To kick off the week, Jonathan Bryce talked about second generation private cloud, which costs less and does more. He said 2nd generation private clouds emerged in 2016 and are marked by mature technology and new delivery models like Private Cloud-as-a-Service, which make it much easier to consume and widely accessibility. The OpenStack Foundation also launched a new remotely managed private cloud category in the Marketplace. Bryce then introduced a series of OpenStack users to talk about their experience and business drivers in choosing Openstack-powered cloud infrastructure.
Compliance: GE Chooses Private Cloud as a Service for Compliance
During the OpenStack Summit keynotes, GE Healthcare presented the benefits of Private Cloud-as-a-Service through their partnership with Rackspace. According to Patrick Weeks, senior director of digital operations for GE Digital, ?The remotely managed OpenStack solution provided the most flexible solution to drive applications to a cloud environment while protecting sensitive data and benefiting from access to internal applications on our private network."
Capabilities: Verizon Runs OpenStack on the Edge
Beth Cohen, cloud technology strategist at Verizon, outlined in a keynote address at OpenStack Summit in Boston today how the carrier is leveraging OpenStack for its Virtual Network Solutions product, a massively distributed Network-as-a-Service solution that puts compute, network and storage resources at the edge of the internet, closer to the proliferation of devices that define IoT and end-user devices that are the driver of 5G networks.
Edge computing is a massive trend and opportunity for open infrastructure technologies like OpenStack beyond telecom, and the Foundation has particularly seen interest from users in manufacturing, retail and research. As we collect more data from billions of devices, there?s a greater need for real-time data processing at the edge where the information is being collected. The cost and latency of the hub and spoke model for centralized computing will not be practical.
The OpenStack Foundation is bringing together cloud operators exploring edge computing use cases at the Boston Summit to enable collaboration. The Foundation has also been working across industry groups and technology communities, including the Open Edge Computing Initiative with Carnegie Mellon, who are looking at OpenStack as part of this reference architecture.
Cost: US Army Cyber School Saves Money with OpenStack
Major Julianna M. Rodriguez, director, and Captain Christopher W. Apsey, deputy director, of the Cyber Technical College, U.S. Army Cyber School, described how their OpenStack solution has put their school‹which trains soldiers to defend the interests of the U.S. and its allies by using tools grounded in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, and mathematics‹years ahead of other training programs. They demonstrated using OpenStack Heat templates to orchestrate courses using the Blackboard learning management system.
Demonstrating AT&T?s New Live TV Mobile App on OpenStack
Amit Tank, senior principal cloud architect, and Sunil Jethwani, senior director, at AT&T Entertainment Group, described the launch and scaling of DirectTV Now, a TV service that includes the programming and functionality of traditional TV offerings, delivered fully over the Internet across multiple devices, all powered by OpenStack services.
eBay Running Kubernetes on OpenStack at Scale
Suneet Nandwani, senior director of cloud infrastructure and platforms of eBay, said eBay is running 95% of its business on its OpenStack cloud. eBay has been running OpenStack in production since 2012 and in the last year have began running Kubernetes on top of its OpenStack environment. With Kubernetes on OpenStack, they can support GPUs, VMs and bare metal.
In this process, eBay developed a tool to fully manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providers called TessMaster. From the Summit stage, they announced plans to open source TessMaster and invited other OpenStack cloud operators to collaborate.
OpenStack powering science and research: MIT & Boston Cloud Declaration
MIT was an early OpenStack user, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT has been in production with OpenStack since 2012. Daniela Rus, one of the top robotics researchers in the nation, gave Summit attendees a taste of the kind of research powered by OpenStack and open infrastructure. She is working to democratize robotics, including self-folding origami robots produced with 3D printers.
Thursday and Friday, approximately 100 researchers and technologists from top universities around the world will be gather alongside the OpenStack Summit and onsite at MIT for an event called the Boston Cloud Declaration. The Declaration will provide guidance to digital infrastructure owners, operators, and vendors on how they may design or temper their cloud products and services to support cloud federation for international research endeavours.
Superuser award winners: UKCloud & Paddy Power Betfair
To conclude the opening day keynotes, the winners of the Superuser Awards was announced. UKCloud, the fastest growing UK tech firm in 2016 according to the Sunday Times, and Paddy Power Betfair, one of the largest online betting sites, were awarded a tie for the first time.
