If you don’t have the answers to these questions, then mark your calendars.

Over the next few weeks, we’re bringing you a series of free webinars to help you drive innovation and improve your business’ cloud strategy. Join us in lively and engaged discussions with our best from Rackspace and your peers in the industry, including Rackspace CIO Steve Mills and Rackspace CFO Karl Pichler.

Here’s a schedule of what’s to come:

Tuesday, May 21, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
The Shift of the C-level in a Cloud World      
Speakers: Rackspace CMO Suaad Sait, Rackspace CIO Steve Mills, Rackspace CFO Karl Pichler and Rackspace Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Solutions Lisa Larson

Wednesday, May 22, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
Be Resilient and Ready with Rackspace
Speaker: Rackspace Enterprise Cloud Strategist Paul Croteau

Tuesday, June 4, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
Building Bridges with Hybrid Cloud
Speaker: Rackspace Cloud Strategist Wayne Walls

Wednesday, June 5, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
Understanding Cloud Block Storage: Performance, Options and Use Cases
Speaker: Rackspace Product Director J. R. Arredondo

Register now, because spots fill up quickly. We hope to see you there.

The immediate loss of revenue from a data center outage or unplanned downtime is tangible and an easier amount to quantify.  We have built a Downtime Cost Calculator that helps you perform quick, back-of-the-napkin calculations to determine the hourly cost of downtime based on:

• Annual Revenue
• Retail Promotion
• Employee Productivity

We have also made it extremely easy to access directly from your smartphone by going to: rackspace.com/dt-calc

Our aim is to provide you with a simple and quick calculator, but we do understand that there are also several other less tangible aspects to consider such as negative impact to brand reputation, customer loyalty (defection to competitors) and SLA-related punitive damages to name a few.

If you happen to be at EMC World in Las Vegas, be sure to drop by our breakout session at 4 p.m. PST on Monday, May 6.  We’ll discuss the cost of downtime and how you can make your systems and apps more resilient.  Also, be sure to drop by our booth (No. 527) and try your luck at our interactive “Unlock the Cloud” touchscreen game for a chance to win a fabulous prize.

Calculating Downtime Costs
Monday, May 6
4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. PST
Room: Murano 3205*

Rackspace offers a broad portfolio of resiliency solutions that can help protect and recover your important apps when disaster strikes. Visit rackspace.com/disaster-recovery-planning to learn about how our DR specialists can help remove the burden related to architecting, deploying and testing complex recovery solutions.

*Please note that the room is subject to change and you should check the EMC World Mobile Application when arriving onsite – just to confirm.

At the same time, the industry is putting pressure on IT leaders to respond to the changing market and to drive innovation. In all, they’re being forced to be more nimble and to do more with less.

At EMC World 2013 in Las Vegas next week, you’ll hear how joint solutions from Rackspace and EMC are powering this transformation and helping enterprise IT leaders meet these challenges head on through a hybrid mix of cloud and dedicated infrastructure.

Rackspace and EMC^® have a long-standing partnership through which we offer enterprise-grade storage solutions to our growing roster of customers. At EMC World, we’ll detail how we join forces with EMC to provide solutions including Dedicated Hosting, RackConnect^® and Managed Virtualization. We’ll also showcase our disaster-recovery-related solutions and the addition of EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to our Dedicated Storage portfolio.

Rackspace and EMC also share a vision of openness. We’re both dedicated to building services on open technologies – Rackspace is a founder of OpenStack and EMC joined the OpenStack Foundation last year.

As the industry makes the move to the cloud, and specifically clouds built on open technologies, we’re here to help no matter where you are in the journey with solutions that enable you to solve IT challenges.

As an industry service leader, we’re in the unique position to offer customized enterprise IT solutions leveraging the cloud and through our great partnership with EMC. And we back them up with our award-winning brand of customer service, Fanatical Support^®.

Be sure to join us at EMC World next week for an engaging breakout session; and be sure to swing by our booth (No. 527) for games, giveaways and most importantly to learn more about how Rackspace and EMC can help you transform your business into the cloud.

