Lion Dance, Hong Kong CIO, interesting Keynotes, more conversations, Raspberry Pi (and another Raspberry Pi almost) and parties!

The summit started with the opening ceremony — Lion Dance, followed by welcome note from Mr. Daniel Lai, the Government CIO of Hong Kong. Keynotes followed, with Jonathan Bryce announcing next summit will be in Atlanta and very impressive user stories from Concur, DigitalTree and ShutterStock.

Some interesting stats/ tweets from the keynotes:

It was a pleasant to see Atul Jha from SwiftStack and OpenStack India User group on stage with Mark Shuttleworth during Canonical keynote. Though he said he just got lucky, I strongly believe opportunities present themselves to those that deserve. @koolhead17, so cool dude!

And more was yet to come, here are some of the sessions that interested me:

Day 1

Deep Dive into the CERN Cloud Infrastructure : Impressive.

Hybrid Openstack Clouds: CERN Research Project Aims to Solve Federation for the Real World: Standing only session!

AWS Repatriation Bring Your Apps Back: Promising toolset/ technique. Not sure how many really need hybrid cloud yet, though everybody seems to want it.

Cloud Reality in China — helped get some insights into the little bit hyped China market.

Day 2

High Availability Update: Havana and Icehouse (pumped to see OpenStack India’s Syed Armani on stage!)

Lessons learned — Building the PayPal Cloud

Write Once and REALLY Run Anywhere with OpenStack and Docker: Docker demo was well attended, full hall. They have a lot of attention being a promising technology for Project Solum. I also followed up with their team on their on technology and use cases. Impressive demo from @aslaen.

Best one ever was Subbu Allamaraju’s OpenStack Private Cloud at eBay. He rocked the audience with his style and content. Hopefully I get to talk to him this summit. Once the video is up, I will update with the link. Here are his slides. My favorite slide was #8, what I like to call the ‘Cloud Services MilkyWay’.

Here are some interesting conversations that I have had first 2 days at the summit and parties:

During the OpenStack VIP Reception party, I met with Sebastien, CEO of Scalr, a multi cloud management company. Very smart guy, leading a profitable, smart team. Check out their products and solutions.

I also met with Jesse Proudman of BlueBox. They are Hosting/ Managed Hosting providers based in Seattle, now also focusing on OpenStack Private Clouds. They are reinvigorating OpenStack Seattle Meetup efforts. Check out their Hosted OpenStack Cloud, they are someone to watch for!

Briefing meetings

I am also covering this summit on behalf on CloudStory and had an opportunity to talk to executives from eNovance, Gigaspaces and Huawei. Check out CloudStory sometime next week for the reports.

What is Core discussion with Rob Hirschfield

Had a quick chat with Rob who is leading the effort to define what is OpenStack core. He explained the motivation behind this is to enable interoperable clouds. All the guiding principles are towards this goal of interoperability. Any feature of OpenStack that complies to all these principles will be a core feature.

Booths I found interesting — GridCentric, StackLab, Stackinsider

GridCentric optimizes host memory utilization through their Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology, thereby helping in reducing server sprawl.

StackLab offers OpenStack training based on edX MOOC platform. While they offer onsite training now, they also plan on providing online training.

Stackinsider offers Deployment as a Service (DaaS), with free trials to play with OpenStack deployments based on multiple distros. They also offer consultancy services.

Some insights into TCO with OpenStack

I went in to the summit with an impression that cost is one of the most important driving factors towards OpenStack adoption. After talking to customers and some vendors, beginning to get the impression that it is not.

It was good to catch up with friends/ faces from the community and to make new friends. It was also great to meet most of the members of the OpenStack Security Group. I won a Raspberry Pi at the Rackspace booth, had a blast at the parties too!

[Updated at 7.50 am to include conversations with BlueBox]