One March 8^th, 70 people from around the world gathered on the Crowbar IM channel to begin building a production grade OpenStack Essex deployment. The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in two physical locations: the Nokia offices in Boston and the TechRanch in Austin.

My objective was to enable the community to begin collaboration on Essex Deployment. At that goal, we succeeded beyond my expectations.

IMHO, the top challenge for OpenStack Essex is to build a community of deploying advocates. We have a strong and dynamic development community adding features to the project. Now it is time for us to build a comparable community of deployers. By providing a repeatable, shared and open foundation for OpenStack deployments, we create a baseline that allows collaboration and co-development. Not only must we make deployments easy and predictable, we must also ensure they are scalable and production ready.

Having solid open production deployment infrastructure drives OpenStack adoption.

Our goal on the 8^th was not to deliver finished deployments; it was to the start of Essex deployment community collaboration. To ensure that we could focus on getting to an Essex baseline, our team invested substantial time before the event to make sure that participants had a working Essex reference deployment.

By the nature of my team’s event leadership and our approach to OpenStack, the event was decidedly Crowbar focused. I feel like this is an acceptable compromise because Crowbar is open and provides a repeatable foundation. If everyone has the same foundation then we can focus on the truly critical challenges of ensuring consistent OpenStack deployments. Even using Crowbar, we waste a lot of time trying to figure out the differences between configurations. Lack of baseline consistency seriously impedes collaboration.

The fastest way to collaborate on OpenStack deployment is to have a reference deployment as a foundation.

Success By The Numbers

This was a truly international community collaborative event. Here are some of the companies that participated:

Dell (sponsor), Nokia (sponsor), Rackspace, Opscode, Canonical, Fedora, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Nicira, Enstratus, Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Purdue University, Orbital Software Solutions, XepCloud and others.

PLEASE COMMENT here if I missed your company and I will add it to the list.

On the day of the event, we collected the following statistics:

• 70 people on Skype IM channel (it’s not too late to join by pinging DellCrowbar with “Essex barclamps”).
• 14+ companies
• 2 physical sites with 10-15 people at each
• 4 fold increase in traffic on the Crowbar Github to 813 hits.
• 66 downloads of the Deploy day ISO
• 8 videos capture from deploy day sessions.
• World-wide participation

For over 70 people to spend a day together at this early stage in deployment is a truly impressive indication of the excitement that is building around OpenStack.

Improvements for Next Deploy Day

This was a first time that Andi Abes (Boston event lead), Rob Hirschfeld (Austin event lead) or Jean-Marie Martini (Dell event lead) had ever coordinated an event like this. We owe much of the success to efforts by Greg Althaus, Victor Lowther and the Canonical 12.04/Essex team before the event. Also, having physical sites was very helpful.

We are planning to do another event, so we are carefully tracking ways to improve.

Here are some issues we are tracking.

• Issues with setting up a screen and voice share that could handle 70 people.
• Lack of test & documentation on Crowbar meant too much time focused on Crowbar
• Connectivity issues distributed voice
• Should have started with DevStack as a baseline
• more welcome in the comments!
  

Thank you!

I want to thank everyone who participated in making this event a huge success!