Within the startup movement, all things are possible. There are plenty of events happening globally in May 2013. The Rackspace Startup Program is here to keep you up to date with valuable information on events and happenings inside the global startup community. What follows is a partial list of global startup events complied by the contributors of StartupDigest:

Amsterdam
Open Coffee Amsterdam @ Bovendebalie
Event Tech Circus

Austin
Co-Founders Wanted May Meetup
RISE Week Austin 2013

Baltimore
gb.tc Tech Crawl at Oriole Park

Brazil
Digital Week ESPM
Lean Startup Machine Rio de Janeiro

Barcelona
Startup World
BCN Tech Demo Day

Berlin
Startup Safary
Heureka Conference 

Birmingham, UK
Kick Campus – Startup Careers Fair
Birmingham Launch48 Weekend 

Bogota
Flisol Bogotá 2013
EXPO MiPyme DIGITAL 2013

Boston (Marathon Tragedy Fundraisers)
The One Fund Boston 2013
Stay Strong Boston
GiveForward Boston

Boulder, Colo.
Boulder Startup Week
Entrepreneurs Unplugged: David Cohen

Brazil
Startup Camp
Lean Startup Machine Rio de Janeiro

Buenos Aires
NoSQL Essentials
Curso de Performance Marketing

Cardiff
Youth Enterprise Nation

Chicago
Social Media Masters Summit
ITA CityLIGHTS Awards Gala

Copenhagen
Creative Copenhagen
CONNECT Denmark – Pitch Training and Screening

Dallas
2013 TeXchange One to Watch with Brad Feld
Startup Weekend Dallas

Detroit
MobiDevDay Detroit 2013
Michigan Growth Capital Symposium

Dublin
How to Build a Startup 2
MBA World Trophy

Gainesville, Fla.
SF CIED: Strategic Planning for Entrepreneurs 
Business Showcase 2013 

Guadalajara
iTuesday

Hamburg
Lean Startup Meetup
Night of the Startups

Helsinki
Startup Weekend
Startup Bootcamp

Hong Kong
Evernote Hong Kong 2013 DEVCUP Meetup
DrinkEntrepreneurs HK

Houston
Houston Geek Gathering
SURGE Day

Hungary
BarCamp – Budapest Bank Startup Competition
Business Espresso

India
SiliconIndia Mobile Application Conference New Delhi
Git Training Workshop Bengaluru

Indianapolis
Lean Startup Circle

Iowa
TechBrew Cedar Valley
Startup Ames Spring Party

Israel
Tel-Aviv Startup Pitch Bootcamp
Mini Seedcamp Tel-Aviv

Istanbul
Etohum Cafe
Webrazzi Startup ’13

Italy
Digital Week
Startup Weekend Cagliari

Kansas City
KCDC
Pipeline Open House

Latvia
TechHub Riga Monthly Meetup
Garage48 Ventspils

Lexington, Ky.
Lexington Open Coffee
Lexington Venture Club

London
Start Build Grow
Introduction to HTML & CSS Weekend Workshop

Los Angeles
The Future of Disruptive Entertainment
StartupWeekend LA

Madrid
Investor Day Passion IE
IE Venture Day

Manchester
The Art of New Business
Creating Great User Experiences with Apps & Devices

Melbourne
Clojure
CocoaHeads

Miami
Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference
Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Montreal
TheFounderProject Mentor Meetup
RailsBridge

Munich
IxDA Sessions with Aarron Walter
Scala Drinks

New York City
Office Ninjas
Funding the Best in Global Innovation III

New Zealand
Innes 48 Hour Startup Competition
Maori Business Leaders Awards

Omaha
Big Omaha 2013

Orlando
Venture Pitch Orlando
BarCamp Orlando

Orange County, Calif.
Startup Weekend Riverside
VC in the OC

Oslo
Web Rebels
Startup Weekend Oslo

Ottawa
Students and Start-ups 15
Startup Weekend Ottawa

Paris
AngelHack Paris
Tech Startup Jobs Fair Paris

Philadelphia
Developer Friday @ Hive 4A
Philadelphia iPhone/iPad Boot Camp

Philippines
Geekcamp Baguio 2013

Phoenix
Startup Book Club
Startup Bootcamp Phoenix

Pittsburgh
Angel Resource Institute: Due Diligence
Girl Develop IT Pittsburgh: Spring Social

Raleigh/Durham
Analytics Camp
ProductCampRTP

San Diego
Startup Ideation Bootcamp
Lean Startup Machine San Diego

Scotland
Growing Fast Within Government (Edinburgh)
RookieOven (Glasgow)

Seattle
AngelHack – Seattle
Get a Real Job! A Job Fair for Startups and Techies

Seoul
BeLAUNCH 2013
VCs meet Startups

Singapore
Singapore PHP User Group Meetup
Lean Launchpad@Singapore Briefing Session

