The bi-annual OpenStack Summit got kicked off this morning in Austin, Texas. I’ve attended every Summit for the past three years and this one is bigger than ever with over 7,500 attendees from some 61 different countries based on pre-registration data. Yes, this means that roughly 1/3rd of the world’s countries are represented at the Summit, assuming all those people show up.
Attendees are coming from about 1200 different companies, which means that (a) on average companies are sending good-sized teams to the Summit, and (b) all those attendees aren’t just from Summit Sponsors, since the number of those is just* 116. (*Though quite large in terms of the number of sponsors for a conference.)
Attendee roles are fairly diverse as well, with attendees self-identifying as the following:
17% – Cloud Architect
12% – OpenStack User
11% – Operations/System Admin
11% – Upstream Development
10% – CEO/CIO/CTO/IT Manager
9% – Product Strategy
9% – Business Development/Marketing
8% – Cloud Application Developer
7% – Product Management
1% – Media
6% – Other
Keynotes Day 1
As per usual, there are two keynote sessions at the event, with the first day’s keynote (roughly) focused on the OpenStack community and the second day’s keynote (again, roughly) focused on the OpenStack project itself.
Three key themes jumped out at me during this year’s day one keynote:
1. Enterprise.
The “Enterprise” was a central theme at the keynote this morning, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that both Gartner and SAP were, for the first time, keynote presenters.
Gartner and SAP headlining #OpenStackATX. Aspirational or reflective of new reality? #EnterpriseCloud #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/vtVcEt4VGU
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
This rubbed some folks the wrong way, and there was quite a bit of meta conversation on Twitter.
I came 2 an #OpenStack Summit keynote & a legacy vendor conference from 2014 broke out. Go bi-modal. 🙂
— Kenneth Hui (@kenhuiny) April 25, 2016
In general though, the answer to the question I posed in my tweet above (aspiration or reflective) is “both.” These keynotes tend to be both lagging (0-6 months) and leading (12-24 months) indicators of where OpenStack is going. Put another way: OpenStack is maturing and becoming of interest to increasing numbers of enterprises. At the same time, the Foundation sees this in the annual user survey data and begins to direct resources and the community to go after enterprise opportunities and the trend solidifies.
A good example of this is NFV. When we first heard about this at the Atlanta Summit it seemed to come from nowhere. Now it’s the driving use-case for OpenStack at the moment. In two years’ time, we’ll be seeing a lot more traditional enterprises gracing the keynote stage, especially since:
Half of the Fortune 100 now running #OpenStack. @jbryce #OpenStackATX pic.twitter.com/tmdSIupUCz
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
This is data from the user survey. Someone on twitter then made the leap to say “and 65% of those [Fortune 100] are in production, quoting another stat from the user survey. Unfortunately statistics doesn’t work like that, but I’ll see if I can get this number from the Foundation.
2. Telecom.
I mentioned this above, but NFV (network functions virtualization) has emerged as a killer app for OpenStack in the telecom industry. Kudus to the Foundation staff and community for seeing this opportunity and organizing around it.
Telecom and NFV played a dominant role in the keynotes. AT&T; delivered the first case study with a presentation on their journey to cloud. They went on to win the OpenStack SuperUser user-of-the-half-year award, following on the heels of another telco from last time–Japan’s NTT.
Telecom and NFV is one of the fastest growing use cases for #OpenStack. @jbryce #OpenStackATX pic.twitter.com/2VLWoe0ehA
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
A customer logo slide presented during Red Hat’s video presentation was also pretty telco heavy.
During the media conference after the keynotes, OSF executive director Jonathan Bryce mentioned a great deal of functionality that has been built into OpenStack to support NFV. How the community will reconcile the needs of two large and demanding communities (ie enterprise and telco) remains an open question and will be a challenge.
"Success in IT about satisfying competing priorities and embracing technological diversity." @jbryce #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/z96dpxpTqN
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
3. Heterogeneity a.k.a. Diversity
A final theme this morning was the heterogeneity of IT environments and how that plays to OpenStack’s strengths. I see this as an evolution of the OpenStack-as-API or OpenStack-as-Glue marketing messages we’ve heard in previous keynotes.
Hate to break it to you, but IT is not getting simpler or more homogeneous. #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/HjdBIYgnQR
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
It is certainly the case that both telecom and enterprise IT organizations are extremely heterogeneous. But public cloud environments and their progenitors –web-scale environments run by companies like Google and Facebook–are much less so. In adopting this as a key marketing message, OpenStack is telling users you can have your cake (complexity) and eat it too (cloud). Certainly this message was echoed by some of the keynote presenters. AT&T;’s Sorabh Saxena for example, credited their success to OpenStacks ability to help them manage the extreme heterogeneity of their cloud offerings. But I think that this can probably be taken too far, and that a key differentiator between successful and failed private cloud initiatives will be the degree to which heterogeneity is created.
