data Center Redundancy

We’ve made a big deal out of the fact that remote monitoring runs in a multiple geographically separated data centers so that an outage in one data center doesn’t affect our ability to continue checking your infrastructure or alert you to failures.

In a similar way, the Cloud Monitoring Agent connects to three Cloud Monitoring data centers but only requires a connection to one to operate correctly. Even if Chicago and Dallas are attacked by Godzilla, your agent will continue to send check data to London and you will continue to receive alarms.

Small Memory Footprint

The agent is built to have a small memory footprint. We understand that a 512 megabyte Cloud Server is large enough to do many jobs, but if our agent was too large you wouldn’t be able to monitor these smaller machines.

To be specific, we built the agent to consume about 6 megabytes of RAM; around one percent of the RAM on our smallest Cloud Server.

Excellent Security 

To protect your data, the agent uses TLS for all connections and a private Certificate Authority (CA). This means that even if some public Certificate Authority incorrectly issues a certificate for our domain to a third party, like the recent TURKTRUST incident with Google.com, our agent will refuse to connect due to an untrusted certificate chain.

The Linux binaries that we provide are signed with a GPG key that you can download from our API server over SSL. Meanwhile, the servers that build and sign those binaries are on an isolated network free from the dangers of the open Internet. Similarly, we will be using Authenticode when the Windows agent launches.

On top of that, the agent does not have the ability to execute arbitrary commands; it simply gathers and reports metrics.

Open Source Software

The agent is an Apache 2.0 licensed open source project. This gives the agent a few distinct advantages:

1. You can audit the code: We are proud of the engineering and security stance of our agent, but don’t take our word for it; dig into the code yourself.
2. You are free to compile the agent for your own distro: We provide a large list of supported binary packages for Windows, as well as Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc. But we understand that we won’t be able to provide binaries for every distro and architecture. If we don’t support your platform, you’re free to compile the agent yourself. With time, we are certain that the agent will be ported to routers and phones.

We look forward to seeing your pull requests on Github.

Custom Plugins

A number of agent check types are available out of the box for common system statistics and applications. But, these checks are only a starting point and can’t cover every conceivable use case. For example, say you want to get alerted when the number of rows in the session table of your database grows above 1,000 – you can do this with a custom plugin for the agent.

The interface for custom plugins is simple and straightforward. The agent simply executes a script that you place in the plugins directory and gathers the metrics from standard out.

Say you write a script that queries your PostgreSQL database for the number of active sessions, let’s call it session_metrics.py. All this script would need to do is query the database and output the following format:

status 235 active sessions in the database
metric sessions int64 235
metric oldest_session int64 50034

Now you can write an alarm when the number of sessions is over 9,000 and be prepared to scale your infrastructure for the additional load.

Familiar API

Entities, checks and alarms are the basic types in the Cloud Monitoring API. To fit into these types the agent only adds one additional property to the entity called the agent_id. So, if you already have an entity for your webserver, you can link a new agent to that entity and start allocating agent checks like the agent.plugin check right alongside your existing remote.ping and remote.http checks. Even alarm criteria are written in the same manner as usual.

if (metric['sessions'] > 90000) {
 return new AlarmStatus(CRITICAL, 'The database says the session table is over 9000!');
}
return new AlarmStatus(OK, 'The session table is not over 9000');

Try It Free

As we mentioned above, Server Monitoring is free to use until July 31, 2013. We look forward to getting your feedback and seeing cool uses of the custom plugins interface.

And as always, we are hiring.

• Business Value
• Case Studies
• Community Building
• Ecosystem
• Getting Started
• Legal
• Operations Summit
• Project Updates

This is always a great way to put presenters and attendees in the same room to maximize the value of the conference. However, there is unofficial track that I consider to be among the most important: the “Hallway Track.” Loosely defined, the Hallway Track encompasses all of the conversations that occur in the hallway or other social gathering points throughout the conference. It is here that you get to hear the dirty details of what a particular group really thought about a presentation or idea. It’s here that the tough questions get asked, and mostly answered; questions that would have probably been better if asked during the actual presentation. It’s a safer venue, a smaller one, that is filled with trusted opinions. Large takeaways from presentations are commonly disseminated during the Hallway Track and those are the ideas that attendees take back to their respective companies (and likely include in their conference reports).