Silicon Valley
500 Startups’ MamaBear Conference
Startup Weekend Space

Stuttgart
bwcon: Rechtssprechstunde
Webmontag 

Taipei
Startup Jobs Asia Launch Party
Experience Google Apps

Tampa
The Titans of Florida
GitFlow

Thailand
WebMob Thailand: April 2013 Meetup
Graphic Designers & Creative Meetup

Tokyo
Super Hackathon
Lean Startup Machine Tokyo

Toronto
Barrie Startup Weekend
Startup Grind Hosts Rob Ruffalo of OMERS Ventures

Vancouver
CUTC Infect Vancouver – Conference & Hackathon
Vancouver Startup Weekend, Disruptive Tech

Washington DC
Day of Fosterly
Co-Founders Wanted of Rockville 

Startups…get involved with the movement and participate in an event in your community. There is no better time than now to build or strengthen your network. Networking with other entrepreneurs allows you to form and maintain a strong circle of contacts that will serve you well for years to come. If you are an entrepreneur with a new idea in cloud computing, an application that makes people’s lives better or the next big thing online, drop the Space Cowboys a note and let us know about it. The Rackspace Startup Program is looks forward to hearing all about it!

Our “Office Hours Hangouts” are active, multi-directional conversations – everyone gets involved. One of the best moments so far was when one customer answered a question posed by another customer. I can always give a good “Rackspace approved” answer, but a real life, tried and tested solution actively employed by another customer can be a much better answer than any I could give.

I wanted to make sure that as many Rackspace Cloud consumers as possible have a chance to ask and answer questions. Our Rackspace Cloud Office Hours Hangouts are Thursdays from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. CDT, starting May 2, 2013. Our first topic is building a scalable WordPress configuration in the cloud. Some future topics include:

• Cloud Files – cloud storage and CDN delivery
• Cloud Load Balancers – load balancing as a service
• Cloud Monitoring  - monitor both cloud and dedicated servers
• Cloud Database – high performance database on the cloud
• Cloud Block Storage – for dependable performance from your database

We hope to see a lot of new participants. Instructions on how to join our hangout are as follows:

1. Head over to the Rackspace G+ page and click “Follow”
2. Find the G+ Event Post for the next Cloud Office Hours and RSVP
3. Go to our G+ page a few minutes prior to the hangout time and wait for your invite
4. If you don’t RSVP, no worries, just find the Event Post for the current Cloud Office Hours and leave a comment saying you would like to join…then wait for the invite…in the meantime you can watch what is going on because it is going to be livestreamed.

Sign up early to have a better chance of joining the hangout.

Our Google+ page will have archived versions of all of our hangouts, so you can watch past hangouts or just see what else we are talking about.

Also, we’re always looking for suggestions for discussion topics. If you have a suggestion, feel free to comment here, or share the topic with us on Google Plus. Hope to see you all on a hangout soon.

Rackspace changed the technology game when we co-founded OpenStack in July 2010. Come “Up Your Game” to the next level with us at OpenStack Summit in Portland, which runs from Monday, April 15 to Thursday, April 18.

This page will be updated throughout the Summit with new info and details. Stay tuned. And be sure to follow the action on Twitter with the hashtag #rackstack2013.

Here’s what we’ve got going on at OpenStack Summit Portland:

OpenStack: The Next 10 Years [Video]

We’re just three years into the OpenStack revolution. Where will it go in the next 10? In this video, we explore that question with representatives from Rackspace, Sony and Dell.

Solving The OpenStack Talent Gap

We’re in trouble. We’re facing an unprecedented shortage of IT talent in cloud, and in this case, specifically within OpenStack. Here, we highlight ways the community can solve the OpenStack talent gap.

Rackspace, HubSpot Keynote [Video]

Check out the full video of Rackspace and HubSpot taking the keynote stage at OpenStack Summit Portland.

Day Two Recap

The second day of OpenStack Summit Portland put the spotlight on the users. It was also another big day for news. Here’s a recap of the second day of the Summit.

Users Take The Spotlight

The second day of OpenStack Summit Portland was all about the users, as several high profile OpenStack users shared their stories.

The Year Of The User

Users are now building businesses and doing great things on OpenStack. At OpenStack Summit Portland this week, we’re seeing that 2013 is clearly the year of the user.

