Open Infrastructure Summit 2019 - highlights

CodiLime software engineer Paweł Kopka and DevOps engineer Jarosław Łukow recently attended the Open Infrastructure Summit, (Previously known as the OpenStack Summit), held from April 29th to  May 4th in Denver, Colorado, USA. Jarosław and Paweł meticulously noted down everything they found interesting, so you don’t have to.  For all those who didn’t make it to Denver, we have prepared a short glossary of essential terms and developments.

Technology names to remember

• Monasca       - monitoring-as-a-service solution that integrates with OpenStack; workshops on Monasca garnered no lack of attention among conference attendees. The tool is open-source and enables easy scaling of cloud apps. Definitely worth noting!
• Kayobe       - the most recent release enables even easier deployment of containerized OpenStack to bare-metal server. This is a name to remember.
• Vitrage       - sources data from Monasca and performs root cause analysis. It gathers metrics from libvirt, docker, k8s, ceph and external alarming systems like Monasca.   It also maintains an object relation graph and can execute Mistral workflows for self-healing. Vitrage offers cool feature allowing you to drill down statuses: cluster > AZ > compute host > VM > app.
• Ironic OpenStack Bare Metal Provisioning Program       - This new undertaking by the OpenStack Foundation seeks to strengthen the existing Ironic bare metal provisioning service and popularize it as a separate tool that can work separately from OpenStack. Thirty organizations have joined the project to show their support for this very new course taken by the OpenStack Foundation.
• Designate       - a multi-tenant DNSaaS service for OpenStack.
• Kubernetes - that Kubernetes was discussed far and wide at the Summit will come as no surprise,  as KubeVirt joins it and bare metal.

The most important topics discussed

• Community - many speakers (including Johnatan Bryce, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director) underscored the importance of the user community and open-source projects.
• Bare metal - many speakers talked about bare-metal deployments.
• Kata Containers and Zuul - Attending to OpenStack’s development, the OpenStack Foundation (OSF) announced that these two projects had exited the pilot phase to become its first top-level Open Infrastructure Projects.
• 5G - the advent of 5G  is imminent. OpenStack is also getting ready for the future.
• Collaboration and open-source - it is very difficult to succeed alone, so we have to promote open source communities and innovation.

Remarks on Keynotes

• The Keynotes       were dedicated to essential topics such as open infrastructure, open-source collaboration, bare metal, the 5G network, Zuul CI and Kata Containers.
• Johnatan Bryce       underlined the importance of collaboration in the field of technology. Tech is not an advantage any more, but is more like a hamster wheel - you have to run fast to stay in the same place.
• James Penick      , Architect Director at Verizon Media, discussed collaborative platforms and their superiority over solutions created individually. It is better to use open source, as more people can provide input.
• Mark Shuttleworth      , CEO of Canonical, declared his full support for the OpenStack platform, stating that it is still a very vital part of the infrastructure landscape, despite the accelerating shift from VMs to containers.
• Samuel Ortiz (Intel) and Andreea Florescu       (Software Engineer, AWS) talked about what’s new in Kata Containers. They looked at performance improvements, operability, more architectures and security (isolation inside VMs). They also discussed support for multiple hypervisors and VMMs (QEMU, NEMU, Firecracker and the upcoming rust-vmm).

Why it is worth attending the Open Infrastructure Summit

We wholeheartedly recommend the Open Infrastructure Summit! This is a great place to learn more about technologies, trends and solutions related to OpenStack and beyond. Best of all, perhaps, is that the sessions and workshops provide hands-on experience with numerous new technologies.