Last month, the OpenStack Foundation organized its 16th OpenStack Summit from November 6th to 8th in Sydney, Australia — the first time an OpenStack Summit was held in this region of the world.
“We have a huge developer and user base in Australia who had to fly halfway across the globe to come to North America or Europe to attend previous summits. This is our gift to the Australian community,” a member of the OpenStack event organizing team told us.
Cloud Foundry Foundation had a booth in the OpenStack Marketplace, which was a mecca for the community. It housed booths of users, partners and adjacent open source communities, like Cloud Foundry. Marketing Communications Manager Caitlyn O’Connell and Member Relations Manager Michelle McManus traveled from the San Francisco office to staff the booth in Sydney and meet members of the Cloud Foundry and OpenStack communities from around the world.
Foundation members VMware, SUSE and IBM volunteered their time at the booth to address technical questions and discuss use cases with potential Cloud Foundry users. Michelle and Caitlyn explained the purpose of a Foundation in the open source community, handed out t-shirts and encouraged those curious about using or contributing to Cloud Foundry to check out the blog and website.
Open and Stack
On stage, Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of OpenStack Foundation, talked about what the terms “Open” and “Stack” mean. He acknowledged that people interpret these words differently, but gave definitions for each term according to OpenStack Foundation’s mission:
Open: “We call it the ‘four opens’: how we write our code, how we design our systems, how we manage our development process, and how we interact as a community.”
Stack: “We’re building a technology stack but it’s not a rigid stack. It’s not a single approach to doing things. It’s actually a flexible programmable infrastructure technology stack.”
When these two are put together, it creates a community of users that’s creating and consuming this open source technology — not dissimilar to Cloud Foundry Foundation’s own vibrant open source community.
Highlights
Announcements at OpenStack Summit included:
- To make it easier for customers to find OpenStack powered public cloud, the Foundation created a platform called OpenStack Passport that lists the providers of OpenStack public cloud.
- The Foundation announced two tools to help users integrate components of the stack:
- Zuul, a development workflow routing software
- OpenLab, a testing platform
- The Superuser Award was given to Tencent, makers of the WeChat platform, for the work they have done using OpenStack and other open source technologies. Tencent was also accepted as one of the Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation.
What’s Next?
The Cloud Foundry Foundation and OpenStack Foundation have worked together to reach their communities — and Bryce announced that, going forward, OpenStack events will be even more inclusive of other open source projects like Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and KVM. We look forward to working collaboratively across open source communities!