HubSpot And The Open Hybrid Cloud

Rackspace customer and OpenStack contributor HubSpot highlights how it uses Rackspace’s open hybrid cloud powered by OpenStack.

The Heat Is On For Autoscaling

One challenge at OpenStack Summit Portland was for the various contributing partners to come to an agreement about how to integrate autoscaling into OpenStack. Should autoscaling stay part of the Heat project, which encompasses all of orchestration, or spin off as a separate project?

OpenStack Powering The Cloud’s Future [Video]

In this video, we hear from Rackspace, Dell, Scalr and the OpenStack Foundation about the importance of OpenStack, the growth of OpenStack Summit and how the OpenStack project is powering the future of cloud computing.

Day One Recap

Day one of OpenStack Summit Portland is in the books. Here’s a recap of some of the big news to come out of the first day of the Summit, including news from Rackspace, NetApp, Red Hat and more.

Twitter Photo Party Contest

New this year at the OpenStack Summit, we’re having a Twitter Photo Party! Simply Tweet a photo or Instagram shot of yourself wearing one of the Rackspace t-shirts from our booth. Be sure to include @Rackspace in your Tweet and the hashtag #rackstack2013  for a chance to win a pair of QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones. All entries must be submitted between  April 15, 2013 and April 18, 2013. Tweet away – we love seeing our fans in Rackspace gear. *See contest rules below.

Rackspace Presentations And Panels

Rackspace will have a huge presence at the Summit. More than 30 Fanatical Rackers will give demonstrations and tech talks and sit on panels throughout the week; and Jim Curry, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Private Cloud at Rackspace, will deliver a keynote presentation with special guest HubSpot on Tuesday morning. Check out the full lineup here.

Free Swag At The Rackspace Booth

We’re also giving away tons of FREE swag at the Rackspace booth (booth A5), including t-shirts. Swing on by.

Contribute Code To OpenStack, Get Free Hosting

If you’ve contributed code to the OpenStack project, we want to offer you free hosting. Go over to iopenedthecloud.com during the Summit, or stop by the Rackspace booth (booth A5) for more info. You made the code free; we’ll make your cloud free – up to $500 per month for two years. You can verify contributions at http://www.ohloh.net/.

Free Certification Exams

Want to beef up your resume and show the world that you’re on top of your OpenStack game? Want to do it for free? At OpenStack Summit Portland we’ll offer free Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack exams – a $200 value. We’ll host the exam each night of the OpenStack Summit (Monday, April 15 through Thursday, April 18) in the Director’s Suite on the third floor of the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower. The exam will run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., and an OpenStack Summit Portland badge must be presented prior to taking the test. Space is limited, so arrive early to guarantee a spot.

Become A Racker

Rackspace will have members of its Talent Acquisition team onsite throughout the Summit. If you think you’ve got what it takes to become a Racker, come talk to us. We’re hiring!

OpenStack Summit Victory Party

On Wednesday night, Rackspace and RightScale will take over Castaway for a private party open to all OpenStack attendees. You can RSVP here for a VIP guest ticket, which includes transportation to and from the convention center, food, specialty cocktails and an Avatar artist.

*ABBREVIATED RULES FOR RACKSPACE UP YOUR GAME PROMOTION

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Void outside the 50 U.S. and D.C., and where prohibited. Open only to legal residents of the 50 U.S. and D.C. at least age of majority at time of entry. Begins at 12:00 p.m. PT on April 15, 2013; ends at 11:59 p.m.  PT on April 18, 2013. T-shirt giveaway is available while supplies last. One (1) Sweepstakes Prize: QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones; ARV of prize: $ 349.95.  Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received. For complete eligibility details and full rules, visit http://www.rackspace.com/information/legal/socialcontestrules.  Sponsor: Rackspace US, Inc.  Copyright © 2013. Rackspace US, Inc.  All rights reserved. 

Calculating ROI is further complicated by the fact that every business is different and the impact of cloud computing on their processes will differ.

In the next installment of the Enterprise Cloud Forum, we will help you understand how enterprises are leveraging a cloud business model to maximize ROI and why traditional models that only focus on simple cost benefits often overlook the real value.

Join Stacy Williams, Rackspace Director of IT Production Support, and I at 11 a.m. CDT Wednesday, April 17 for “Maximizing ROI in the Cloud,” a webinar during which we investigate the costs, risks and benefits associated with cloud adoption, as well as discuss a framework for measuring its return.

