Getting the most out of the Summit

ozgurOpen Infrastructure SummitLeave a Comment

These are the stories from our team members who attended the summit and some of their key take aways from their week in Shanghai.

Our team recently got back from the Open Infrastructure Summit in Shanghai. This was the first ever Summit in mainland China and for good reason. Chinese companies are pouring more and more resources into basically all of the OpenStack projects, so hosting a Summit there came quite natural.

As usual the summit consisted of keynotes, presentations, hands-on labs, and the Forum. The setup of the event was a little bit different than usual with 3 days of Summit and 3 days of Project Teams Gathering (PTG) with one day overlapping.

Erik Johansson, Senior Systems Engineer Linux & Automation

First time for OpenInfra Summit to take place in China. Kind of unavoidable, as Chinese companies are heavily investing in all of the Openstack projects, so putting a Summit there comes quite natural. The Summit was a bit less crowded than the ones I’ve attended before, with around 1200-1300 participants. Perhaps the location itself played a role here. For the first time, the Summit and the PTG was co-located, having the Summit running from Mon-Wed, and the PTG continuing Wed-Fri.

The board meeting

For us in the team it all started out with the Board meeting on Sunday. The board meeting is a full day event where the Foundation board (And interested parties) sit down and discuss a myriad of different topics. Some of them are mentionable achievements during previous cycle, the overall state of the different projects in terms of resources and “health”, as well as the financial situation. This time around we also had the chance to welcome a new Gold Member, Troila Technology.

The Summit

There were many great presentations as well as Forum sessions during the first three days. I focused on attending more Ops related sessions, as well as sessions for specific projects/features that we see a need in the near future. Some honourable mentions from the first three days:

The Project Teams Gathering (PTG)

I tried to attend as many sessions as I possibly could during the PTG, to get a feeling for all the relevant projects for us.

One full day was spend with the Manila team, getting and introduction into the project, as well as learning what new features were included/planned. Most prominent feature for us is Ceph support for Manila, which has been fully supported for several cycles, whereas OSA has full integration with Manila from Stein release.

Ops Meetup

Half a day was spent in the Ops Meetup. Always a good learning experience to hear about the operator side of things. We share a lot of the same kind of issues/solutions to things. I also had some discussions on upstream help there as well, where I got to know that it’s a joint effort from Operators to keep a fair few documents up-to-date in Openstack docs, as the Docs project have dropped support for those:

https://docs.openstack.org/operations-guide/

https://docs.openstack.org/ha-guide/

https://docs.openstack.org/arch-design/

I think we are in a very good situation to contribute to at least the operations-guide here, as we have tons of internal documentation that can be pushed upstream. The rest of the time I did my best to cover most projects that had a presence. Sadly, there were quite a few projects without an official presence at the PTG this time for whatever reason (maybe location of summit plays a role), so no “official” OSA gathering.

My Open Infrastructure Summit sessions