Yesterday, Dell sent me to be part of our OpenStack vanguard for the design summit.  The conference is fascinating and productive for the content of the sessions and even more interesting for the hallway meetings.

It’s obvious looking at the board composition that RackSpace and NASA Nova are driving  most of the development; however, the is palpable community interest and enthusiasm.  Participants and contributors showed up in force at this event.

RackSpace and NASA leadership provides critical momentum for the community.  Code is the smallest part of their contribution, their commitment to run the code at scale in production is the magic rocket fuel powering OpenStack. I’ve had many conversations with partners and prospects planning to follow RackSpace into production with a 3-6 month lag.

Beyond that primary conference arc, my impressions:

• Core vendors like Citrix, Dell, Canonical are signing up to do primary work for the code base.  They are taking ownership for their own components in the stack.
• Universally, people comment about the speed of progress and amount of code being generated.  Did I mention that there is a lot of code being written.
• Networking is still a major challenge.  OpenStack (with Citrix’s Xen support) is driving Open vSwitchas a replacement for iptables management.
• IPv6 gets lackadaisical treatment in the US, but is urgent in Japan/Asia where their core infrastructure is ALREADY IPv6.  Their frustration to get attention here should be a canary in the cloud mine (but is not).  They proposed a gateway model where VMs have dual addresses: IPv4 gets NATed while IPv6 is a pass-through. Seems to me that the going IPv6 internal is the real solution.
• Cloud bursting is still too fuzzy a thing to talk about in a big group.  The session about it covered so many use-cases that we did not accomplish anything.  Some people wanted to talk about cloud API proxy while others (myself included) wanted to talk about managing apps between clouds.  My $0.02 is that vendors like RightScale solve the API proxy issue so it’s the networking issues that need focus.  We need to get back to the use-cases!

Executive Tweet: #openstack: Partners & Code = great progress.  Networking = needs more love

Other notes:

• Joseph George’s Day 1 Notes.
• My Day 2 Notes.
• Joseph George’s Day 2 Notes.