You’ll learn:

• How to think of ROI differently in the cloud
• The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your return on cloud
• How to utilize project based accounting for real-time ROI
• How the cloud enables first-mover advantage to improve profit margins
• How flexibility in delivery models can maximize your cloud ROI

Register now for “Maximizing ROI in the Cloud” and learn how to make it rain in the cloud through maximized ROI.

This is Rackspace’s largest-ever presence at the annual conference, which runs Monday, April 15 through Thursday, April 18. Here’s a glimpse of where to find Rackspace experts at the OpenStack Summit next week. You can also follow our presenters on Twitter for the most up-to-date schedule.

OpenStack Summit 2013

Keynote

Tuesday, April 16

9:45 a.m. – Keynote (Jim Curry, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Rackspace Private Cloud, @jimcurry & HubSpot)
In this keynote presentation, OpenStack user and Rackspace customer HubSpot will showcase how it uses OpenStack.

Rackspace Sessions

Monday, April 15

1:50 p.m. – Cloud Keep: OpenStack Key Management as a Service (Matt Tesauro, Lead Software Security Engineer)
This presentation will cover Cloud Keep, an open source project sponsored by Rackspace to build a secure, cloud-ready key management solution. We hope to solve a need for our customers as well as other OpenStack projects, several of which have published blueprints around encryption recently. We will walk through our plans for the system, its technical architecture and demonstrate our current proof of concept implementation.

1:50 p.m. – Designing Your OpenStack Private Cloud: Folsom Edition (Ryan Richard, OpenStack Architect, @rackninja)
There is no easy answer or magic solution when architecting your private cloud. OpenStack is flexible and can be designed in many ways, which can be a blessing or a curse. The goal of this talk is to provide guidance on how to start thinking about your private cloud architecture.

1:50 p.m. – Panel Discussion: Enterprise Vendors in the OpenStack Ecosystem (Cody Bunch, Principal Architect, @cody_bunch)
In this panel, members from AMD, Arista, Brocade, EMC, HortonWorks, NetApp, OpenCompute, and Rackspace will discuss the enterprise OpenStack ecosystem and speak about benefits and motives for making OpenStack a core part of their product offering. 

2:40 p.m. – After the Install: Operational Tooling for OpenStack (Jason Cannavale, Director of Software Development, @jcannava)
OpenStack is installed. Now how do you operate it? How do you perform upgrades? Cannavale will demonstrate and discuss the Rackspace Private Cloud approach to operating an OpenStack-powered cloud and simplifying the operator experience.

2:40 p.m. – Update on Project Reddwarf: DBaaS for OpenStack Clouds (Tim Simpson, Software Developer)
Join Rackspace and HP as we discuss the value Reddwarf brings to OpenStack, the progress we’ve made, the challenges we have faced and our vision for the future. In this session, you will get a chance to hear how Reddwarf simplifies the management and maintenance of database systems in the cloud, understand how you can begin to leverage it, and learn how you can become active in the community.

3:40 p.m. – Solving the OpenStack Talent Gap (Niki Acosta, Cloud Evangelista, @nikiacosta)
As a follow-up to last year’s successful OpenStack Careers Panel, come join Rackspace Cloud Evangelista Niki Acosta as she shares her thoughts on the OpenStack talent gap and what the community must do–short term and long term–to accelerate adoption and usage of OpenStack-powered public and private clouds.

Tuesday, April 16

11:00 a.m. – Apache Hadoop on OpenStack (Sudarshan Acharya, Software Developer)
In this session, we will briefly look at the Hadoop’s design decisions; come up with the best practices for deploying and running Hadoop on OpenStack and some of the challenges around it. We’ll also look at the ongoing work in the Hadoop and OpenStack communities, and explore how we can make OpenStack a better platform for Hadoop and big data.

11:50 a.m. – Panel: What Everyone Ought to Know about OpenStack Internships (Anne Gentle, Community Documentation Coordinator, @annegentle)
In this session, we will share information on our current OpenStack internships and our future plans for such programs. We will talk about the projects that previous interns have worked on, the struggles they faced while learning about OpenStack and where they want to go from here. If you are an organization looking to hire OpenStack interns, or a potential intern seeking an internship, this session is for you.

