Reflections from OpenStack Summit Berlin 2018
The Trilio team just returned from the OpenStack Summit Berlin 2018, and both the conference and the city were a huge hit.
The Summit marked the last event to cater exclusively to OpenStack users, as next year’s conference will be rebranded as the Open Infrastructure Summit. This will provide open arms to all products that touch the OpenStack landscape, including the much-talked-about projects like Zuul and Starlingx. With more than 2,700 attendees, the Summit represents more than 667 companies in 63 countries.
Slope of Enlightenment: How the Community Has Changed
The past two Summits have had small but steady attendance, and Berlin was no exception. This year, however, it was evident that there were fewer startup sponsors than ever.
Despite the slowing attendance and sponsorship, the quality of conversations was high — reinforcing that OpenStack is here to stay. The market has matured, adoption of OpenStack continues to grow, and industry leaders doubled-down on their commitment to the community. At the show, Nick Barcet from Red Hat promised his company’s support for at least 10 years in an effort to clarify their future as the pending IBM acquisition looms. That’s a strong statement for the continued growth and maturity of a relatively young technology.
Red Hat Virtual Central Office Solution
Red Hat announced their new virtual central office (VCO) solution, an NFV platform for telecommunications companies. With this new solution, Red Hat aims to improve the delivery of residential, business, and mobile services for telecommunications providers that need to modernize their infrastructure with an open, software-defined platform.
Trilio also announced its support of the Red Hat virtual central office solution. Trilio enables fast VNF recovery by natively capturing complete NFV workloads. Now telecommunications companies can deploy, backup, and manage complete workloads within their VCO environment leveraging NFV infrastructure using Trilio’s OpenStack-native backup and recovery solution, TrilioVault.
Data Protection Requirements for First-Class OpenStack Deployments
On the first day of the show, Trilio’s CEO, David Safaii, hosted a panel featuring OpenStack users and experts from Red Hat, Volkswagen Financial Services, and CSI Piemonte. They discussed their views on cloud data protection requirements, and the future of stateful applications in a container based environment.
The room was packed, highlighting how important data protection has become to enterprises and service providers that are deploying OpenStack. Our booth was packed following the panel session, and our technical team gave many demos illustrating the ongoing benefits of data protection when scaling, growing, and moving applications into their cloud. Overall, attendees at the Openstack Summit Berlin 2018 demonstrated a heightened awareness for the need of data protection, showing that the market has matured significantly over previous shows.
Sold Out Party Co-Hosted by Red Hat
The first night of the show, Trilio co-hosted a sold-out party with Red Hat and took over one of the biggest clubs in East Berlin. The waitlist started early and it was a fun night entertaining customers, partners, and community members after a day of education-focused content. As our party wrapped, the Berlin night scene was just beginning, so attendees cut the line and continued the party next door. Although it was a Tuesday night, the club was packed into the early morning hours. You can see Trilio’s photo album of the night here.
Mark Shuttleworth’s Keynote
Mark Shuttleworth took the stage in Berlin, congratulating the community on achieving easier-than-ever deployment of OpenStack. He spoke of Canonical’s major focus to make OpenStack more accessible to all — today and in the future — by making it easy to deploy, cutting time to market, and reducing the cost of performance. He said, “In this light, you’ll see what matters isn’t ‘day two.’ What matters is ‘day 1,500,’ living with OpenStack, scaling it, upgrading it, growing it. That is important to master in order to really get value for your business.”
As he wrapped his keynote, Shuttleworth pledged 10 years of OpenStack support by Canonical. This gesture confirmed their commitment to help manage the operating costs of OpenStack in order to keep private cloud costs aligned with those of public cloud, so businesses can maintain a successful private or multi-cloud strategy.
On the Horizon: China Summit 2019
The Foundation officially announced China as the next destination for the show, resulting in very mixed feedback from exhibitors and attendees alike. While OpenStack has substantive adoption within China, it is a tough market for non-Chinese sponsors, not to mention a costly one. The announcement seemed to highlight the Foundation’s growing desire to find and support new audiences around the world.
That’s a Wrap
Overall, the conference was a success. We were proud to see Trilio’s backup and recovery solution highlighted by customers and partners in many sessions as an imperative step in developing a next-generation OpenStack environment. The enthusiastic commitments from both Red Hat and Canonical highlighted the growing momentum of open source technologies and the rapid adoption in the marketplace.
As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions, the Trilio team is here to support you on your cloud journey. Looking forward to the next Summit in Denver!