Hong Kong, China, May 11, 2017 /Xinwengao.com/ - Speakers, demonstrations tout OpenStack’s power to drive innovation through composable open infrastructure that costs less, does more
OpenStack Summit Boston — Thousands of participants from 60+ countries are attending OpenStack Summit Boston this week to discuss how to combine open source technologies including programmable infrastructure and container orchestration frameworks to deliver speed, agility and cost savings.
During his opening address, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said smart organizations are getting sophisticated about workload placement across public and private clouds based on the Three C’s — capabilities, compliance and cost. He pointed to Remotely Managed Private Cloud, a rapidly growing new segment in the OpenStack ecosystem, as a prime example of how the OpenStack community has ushered in a new era of “2nd Generation Private Cloud” that costs less and does more.
GE Healthcare presented the benefits of this emerging model through their partnership with Rackspace. According to Patrick Weeks, senior director of digital operations for GE Digital, the remotely managed OpenStack solution provided the fastest path to lift and shift applications to a cloud environment, and the on-premises cloud allows them to protect sensitive data and benefit from accessing internal applications on their private network.
The OpenStack Foundation today announced a new category within the OpenStack Marketplace to feature vendors who offer remotely managed private cloud solutions powered by OpenStack.
Edge Computing Emerges as Next Growth Catalyst
OpenStack is moving beyond the cloud to the edge. Beth Cohen, cloud networking product manager at Verizon, outlined how the carrier is leveraging OpenStack for its Virtual Network Solutions product, a massively distributed Network-as-a-Service solution that puts compute, network and storage resources at the edge where the proliferation of devices that define IoT are creating new demands on networks.
Edge computing reduces latency and network bottlenecks by quickly processing vast amounts of data near the source or end user. Key data is returned to the central cloud for big-data analysis and long-term storage. Insights, performance tuning and other operational improvements are in turn pushed back to the edge cloud to improve user experience and economics.
“Verizon is one of several OpenStack users taking a leadership role in edge computing,” said Bryce. “Because OpenStack is already the cloud software of choice for telecoms, it is uniquely positioned to be the infrastructure platform of choice at both the edge and in centralized private and public cloud data centers.”
Live Demonstrations Highlight Power of Composable Open Infrastructure
Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation kicked off day two describing how OpenStack is composable open infrastructure, and how users can consume different pieces of OpenStack and combine them in meaningful ways with other open source technologies based. “We want to break the myth that OpenStack is a monolith and you must consume every piece of it, because in fact it’s a collection of robust services including storage, networking and identity that provide great value on their own.”
John Griffith, principal software engineer at NetApp, and Kendall Nelson, upstream developer advocate at OpenStack Foundation, deployed the Cinder block storage service as an independent system using standard Docker tools in a matter of seconds. The demo showed how easy it is to leverage the maturity and vast number of backends provided by Cinder as a Kubernetes FlexVolume plugin.
Jakub Pavlik, director of product engineering at Mirantis, demonstrated OpenStack’s ability to serve as one platform for bare metal, VMs, and containers. Pavlik deployed a big data application using Spark, Kafka and Hadoop Distributed File System on a common OpenContrail-powered network.
“Interoperability Challenge” Demonstrates Application Portability
In a live demonstration on Tuesday, 15 global IT leaders in the OpenStack ecosystem simultaneously deployed Kubernetes on OpenStack clouds and used the container management tool to concurrently deploy a distributed FV applications, CockroachDB database and N.
This “Interoperability Challenge” underscores OpenStack’s strength in facilitating application portability across a diversity of OpenStack public and private clouds. Participants in the Interoperability Challenge were Canonical, Deutsche Telekom, EasyStack, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Platform9, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, T2Cloud, VEXXHOST, VMware, Wind River and ZTE.
“This is actually our second Interoperability Challenge,” said OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier. “The first one, held last at the Barcelona Summit, showcased how workloads can be deployed across multiple different OpenStack environments run by different vendors, with consistent behavior and performance. With today’s Challenge, the OpenStack community has raised the bar substantially, showcasing interoperability with microservices-based applications that manage both storage and network functions with Kubernetes. It shows both the community’s commitment to interoperability and to embracing innovation that works across different OpenStack clouds.”
Growing User Adoption Across Industries and Geographies
The April 2017 OpenStack User Survey revealed a 44 percent increase in OpenStack deployments catalogued year over year. Seventy four percent of deployments tracked were outside of the US. Important users speaking at the OpenStack Summit Boston include:
● Adobe Advertising Cloud
● ATamp;T
● Bloomberg
● CERN
● China Mobile
● China Telecom
● Comcast
● Department of International Trade for the UK
● eBay
● Fidelity
● Gap
● GE
● Harvard / Massachusetts Open Cloud
● MIT
● Paddy Power Betfair
● U.S. Army Cyberschool
● Verizon
All session videos will be available at https://www.openstack.org/videos/summits/boston-2017.