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:
- https://www.openstack.org/summit/shanghai-2019/summit-schedule/events/24415/ops-war-stories – A lot if interesting stories from the trenches, mostly from Operators sharing both problems and solutions from their Openstack environments.
- https://www.openstack.org/summit/shanghai-2019/summit-schedule/events/24410/manila-csi – Forum session with PTL for Manila, presenting Manila Cloud Storage Interface, which is work of abstraction/standardization for Manila cross cloud interface (Openstack/Kubernetes/more).
- https://www.openstack.org/summit/shanghai-2019/summit-schedule/events/24404/how-are-you-using-cinders-volume-types – Forum session regarding cinder types and migration between different backends for cinder. Very useful/relevant information for us.
- https://www.openstack.org/summit/shanghai-2019/summit-schedule/events/23919/efficient-monitoring-and-root-cause-analysis-in-complex-systems – Great session from Monasca PTL regarding leveraging Monasca and Vitrage for metrics gathering and RCA handling in complex application stacks (Not specifically Openstack).
- https://www.openstack.org/summit/shanghai-2019/summit-schedule/#day=2019-11-06 – Great tips for how to improve KVM performance, covering both networking and storage (Later parts of the presentation becomes a bit of a vendor sales speech though, as the presenter is Co-founder of StorPool.)
- https://www.openstack.org/summit/shanghai-2019/summit-schedule/events/23884/are-your-secrets-secure – Very well presented Barbican talk, mostly in relation to proper configuration and how to stay compliant. Outside of the sessions themselfs, there are as always a good amount of discussion during joined events (marketplace mingle, dinner, corridor chatter etc).Wed-Fri of the event was the PTG, where the teams from the different projects gather and run retrospect as well as plan for the next Openstack cycle.
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
- Free breakfast for your staff before investing in the latest tech like AI and Blockchain makes sense