Key Discussion Topics

I’m not going to dive into the details of every Hallway Track session I attended, but I want to share some of the overarching themes that were discussed during these sessions:

• Essex adopters are running OpenStack clouds with production workloads today. There were two keynote sessions that highlighted users who got their first real taste of OpenStack during the Essex Summit: Comcast and HubSpot.
• Most talked about session. State of the Stack April 2013 presented by Randy Bias from CloudScaling was the most talked about session in Portland. It was raved about. It was an update on all the projects, their best parts, their not so great parts and some general thoughts on the current state of all OpenStack projects.
• Interoperability, oh my! Analyst sessions, panels, blog posts and snarky comments abound all week. A lot of the OpenStack community contingent still believes OpenStack interoperability will occur, but there were some very strong opinions floating around about OpenStack just being too large, having too many deviations and there being too many factors to truly bring the whole community to an interoperability consensus. One thing both camps agreed upon was the great potential of interoperability. Personally, I think it’s too early to make a judgment call, but after seeing so many products start to converge towards a more common codebase, it might not be a pipe dream.
• Whiteboards in design session rooms. This seems to come up every conference, but if a room is designated for a design session, it should include a whiteboard. Sure, mostly there is debate and healthy conversation with an etherpad, but sometimes a discussion calls for a whiteboard for architecture or process flow.
• If you’re not using SCM, you’re doing it wrong. The age of logging into servers or virtual instances is seemingly coming to an end. More and more companies talked about advanced automation and the replacement of instances rather than nursing them back to health.
• Federated Auth in Keystone. This is one item that is near and dear to Rackspace, as we have proudly been running OpenStack Grizzly code in production for weeks. But since we switched our cloud platform over to OpenStack (on Aug. 1, 2012) there were some key features that we ran differently than the community due to our legacy cloud customers. The biggest hurdle to fully adopting native OpenStack is authentication, as Rackspace is not running the community variant of Keystone, but a Rackspace-ified version. With federated authentication getting closer to reality, it will allow Rackspace to adopt Keystone fully into our platform and move that much closer to running native OpenStack code.
• There was not a Piston or a Nebula party. Let’s be honest here; when the agenda came out and both of these companies were missing from the evening events lineup, there was quite a stir. These companies know how to put on a great party and roughly 3,000 attendees were let down. Luckily, there were still a slew of great evening networking events hosted by Mirantis, PuppetLabs, HP, Red Hat and Rackspace; but it just wasn’t the same without Piston or Nebula putting their respective party spins on the OpenStack Conference.
• nova-conductor:  One of the new services in OpenStack Nova, there was plenty of talk about what it does, why it’s needed and the best way to implement it. Yun Mao wrote a great post right before the Summit that answered a lot of those questions, and it was commonly referred to throughout the week. You can find his blog post on his personal website here:  http://cloudystuffhappens.blogspot.com/2013/04/understanding-nova-conductor-in.html
• OpenStack Operations Guide. A key element of Jim Curry’s keynote presentation was that 2013 is the “year of the user” for OpenStack. Over the past two years we have all been part of a transition that started with a strong focus on developers and now adds a heavy dose of OpenStack users. While the development of OpenStack has never been stronger – there were 500-plus contributors to the Grizzly release; OpenStack has also experienced a tremendous spike in growth and adoption. Another signal that users are here and ready to play is the release of OpenStack Operations Guide. There are more options than ever to get OpenStack running in your data center, and knowing all of the components of OpenStack and how they interact has never been more important. Once you have a grasp of OpenStack, the next question that is “what is the best deployment model for me?” OpenStack Operations Guide answers that question. The book is absolutely free and can be found here. Even cooler, this entire guide was written in a five-day sprint before the conference.

