High Tech Bristol and Bath is running an OpenStack Day looking at the latest issues in open-source cloud software development and use. Keynote speakers include Richard Haigh, Head of Delivery Enablement at Paddy Power Betfair, which has invested over £30m in OpenStack to support its betting services, and Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation.
OpenStack Day UK is on 15 September at HP Bristol, and brings together hundreds of IT executives, cloud operators and technology providers to discuss cloud computing. The regional events are organised and hosted annually by local user groups and companies in the ecosystem.
OpenStack is open-source software that is used by companies such as IBM and HP (who both have teams of OpenStack developers in Bristol) to provide cloud services on both private and public servers. There are currently over 500 companies in the foundation that oversees the technology.
Openstack speakers
Stig Tefler, CTO of StackHPC (pictured left), will be looking at OpenStack and the Software-Defined Supercomputer. There are significant differences in design criteria between cloud and HPC, and these can be mitigated through architectural and configuration choices of an OpenStack private cloud. Some real-world examples demonstrate the potential for using OpenStack for managing HPC infrastructure to gain the benefits of using software-defined infrastructure without paying the performance overhead.
After working in high-performance networking startups and for supercomputer company Cray in Bristol, Stig is CTO of StackHPC, a Bristol-based consultancy specialising in developing OpenStack for research computing and HPC. He is currently working with Cambridge University on the use of OpenStack in several flagship scientific research programmes and is co-founder of the OpenStack Foundation’s Scientific Working Group.
VS Joshi (pictured right) from the EMC Emerging Technologies Division is mapping the OpenStack cloud deployment minefield. Most cloud deployers have experienced their fair share of failed cloud deployments – but some projects are absolutely doomed from the start.
He will take an honest look at the key factors that are important for success in cloud projects, informed by experience designing and deploying dozens of them. He will look at which factors are most important, and analyse how a turnkey solution to OpenStack can help solve the most common—and most painful—deployment challenges for the majority of enterprise cloud operators.
Routing on the server in an OpenStack environment extends the capabilities of traditional routing protocols from the top of rack switch down to the server. Routing to the host allows the server admin to use equal cost multi-pathing capabilities on the server by using multiple uplinks in an active active role without bonds or Layer 2 networking. It also opens up the opportunity to make intelligent per tenant path decisions on the server, and increase automation scalability through minimised IP addressing.
Attilla de Groot (pictured above left) has been working as a network engineer as service providers, enterprises and in consultant roles before joining as a system engineer at Cumulus Networks and will be looking at routing on a host in an Openstack environment.
Lightning talks
Delegates can also sign up to give a 5-minute Lightning Talk with the chance to win a complimentary ticket to OpenStack Summit in Barcelona or a complimentary code for the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam.
The software platform consists of interrelated components that control hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a web-based dashboard, through command line tools or a RESTful API interface.
Details on the OpenStack Day are at https://openstackday.uk/ and you can register to attend here.
