OpenStack Summit 2013, Portland, Oregon, USA

Contrail session at OpenStack

Ales Cernivec speaking at OpenStack Summit  

In the first technical meeting in the early beginnings of the Contrail project the partners had a discussion about which IaaS framework they should initially support, and came to the conclusion to first support OpenNebula [1], and after the first working implementation with the chosen IaaS provider they should start seeking ways on how to support alternative IaaS open source implementations. After attending Randy Bias' [2] session talking about the "state of the Stack" on the OpenStack Summit 2013 in Portland (Oregon, USA) Contrail partner XLAB was quite amazed about the big support OpenStack [3] gained in the last couple of years - the Contrail partners knew it was getting bigger but had no idea it was that big, as observed at the slide from the presentation below. The slide points out what incredible community size it gained comparing to other open source IaaS implementations. Mainly due to the support of big companies such as RedHat, Suse, HP, Canonical, Cisco, IBM, etc.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/state-of-the-stack-april-2013

Why did the XLAB Contrail partners choose to attend the OpenStack Summit? They submitted a proposal for the talk titled "Contrail Project: Federation and its Security aspects" on the summit in the track of OpenStack related open source projects. This was a good way to disseminate the project's results to other communities and seek for potential to collaborate with the communities. As a result, the submission got accepted and the partners were invited to give a talk about the Contrail project on the Summit.

Be your own Cloud 

The focus of the talk was the explanation of the project's idea, that it is a tightly integrated open source  software stack including a comprehensive set of system, runtime and high level services providing standardized interfaces for supporting cooperation and resource sharing over Cloud federations. XLAB pointed out that the main contribution of the Contrail project is an integrated approach to virtualization, offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, services for IaaS Cloud Federation, and Platform-as-a-Service (ConPaaS). Besides the explanation of the Contrail project itself and some technical details about the project, the XLAB Contrail partners also performed a live demo of the deployment of an application through a Contrail's web portal. After the talk there was some interest expressed from the audience of around fifty people attending the talk, mainly regarding the support for advanced SLA terms in the deployment of applications through the Contrail portal. The XLAB Contrail partners also got some critical thinking about the Contrail portal itself - that it needs some more work to express the whole potential of supporting multiple IaaS providers "beneath the cover". However, they got encouraged by interested people also to work on supporting OpenStack by which they could get more recognition and traction in the big OpenStack community which is growing in large scale.

After the first day's presentation the parnters attended other interested talks in the next three days, mainly about building highly available deployments of OpenStack and IaaS in general, and how to use automation tools such as Puppet and Chef in cloud deployments with OpenStack as elaborated by companies such as eNovance and Mirantis. Since big data is now what a lot of people started to equate with cloud computing big-data related frameworks were presented, such as Savanna - elastic Hadoop Controller running on OpenStack and other interested OpenStack subprojects. The whole OpenStack Ecosystem is growing to become mainstream in the Cloud Computing.

The whole event attended more than 2600 attendees and the climate in the Portland Convention Center was amazing and inspiring. Additionally, the partners hope to attend the Summit again with new news from the Contrail project, possibly uptaking the OpenStack as one of the supported underlying IaaS Open Source providers showing the deployment and seamless migration between clouds using the Contrail platform.

[1] http://www.opennebula.org/
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/state-of-the-stack-april-2013
[3] http://www.openstack.org/