Speaking of which, Mirantis’ Boris Renski gave a nice (and bearful) presentation on the difference between successful and failed cloud initiatives. In it he pointed out that people and process moreso than technology defines success and failure with cloud. His example focused on the operations team and how traditionally skilled ops teams (ie VMware sysadmins) won’t run a great cloud. Going back to my previous point, I think this starts earlier with architects as well. A cloud architect who knows how to streamline an environment for elasticity, scale and efficiency (in part through simplicity and homogeneity) is not necessarily the same as the enterprise architect who has reigned over a one- of-everything regime of J2EE hell.
In other words, don't let your Mode 1 ops team run your Mode 2 cloud #gartnerspeak #OpenStack <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cloudfail?src=hash" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter task management system.com/hashtag/cloudfail?src=hash’, ‘#cloudfail’);”>#cloudfail pic.twitter.com/Fav6clunR8
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
So, while I fully support diversity as a community goal, I think it needs to be taken with a grain of salt in the cloud.
Used to call this heterogeneity. Diversity easier to say, but maybe distracts fr broader issues in #OpenStack & IT? pic.twitter.com/9K70pkC9uH
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
More Tweets
Here are more interesting tidbits from this the day 1 keynote.
Live band to get things warmed up at #OpenStack Summit ATX pic.twitter.com/zKvIu8ofw7
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
360° view from #OpenStack ATX. Expecting north of 7500 attendees this time around. pic.twitter.com/7W8fKCK4ct
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Soul Track Mind band with special guests Kubernetes & the containers. @soultrackmind @OpenStack #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/10FV0RYtaj
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Welcome to #OpenStack Summit ATX. Keynote getting started with @laurensell @toddmorey @OpenStack pic.twitter.com/KUfriaCcJt
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
#OpenStack Mitaka. 13th release of @OpenStack. 2300 contributors from 345 companies. @jbryce pic.twitter.com/FC6y0dLFUc
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Gartner's Donna Scott pitching their bimodal IT model at #OpenStack. pic.twitter.com/25lqboCid9
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
I'm not a #BimodalIT hater. If ur business is all "mode 2" & u need Gartner permission to innovate, good luck w that. #OpenStack
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
"Some don't love bimodal, but it matches what we see in large enterprises" @jbryce #disruption #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/nvj6hxLfEK
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
75->7500 attendees in Austin after 6 years. Not too bad #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/ckeJLialKr
— Nick Barcet (@nijaba) April 25, 2016
#OpenStack a platform for #CloudHosted, #CloudOptimized , #CloudNative applications. @jbryce @OpenStack pic.twitter.com/mDQnvUBMxT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
My POV: Culture not the same as process, but both need to evolve to support #agile #cloud. #OpenStack
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
AT&Ts journey to cloud with #OpenStack by Sorabh Saxena. pic.twitter.com/Nc1jEn4YV7
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Sorabh Saxena said @ATT mobile traffic grew 150,000% from '07-'15 to 114 petabytes—will be 10x in 2020! #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/EYl2D8Iyjs
— Garrett Heath (@pinojo) April 25, 2016
AT&T needed the scale of multiple clouds but w/o the complexity. Created an overlay region manager. #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/5qViZbvpE2
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Before automation took AT&T 10 months to deploy 20 #OpenStack zones. After, only 2 months to deploy 54 zones. pic.twitter.com/TdLYqoX90g
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
"The value in public cloud isn't tech, it's shortcutting the people & process issues." @zer0tweets #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/CTAyX1aThl
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Just beginning #cloud disruption. Thinking in terms of just public or private too simple. @zer0tweets #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/qUrdIrrIC1
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
NTT, last year's winner of #OpenStack SuperUser awards, introducing this year's winners. pic.twitter.com/pgaHyBgAiK
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Congrats @tobybot11 and the team at AT&T for winning this year's SuperUser award. #OpenStack #OpenStackATX pic.twitter.com/gcQBeM1eZS
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Not a surprise. Telco, NFV workloads a killer app for #OpenStack justifying huge investment. https://t.co/jXyev1i5yS
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
Current Status #OpenStack pic.twitter.com/8qo6Dowsl3
— Val Bercovici 🇻 (@valb00) April 25, 2016
Volkswagen Group shout out to @cloudfoundry running on #OpenStack. #OpenStackATX pic.twitter.com/OkHY750Dij
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
2017 #OpenStack Summits to be held in Boston and Sydney! pic.twitter.com/5xpRsd32Qa
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
A sketch of #OpenStack Summit keynote themes. pic.twitter.com/tloJyXWaR4
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
#OpenStack press conference starting. @jbryce – Workloads have really evolved over past 18 months. pic.twitter.com/5u7fIoDO4g
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) April 25, 2016
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