[caption id=”attachment_183" align=”alignleft” width=”300"]
OpenStack Summit[/caption]
After a delayed flight, multiple “van to hotel will be in 10 minutes”, 30+hours door-to-door, I made it to HKG on sunday afternoon. Hong Kong Immigration was very efficient, what I thought would take more than 30 minutes, took less than 5 minutes. That efficiency, however is not seen outside. Starbucks, Hotel reception desk, everything is slow. Hmm, APAC style? After nice nap and dinner, had two very interesting conversations:
Conversations with Sajid Akthar
OpenStack India User group has grown up significantly. Sajid and Atul Jha all have done incredible job in growing this from handful of members to 1000s. Awesome. He is doing an awesome job in nurturing the community, bringing visibility to developers and vendors. Happy to see more contribution from India, and more customer interest/ traction with OpenStack.
He brought up a very interesting point regarding customer use cases. Wouldn’t a developer do better if the big picture is known? Very valid point and the OpenStack User committee is driving towards that. We also talked a lot about adoption practices, inertia in India, his initiatives talking to the government regarding OpenStack. I expect to hear more on that soon.
Conversation with Chris Kemp of Nebula)/ Justin of FathomDB
Serendipitously ran in to Chris (hey, suggested him get a Sea-side view room and he got it!) while he was checking in. What was supposed to be quick chat for may be 30 minutes, ran for more than 2 hours -he has to sit through day long board meetings tomorrow (Sorry Chris!)
He drove more in to the use cases: detailed workloads. What can a customer run on OpenStack cloud? Fantastic conversation covering many aspects — what Nebula has done to harden their Private Cloud solution, kind of workloads they see, challenges to private cloud market, economics of cloud, to what is core, oh my god! Thoroughly enjoyed the insights Chris and John brought in, thanks to both of them!
Key things learned:
- Key values a private cloud solution brings in is not just cost, but security & compliance and performance
- Providing infrastructure to the end customer is only part of the story, the workloads and applications that run on it is are equally, if not more, important.