OpenStack Summit 2013: Recommended Presentations and Voting Guide

It’s that time of year again (up until February 25) - time to figure out what presentations we want to see at the OpenStack summit. Here are some presentations that I’m involved with, as well as others that I think should be on the docket.

If you think these will be of value to the community, please use your vote to ensure that they will get on the schedule.

Surviving Your First Check-in: An Engineer’s Guide to Contributing to OpenStack

Presenter: Colin McNamara — Chief Cloud Architect / Director Cloud Practice at Nexus IS

Let me tell you a dirty little secret. While OpenStack is a great project, it is extremely complicated for an individual with an engineering/operations focus vs a programming focus to get to their first code contribution.

My name is Colin, I am an engineer. Although I initially got involved with OpenStack in the context of operations, I quickly was drawn into actually contributing code to the project. What I found is that many of the tools and workflows used to contribute to OpenStack are completely foreign to those (like me) with an operations focus.

Learning Objectives:

1. The importance of community - Leveraging the power of the meeting
2. Talking your employer into supporting OpenStack and the CLA
3. Setting up your dev environments - getting beyond Devstack
4. Getting git, using the git repository for those that don’t code for a living
5. Testing your code - what do you mean it doesn’t build?
6. How to give back, and get other people involved in the community

Building and Running a Successful OpenStack Meetup Community

Presenter: Kyle Mestery — Technical Leader at Cisco

This session will be a panel where we will discuss how to build and run your own OpenStack Meetup. The panelists have varying experience around this, from Sean running one of the largest and longest tenured OpenStack Meetup groups, to Mark starting a brand new group in the RTP area. We will discuss what makes a successful group, strategies for forming and running your own group, and how community organizers can work together to share content and enable others to be successful with their own group.

VMware/Nicira NVP Deep Dive

Presenter: Brad Hedlund — Engineering Architect, Virtual Networking at VMware, Inc.

This session is a 201 level technical deep dive on the VMware/Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). NVP is a virtual networking platform powering many OpenStack production environments as the networking engine behind Quantum.

Topics Include:

• System Components Review
  • NVP Controller Cluster
  • Hypervisor Nodes
  • NVP Gateway Nodes
  • NVP Service Nodes
• NVP Controller Cluster
  • Scale-out control plane & HA
  • Control and management channels
• NVP Security Groups
• NVP Logical Network Devices
  • Logical Switches
  • Logical Routers
  • QoS, NAT, Monitoring, Security
• Physical network design with NVP

Stand up HA OpenStack with Open Puppet Manifests

Presenter: Boris Renski — Co-Founder and EVP at Mirantis

A demonstration of using open puppet recipes to create highly available OpenStack deployments using free, open source tools.

Get Started Deploying OpenStack with Puppet

Presenter: Dan Bode — SoftwareDude at PuppetLabs

This hands-on lab will provide an opportunity to see how easy it is to use Puppet to deploy OpenStack environments. It will cover the architectural details of the Puppet modules used for installation, and explain how to easily get up and going with a fully functional OpenStack environment.

Requirements:

• Laptop with:
  • virtualbox
  • vagrant
  • git
• Reasonable networking connectivity

Managing a Team of OpenStack Developers

Presenter: Rainya Mosher — SDLC Manager at Rackspace Hosting

This presentation addresses the unique challenges of working with software development teams who are dedicated members of the OpenStack Community, including:

• Balancing review days with the development cycle
• Delivering a product to customers on time while meeting OpenStack milestone commitments
• Communicating to senior leaders about the OpenStack review cycle
• Keeping developers engaged with new OpenStack features while maintaining production systems