I am speaking this afternoon at the OSCON show in Portland, Oregon. It’s been a great week here, punctuated by a number of announcements Dell made yesterday.
Our breakout session is titled “Must Haves for your Cloud Toolbox – Driving DevOps with Crowbar and Dasein” reflecting on two key open source initiatives that are of interest to organizations adopting DevOps principles, particularly when it comes to building cloud architectures.
James Urquhart, who joined Dell as part of Enstratius, will be joining me to talk about how Dasein makes it easy to develop tools that can be used across a variety of private and public cloud environments (including OpenStack!). I will talk about how Crowbar simplifies OpenStack and Hadoop deployments and management, and how we are partnering with community members, Intel, and SUSE, to evolve Crowbar as we go forward.
Best of all, one of our Crowbar customers, Tim Cook from Hightail (formerly yousendit.com), is joining us. Tim has a whole lot of DevOps experience from places like Hightail, Google, and NASA Ames. As of late, Tim has been focused on building OpenStack deployments, cutting his teeth at NASA Ames (where OpenStack was originally authored), and now deploying OpenStack at Hightail. It will be great to get past the “vendor speak” and hear about his real world experiences with Crowbar and OpenStack.
Looking back, it’s amazing to me how quickly we have progressed on this journey. As OpenStack and Crowbar have matured over the past three years, we are seeing a lot of installations preparing to move from proof-of-concept to production, and a spreading interest in how to effectively deploy OpenStack. The impact on the enterprise data center is now being tangibly expressed in strategies and tactics. It’s pretty clear that the future is now.
IT executives and managers must address how the agility of DevOps processes and open source technologies will impact their industry, the players in their market, and ultimately, the bottom and top lines of their business. Beyond being an open source developer and advocate at Dell, I’ve benefited most from partnering with our customers to resolve best practices for implementation by drawing on the full complement of our services, software, and hardware expertise to help create complete, automated, cloud solutions that have real impact.
If you are at OSCON today, please join me at 2:30 in room E143 – and make sure to stay until the end as we’ll be giving away a free project Sputnik developer laptop!