Perhaps the most interesting thing about open source once you get past the inherent freedoms (freedom to run for any purpose, study, modify and distribute) is the ability for users to participate in a meaningful way in developing the software that they use. To that end on Nov. 20-22 in Amsterdam, the Apache CloudStack community will be coming together at a user-organized event to share their experience and development plans for Apache CloudStack at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference EU 2013(CCCEU13).
This is the first conference for the CloudStack community in Europe and was driven by a group of volunteers largely from the staff of mission-critical outsourcer, Schuberg Philis. As users and builders of CloudStack clouds, Arjan Eriks and Harm Boertien have been leading the efforts of the organizing committee. Boertien says,
“This is a unique event showcasing how developers and users should get together to develop software and take advantage of the beautiful city of Amsterdam. Our aim is to broaden the user and developer community and improve the overall feature set of CloudStack.”
The program was created from paper submissions selected by members of the Apache CloudStack community and will feature talks on everything from designing basic cloud architecture, to storage systems and software-defined networking (SDN). The featured keynote speaker will be Patrick Debois, the godfather of the DevOps movement and founder of the wildly successful DevOps days. There are also talks from Dell’s DevOps and systems management guru John M. Willis and Mark Burgess, a pioneer in policy-based configuration management and the founder of CfEngine.
Agility in delivering IT solutions is a big part of the cloud computing culture and to that end many of the talks will focus on that topic. Opscode’s Michael Ducy will explain how to instill culture in the cloud. Longtime operations guru Kris Buytaert will share his vision on the future of sysadmins and Paddy Power developers Noel King and John Turner will talk about the “killing of dinosaurs” a provocative talk about rejecting antiquated approaches to operations management. CCCEU13 Gold sponsor NetApp is keen to showcase their new Virtual Storage Console plugin that allows CloudStack users to manage NetApp storage right from the CloudStack interface. Many other users will share their experiences acquired from running production cloud computing environments.
While the event is about users and developers it is supported by a number of industry technology leaders including CA, Citrix, Juniper, NetApp, Splunk, Sungard, TrendMicro and VMware. Giles Sirrett, managing consultant for ShapeBlue, and a supporter of the conference who has been tirelessly espousing the virtues of CloudStack and promoting the solution commercially had this to say:
“Apache CloudStack is a technology that we’re heavily backing at ShapeBlue as it presents to us the most stable, proven and fast to deploy option when building out cloud computing environments for our customers.
“As well as the proven technology, we and our customers find great value in being able to interact with a well-governed, dynamic Apache open-source community,” Sirrett says. “CloudStack Collaboration conference presents us with a unique opportunity to meet with the users, integrators and developers of the technology. We’re able to share experiences, look at ongoing work from associated vendors and work with the developer community to ensure that Apache CloudStack continues to meet our needs.”
Linux.com readers can receive a 50% discount off the €150.00 registration price by using the code CCC_LOVES_LINUX when they register at http://cloudstackcollab.org/event/registration.
Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions, at Citrix. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com, where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix Open Source Business Office and the Citrix efforts around Apache CloudStack, Open Daylight, Xen Project and XenServer.