11:50 a.m. – nova-network: The Dirty Details (Ryan Richard, OpenStack Architect, @rackninja)
Even with Quantum lingering right around the corner, nova-network still has its place in existing OpenStack clouds and will be used in the immediate future for many deployments. The goal of this talk is to provide in depth information about nova-network and items to consider when architecting your cloud.

1:50 p.m. – Getting Started with OpenStack Development (Michael Still, Senior Software Developer @mikal)
People frequently ask how they can get started with OpenStack development. There’s a process that needs to be followed, from setting up a launchpad account, to signing the CLA, to sending off you first patch with adequate testing. In this session Michael Still, a Nova core reviewer, will guide the audience through this process and send off a patch to a real bug in the Nova codebase, stopping to answer questions along the way.

1:50 p.m. – DevOps Panel (Kevin Jackson, Senior Solutions Architect, @itarchitectkev)
Join Kevin Jackson and panelists from organizations including HP and Big Switch Networks as they field questions on DevOps and Continuous Development/Integration.

1:50 p.m. – Images for Private Cloud: Automating Image Builds for OpenStack (Jordan Callicoat, OpenStack Private Cloud Engineer, @jcallic & Ryan Yard, Sales Engineering Senior Manager, @rackeryard)
This discussion will cover how to use existing tool chains (oz, boxgrinder, veewee) to automate building homogenous, patched OS images for cloud consumers, as well as functionally testing and deploying your images using continuous integration.

1:50 p.m. – Deploying OpenStack Trunk into a Production Environment (Rick Lopez, Director of QE for Cloud Infrastructure, @rklpz)
When someone hears that Rackspace deploys from OpenStack trunk into a production cloud environment, there are generally lots of questions (and sideways glances at the perceived insanity). In this session, we’ll address both the business strategy behind this approach and begin a deeper conversation with the OpenStack Community.

2:40 p.m. – Building “Cloudy” Apps (Tony Campbell, Director of Training and Certification, @cloudtrainme & John McKenzie, Technical Training Manager, @jmckind)
During this session we will walk through some of the considerations for building applications on OpenStack. We will show you how to leverage OpenStack to scale up and scale down your application infrastructure. We’ll also walk through architecture considerations for a “cloudy” application and provide you with plenty of tips for getting the most out of OpenStack.

2:40 p.m. – Network Virtualization and OpenStack Quantum User Panel (Mike Aeschliman, Private Cloud Engineering and Product Head, @bostonmikea)
Moderated by independent industry analyst Brad Casemore of IDC, the panel will be asked to discuss specific networking challenges faced before and after deploying Quantum and network virtualization; the impact it’s had on their production cloud deployments and their sense of where the technology is at today and where it needs to evolve in the short and long term.

3:40 p.m. – OpenStack:  The Next Ten Years (Jim Curry, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Rackspace Private Cloud, @jimcurry)
Tremendous strides have been made since Rackspace and NASA launched OpenStack three years ago, but was does the long-term future hold? Where will OpenStack be in 2023? Join OpenStack Co-Founder Jim Curry to discuss where our project might be headed and the potential pitfalls and innovations that may await.

5:20 p.m. – Panel: Writing the OpenStack Operations Guide in 5 Days (Anne Gentle, Community Documentation Coordinator, @annegentle & Everett Toews, Developer Advocate, @everett_toews)
The authors of the OpenStack Operations Guide will discuss the trials and tribulations of writing their book in just five short days, from the conception and proposal to the process and publication. This panel will highlight the efforts that go into producing the documentation necessary for a successful OpenStack ecosystem. The first 60 attendees will get a printed copy of the OpenStack Operations Guide courtesy of Rackspace.

5:20 p.m. – Panel: Interoperability (Wayne Walls, Cloud Strategist, @waynewalls)
Interoperability allows OpenStack users to transfer workloads between providers; however, even minor differences between deployments can create significant interop challenges. By solving these problems, we can create a clouds that provide fault tolerance at the technical, geographic and commercial level. Join us for a lively discussion about the opportunities and challenges facing us in our quest for workload portability. This panel includes a broad range of representatives on both the infrastructure, client and system side.

5:20 p.m. – Unified Event Notifications (Sandy Walsh, Software Engineer, @TheSandyWalsh)
Join Sandy Walsh as he explains how we can clean up the code by unifying AMQP notifications, the DB InstanceFault table, decorators, conductor mechanisms and logging.