OpenStack Products Abound

There was also a great deal of product talk at OpenStack Summit Portland, with many OpenStack players offering up new solutions. Check out NetworkWorld’s roundup of the hottest OpenStack products right now. Here’s a sampling of some of the products launched and discussed at the Summit:

• Rackspace announced the Rackspace Global Cloud Network: Rackspace revealed plans to expand its global cloud network through a program in which Rackspace will build and run interoperable public clouds for service providers around the world.
• RedHat announced RDO: RDO is a community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives. Red Hat hopes to do for OpenStack what it did with Linux.
• Project Savanna: Red Hat, Hortonworks and Mirantis will collaborate to contribute significantly to Project Savanna, Apache Hadoop on OpenStack for simpler and cost-effective transitions of big data workloads between public and private clouds.
• Nebula released Nebula One: Nebula finally came out of the darkness and released its long awaited product, Nebula One, a turnkey private cloud system that provides compute, network and storage services through a self-service interface and APIs, using industry-standard servers from vendors such as HP, IBM and Dell.
• CloudScaling announced Open Cloud System 2.5: CloudScaling launched Open Cloud System 2.5, which supports OpenStack Grizzly; 100 percent community OpenStack – no forks; virtual private cloud via Juniper Contrail technology with block storage snapshots; and runs on certified hardware from Dell, Cisco, Quanta, Juniper and Arista
• Mirantis FUEL: FUEL is the public open source release of Mirantis’ toolset for production deployments of OpenStack. It has been used in projects completed at NASA, PayPal, WebEx and others.
• Ceph is hot, Swift is not: A full replacement alternative for Swift, Ceph is an open source, distributed storage system that provides block and object storage fully integrated with OpenStack. You can find more information about Ceph on the Inktank blog about Ceph’s Cinder compatibility. That being said, SwiftStack put on another series of fantastic workshops that gave newcomers and grizzled veterans of the technology some hands-on time and theory around using Swift in production.

Overall, OpenStack Summit Portland was an excellent five-day look at the state of the project from nearly every perspective. Roughly 3,000 people showed up to shape, drive and learn more about OpenStack, and the energy and enthusiasm in the sessions, and the Hallway Track were infectious. One thing is for certain, OpenStack is here to stay. I can’t wait to do it all again in six months.

OpenStack is making great strides to invite and include women through internships, support, breakfasts and meetups and by encouraging them to get involved, contribute code and come to the Summit.

At OpenStack Summit Portland, Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis caught up with some of the women who are making OpenStack great and who are working to get more women involved.

The book is gaining traction – it’s marching up the popularity list and is in the top four of all things downloaded from docs.openstack.org.

According to the team of authors, the input from the community and from users was valuable and will help guide its future efforts. The next step is to build a community around the book and enable community members to include their experiences.

In this video (shot and edited by Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis) the team discusses OpenStack Operations Guide in more detail.

Founded by Facebook, Intel and Rackspace, the Open Compute Project aims “to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost.”

Crawford says both Open Compute and OpenStack are built on answers to the question “What if?” For OpenStack, that led to this week’s Summit with almost 3,000 attendees. For Open Compute, that led to innovations such as widening standard 19-inch racks to 21 inches to include more hard drives and blade architecture.

The result is what Crawford calls a “platform for rapid innovation.” Hardware has gone from design to completed circuit boards in six months. Companies in Japan are investigating hanging racks from the ceilings of data centers as a better way to guard against earthquake damage. A new cabling technology called silicon photonics will move data at up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is much faster than current technology and speedy enough to effectively connect equipment even if it’s not physically located close together.

Crawford says the project’s journey is only 2.5 percent complete. As one of the biggest fans of the project, we can’t wait for the remaining 97.5 percent.