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OpenStack Summit Session Voting Open! Spoiler Alert, Vote For Mine!

Ok, I’m just going to throw it out there.  This post is noting more than shameless self promotion for OpenStack Summit voting.

I’ve teamed up with Eric Wright, one of my Virtual Design Master partners in crime, to bring you number of topics which have a few central themes, mainly a few facets of OpenStack and how you can get it running within your organization.  From planning your first deployment outside of the confines of your laptop to convincing your CIO you are production ready, we’ve submitted a total of six aka 6 aka quite a few sessions.

Below are voting links to all of our sessions, as well as a summary of each.  I’ve been doing a lot with OpenStack in the last year or so, and I would love a chance to share what I have learned with others.  In addition, this will be my first time attempting to attend an OpenStack summit.  Besides presenting, I’d really love the opportunity to attend some of the Liberty design sessions!  I’m a big follower of many of the incubation programs, and would like to have more exposure to them, and as well as the minds behind them.

Please feel free to vote for any or all of them!

openstacksummit(Where is it you ask?  Right there, in Vancouver!)

Couch to OpenStack – Understanding Where to Start Your Learning Journey

Regardless of your background, OpenStack is a fundamental shift from the way that traditional virtualization and bare-metal deployments are built and operated.  Just like with learning to run in a Couch-to-5k clinic, this is your coaching team to help you get from zero to hero on OpenStack!

Attendees will get a walk through of the learning program and be given resources to spin up a demo environment on their own machines using Vagrant and VirtualBox.

Knowing where to start is as important as knowing how to start.  This will be a very interactive session to help encourage attendees to get help with starting their journeys to becoming OpenStack operators.

 

Convincing the CIO It Is Time to Go Production, Adopting OpenStack in the Enterprise

Are you already on your journey to adopting OpenStack, or are you about to begin embracing OpenStack in production?  What should you be doing to ensure a safe transition?

Packaged distributions?  Do-it-Yourself?  Nightly builds? Major revisions only?  There are many considerations when making the decision on how to consume OpenStack to run your cloud environment.  We will guide you through the different methods, and how to decide which will be the most successful within your organization.

We will highlight key differences when transitioning from a traditional virtualized or bare-metal server environment to a true private cloud.  Making everyone comfortable in the organization, from the users to the operations team to the CIO is an important part of deploying OpenStack successfully.

 

So You Want to Convince the Boss to Run OpenStack? Introducing OpenStack to the Enterprise

When it is time to go to the boss to talk about OpenStack beyond the confines of your laptop, you’re going to need to pick a business problem to solve.  The days of getting our hands on hardware for fun are long gone.  Besides having a solid use-case, understanding the impact of bringing OpenStack into your organization is of absolute importance.  We will discuss the analysis process for how to prepare to add OpenStack into your data center to provide enterprise-grade service levels.

We’ll consider all of the things you really need to start thinking about for your first enterprise-grade OpenStack deployment, including compute, storage, networking, and most importantly, understanding use-cases for architecting your OpenStack strategy from different perspectives within your organization.

 

Beyond Your Laptop, but Before the Data Center Building Your OpenStack Lab Environment

There are dozens of potential ways to build an OpenStack lab environment.  Which is the right one for you?  We will look at a variety of OpenStack lab deployment tools and distributions.

Whether you want an all-in-one virtual machine, a multi-node deployment, a cloud-hosted build, or anything in between, there are considerations for each of these lab models.  There are as many options as there are use-cases, but we will narrow down the search.

Best of all, we can match your budget of zero dollars!

 

Run Kilo Run – OpenStack for VMware Administrators

One of the challenges with OpenStack is the shift in operational procedures in enterprise data centers which have been occupied by large VMware installations.  VMware administrators will be introduced to a comparison of the programs in OpenStack to similar VMware technologies.

We will show how to leverage OpenStack as a part of your existing VMware deployment, and how to run a multi-platform virtualization strategy in order to get the best of available features from both the VMware and OpenStack ecosystem.

Both packaged offerings and user-built options will be discussed to illustrate many strategies to bring OpenStack to your VMware environment and take the steps to creating a true, versatile private cloud.

 

OpenStack Story Time: Building a Case for OpenStack in Two Distinct Organizations

We will use two different organizations which have embraced OpenStack in our session to guide attendees through the entire journey of bringing OpenStack into production.

The first example is a medium sized organization which wanted to go from using AWS to running on a private cloud environment.  Using OpenStack as the destination platform, we walk through the transition to bringing services on-premises, and challenges along the way.

Our second organization is a large scale financial services environment with a significant development community.  This will allow us to illustrate a very DevOps-oriented design and how the use-case was built and successfully implemented.