Wednesday, April 17

11:00 a.m. – Hands-On Configurations Workshop with Cinder and Quantum (Cody Bunch, Principal Architect, @cody_bunch)
In this session, end users will be walked through installing and configuring OpenStack Cinder and Quantum to work with a variety of Enterprise vendors. This interactive configuration session will provide detail in setting up Quantum and Cinder, as well as Enterprise Software Defined Networking and Storage architectures.

1:50 p.m. – Panel: Building an OpenStack Business (Scott Sanchez, Director of Strategy, @scottsanchez)
In this panel discussion, Scott Sanchez, OpenStack Foundation Director Jonathan Bryce and others will discuss how to build a business around OpenStack.

2:40 p.m. – Rackspace Testing Engine Case Study/Overview (Sam Danes, Quality Engineering Manager)
Rackspace is open sourcing its internal testing framework, which is used to test our deployed OpenStack instances. In this session, we will host a demonstration and discuss our approach and how it can be used in the community.

4:30 p.m. – Learning to Scale OpenStack: A Case Study in Rackspace’s Open Cloud Deployment (Rainya Mosher, Software Development Manager, @rainyamosher)
In this case study, we will talk about the various open cloud deployment strategies that Rackspace has used, our experiences with them and how the strategies that worked for 200 nodes didn’t always work for 1,000 nodes. We’ll end by looking at how we will get to the first 10,000-plus-node deployment and stay continuous.

Thursday, April 18

9:00 a.m. – Project Overview: OpenStack Queuing and Notification Service (“Marconi”) (Kurt Griffiths, Principal Architect, @kgriffs & Allan Metts, Software Development Director, @ametts)
Join Kurt Griffiths and Allan Metts to learn about the work that has been done on Marconi, an OpenStack queuing and notification service, and the path ahead — including a description of the project, milestones, how it works and an early demo. Users will be able to customize Marconi to achieve a wide range of performance, durability, availability, and efficiency goals.

9:50 a.m. – Double Entry Auditing of Collected Metrics in CM (Sandy Walsh, Software Engineer, @TheSandyWalsh)
In order to offer SEC-Compliant billing we need to validate collected metrics from two sources. The needs to be an audit trail for important metrics such as instance lifecycle, bandwidth and storage usage. Join Sandy Walsh as he explains how this might be accomplished with CM.

11:00 a.m. – The Zen of Eventlet (Chuck Thier, Software Developer, @creiht)
Eventlet is a core library that OpenStack depends on for network communications. Eventlet is not magic, though often it is treated as such. In this talk, Chuck will dispel the magic, and discuss best practices for using Eventlet.

3:20 p.m. – Bare Metal to OpenStack with Razor and Chef (Egle Sigler, DevOps Architect, @eglute & Matt Ray, Opscode Senior Technical Evangelist, @mattray)
In this workshop attendees will learn to use the Razor Provisioning Engine along with Opscode Chef to deploy OpenStack to bare metal in an easy to do, easy to maintain, easy to scale fashion. You’ll become familiar with the concepts and tools needed to build and maintain an OpenStack Cloud.

4:10 p.m. – Practical OpenStack Cloud Hardening and PCI-DSS Readiness (Cody Bunch, Principal Architect, @cody_bunch)
This session will cover some basic cloud security concepts and then dive into the practicalities of securing your OpenStack deployment and the steps necessary to design your OpenStack Private Cloud in preparation to undergo a PCI-DSS Audit.

5:00 p.m. – Project Meniscus: A Better Focusing Lens for System and Application Events (John Hopper, Software Developer, @zinic)
In highly diverse, clustered environments like those seen in many OpenStack deployments, the system event landscape can become complex, difficult to manage and over time become opaque to the point where events generated no longer provide value. In this session, we will identify how to capture the business value of these events in a standardized and scalable manner.

5:00 p.m. – Fine-Grained Access Control (Joe Savak, Product Manager)
In a large implementation, there can be many users each having some level of access to a shared pool of resources. Not all users need that much access though, and there are cases where access must be restricted further. V3 introduces policies and that works for restricting access to certain capabilities (only a user with the role “admin” or group “foo” can create server in nova, etc). Policies bloat up though if they need to get down the resource level (only joe can delete server “ABC”). This session will discuss possible solutions to provide fine-grained access control to OpenStack services.

5:00 p.m. – Supporting Rich Data Types and Aggregation (Sandy Walsh, Software Engineer, @TheSandyWalsh)
Sandy Walsh will review some of the real-world metrics collected at Rackspace and discuss how this data might be stored in Ceilometer. He will also explain the potential ramifications on the query interface and multi-publisher.

