Created on 29 November 2016

In October, this year one of our colleagues attended the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona in order to gain some insights on new technology trends, as well as some knowledge on how different companies are utilizing the OpenStack infrastructure.

 

After attending the event, it was evident that OpenStack is increasing in popularity, as a large number of tech companies are now attempting to move towards the OpenStack based infrastructure operation. Many of these companies are using this infrastructure to add value, for example Intel is adding value by using custom based modules by selling in an OpenStack environment.

 

A number of big name tech companies including IBM, Intel, and many more have presented solutions that are compatible with OpenStack. Each company booth presented custom solutions for OpenStack, many of them were hardware companies presenting solutions that help utilize OpenStack. Intel presented a hardware platform which is compatible with OpenStack and provides technical support when needed. The OpenStack infrastructure also uses numerous modules and many of these companies presented solutions on how to improve these modules.

 

Another major tech trend that has increased in popularity among tech companies is the use of container technology, Docker containers to be particular. Due to this trend, many cloud providers would like to use Docker containers. Therefore, many companies presented solutions on how to operate cluster management solutions on top of OpenStack.

 

The main purpose of OpenStack is to simplify the process, in previous years’ companies would use a custom infrastructure, but now firms are moving towards the OpenStack infrastructure and their goal is to make it more simplified.

 

During the OpenStack summit, there were numerous presentations, we have chosen the most impressive presentations and decided to do an overview of each one, including some key insights.

 

 Enterprise-Ready OpenStack?  The Challenge and Benefits of a Global OpenStack Cloud Deployment

 

 

Over 13,000 servers, thousands of applications, 640 in-house systems - all migrated to one OpenStack-based cloud platform.

In this session, you can hear from Fujitsu’s experience about the challenges and benefits of deploying a global, enterprise-grade OpenStack cloud platform (Fujitsu Cloud Service K5), designed to tackle the challenge of supporting both:

• Mission-critical systems (Systems of Record / SOR)
• The creation of new value streams for customers through digitalisation (Systems of Engagement / SOE)

Sky UK Case Study: OpenStack in the Enterprise

 

Over the past few years we have read positive and many negative stories about OpenStack in the Enterprise. We have been on the journey of installing, integrating, and running multi-tenant production workloads on OpenStack in the Enterprise. From our experience we will share the things that did work and the things that didn't.

• Deploying and integrating OpenStack into the Enterprise environment
• Upgrading OpenStack and Ceph in a production environment
• Enterprise hardware, multi vendor integration
• Multi tenancy - end users and their issues
• Simplifying OpenStack
• BAU Support Operation
• OpenStack services, Nova Neutron, Heat, Designate
• Scaling OpenStack

The Open Cloud: A Platform of Possibilities

 

Building a cloud strategy for your company is not a simple task. If you are evaluating your cloud strategy and considering OpenStack, this session is for you. IBM is all about open technologies and building open cloud solutions that enable clients to quickly deploy their workloads on cloud infrastructure.

In this session, Jesse Proudman, IBM Blue Box CTO and Distinguished Engineer, and Azmir Mohamed, IBM Blue Box Product Manager, will share IBM's cloud strategy and point of view on market direction.

You will learn about different use cases for local, dedicated, and public cloud deployment models and how they address different client expectations. With so many companies supporting OpenStack, you need to do your homework. Hear details about what differentiates IBM Cloud as a provider.

 

Toward 10,000 Containers on OpenStack

 

Kubernetes, Swarm and Mesos have been shown to scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of containers, handling millions of requests per second. On OpenStack, they can be easily deployed and managed by Magnum, but how do they scale? Building the correct infrastructure plays a critical role in the performance and scalability for the containers, and this needs to be implemented in Magnum.

Working toward this goal, we have built a collection of Rally plugins to track the performance and scalability of both Magnum and the Container Orchestration Engines (Kubernetes, Swarms, Mesos). We have been running the benchmarks on large OpenStack environments to collect measurements and study the behavior of the system. In this talk, we will present our findings along with some of the best practices we found for operating large container environments.

 

Microservices on the Open Cloud: Part 1 – Designing Effective Microservices

 

Microservices are at the heart of the open cloud. Join us for a thought-provoking session where we will help you understand what it takes to build and run a modern, cloud-native application using open cloud technologies such as OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and containers. 

In this first step on your journey to building a successful microservices application, we will begin by considering the 12 factor app (12factor.net) and how modern applications are designed and run. We will then delve into the critical architectural decisions that facilitate scalable and resilient application development. As you finish this session, you will not only have a better understanding of how to architect a microservices application, you'll walk away with a better understanding of the options available to you.

 

OpenStack on Kubernetes - Lessons Learned

 

How To & Best Practices

 

Due to its important number of components, deploying and managing OpenStack is known to be a complex and error-prone process. On the other hand, containers recently introduced consistent deployment capabilities and container management systems brought robust application lifecycle administration at scale.

 

Therefore, we’ve decided earlier this year to bring the worlds of VMs and containers together by containerizing OpenStack services and managing them using Kubernetes. This effort enables companies to deploy a scalable and self-healing OpenStack platform in less than 5 minutes on top of Kubernetes.

 

During this session, we will share the experience that we gained during the kubification of OpenStack, demonstrate how this work simplifies and accelerates OpenStack deployments and operations, and describe how what was initially a proof of concept is growing into a production ready product.