During my presentation at OpenStack Summit in San Diego last October – along with digging into some of the early success that we had – I committed to address these issues.

Our commitment to OpenStack is stronger than ever. As we head into OpenStack Summit Portland, I want to take a moment to update everyone on our progress.

One notable success for us included getting Cells merged into the Grizzly release of Nova. Cells is the level of host abstraction that will enable us to scale to tens of thousands of nodes behind a single API endpoint. Having it in Grizzly trunk eliminates the major difference between our deployment and trunk and also makes cells available to all OpenStack deployers. A big thanks to all who helped in making this happen.

We’re still plugging away on efforts to do continuous delivery from Nova trunk to our production environments. Our deploy pace has slowed as we are learning how to scale this effort and keep up with the pace of commits. It’s become clear that others in the community are interested in making this process work as well. So, we sponsored a work session here at Rackspace that included participation from Red Hat and HP. This is in preparation for a number of sessions at OpenStack Summit Portland on deployments and particularly CI/CD. To help facilitate progress, we’ve open-sourced our testing framework, Cloud Cafe, and engaged with the community to talk about how we might move our extensive test suite further upstream in the process. There is a lot to sort out in this area and we look forward to active collaboration across the teams to keep moving forward.

We are also taking active steps to align Rackspace with the rest of OpenStack around queuing, metrics and orchestration. At the Design Summit, we helped launch the Marconi project to focus on a queuing service optimized for OpenStack. Since the Summit, an initial community has formed around the project and the API is taking shape. The team looks forward to sharing its progress in Portland. Before knowing how OpenStack would evolve its focus, we had begun internal projects in both of these areas. We moved quickly after the Summit to align our metrics effort with Ceilometer. While we haven’t merged all of our work into the projects yet, we have our developers actively engaged and are far down that path. This week, we stated our plans to engage a couple of our teams in the Heat project to join forces with the community on orchestration and auto-scaling. These are exciting and vital project for the future of OpenStack and we’re pleased to join in these projects.

We also realize that the Rackspace public cloud has a number of implementation details that are out of step with common practice in the OpenStack community. Most of these were due to either our early lockdown on features to enable our 2012 launch – or decisions designed to keep in line with our first generation Cloud Servers offering. While  we believe some variation in implementations will be inevitable, we do want to eliminate as many of these as possible to provide as much of a common OpenStack experience as we can. Along those lines, we are committed to take the following steps between now and the end of 2013. Hopefully, this will close most of the gaps that may currently exist:

Nova API Extensions: Support for os_keypairs, config drive for file injection and eventual deprecation/removal of personalities, console/boot log availability

API Support: Exposure and full support of the Glance and Quantum V2 APIs as the primary interfaces for handling images and networks

Image Compatibility: Rackspace will begin supporting cloud-init (for Linux, and a Windows equivalent, likely cloudbase-init) style initialization, removing the dependency on the current Nova and Cloud Servers agents. In addition, we will focus our efforts on ConfigDrive and the Metadata service for client configuration to remove dependencies on XenStore and provide greater portability between implementations. The end goal is to enable images to be easily shared between the Rackspace Open Cloud and other OpenStack implementations with minimal effort.

We’re excited to be ramping up our investment and involvement in OpenStack. I hope this brief update gives you a sense of the energy we all feel around this great effort. If you have any questions or want to talk about these efforts further, find me in Portland!

Each evening after the Summit, a limited number people can receive a free Rackspace Certification for OpenStack exam. There are no reservations and the slots will be given on a first come, first served basis – we anticipate a high demand, so be sure to show up early to guarantee a spot.

By passing the exam, you’ll become a Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack, our entry-level certification. The two-hour, timed exam is hands-on and carried out at the command line. There is no access to the Internet required to complete the exam and exam-takers must have the know-how to interact with OpenStack and its various features. This exam will be based on the OpenStack Folsom release.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to become a Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack, we invite you to take the free exam. We’ll host the exam each night of the OpenStack Summit (Monday, April 15 through Thursday, April 18) in the Director’s Suite on the third floor of the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower. The exam will run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., and an OpenStack Summit Portland badge must be presented prior to taking the test.

Join us for the exam at the Summit and get the skills and training you need to boost your resume and become a Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack.

For more information on Rackspace Training for OpenStack, check out our training web site: http://training.rackspace.com/