We’re back from a busy week at the sold-out OpenStack Kilo summit in Paris. Comcast was well represented at the Palais des Congrès (pictured), where the Summit played host to a crowd of 4,600 attendees.
The annual summit gathers a thriving community of developers to share in OpenStack’s collaborative spirit and outline what’s ahead. OpenStack is an open source cloud operating system that controls storage and networking resources. Comcast has deployed OpenStack throughout our infrastructure to support large-scale, media-rich, consumer-facing applications. Several applications targeted to the OpenStack infrastructure are used to power our X1 platform.
At the summit, the focus was on delivering OpenStack to the enterprise, as well as its use in various and disparate industries, from banks to telecommunications to the automotive industry. As an open source advocate, this was wonderful to see. We learned, for instance, that OpenStack was used to deliver the BMW’s electric super car, the i8.
The Comcast contingent at the OpenStack Summit was honored to be one of the top four finalists this year, which granted us front row seats to all the keynotes and to the first OpenStack Superuser awards show, along with other technical pioneers like CERN.
We were also delighted to see representation from the Comcast team at the Women of OpenStack events. At the Women of OpenStack working breakfast and networking session, for instance, many united to share experiences, encourage one another and examine ways to grow the number of women involved in OpenStack.
We were also excited to see Mark Muehl, our Senior Vice President of Software Development & Engineering, moderate the Headline Panel: Global Enterprise IT Companies Supporting OpenStack.
We also participated in sessions including: CI/CD in practice, IPv6 Features in Juno and Building OpenStack near the users. And, we were involved in a number of panel discussions and a vBrownBag talk: OpenStack Design Guide Panel and Great Expectations - The New Enterprise Stack. Our panel discussions and presentations were just a small part of the value we derived from the Summit. With an ever-expanding demand for infrastructure, we were also greatly involved in the design sessions for the OpenStack Kilo release.
We firmly believe that by working with the open source community, everyone benefits. It is enjoyable to work with such an intelligent group of people, with similar goals and needs. It was recently announced that the next OpenStack summit will be held in Vancouver, Canada. We hope to see some of you there.
(Palais des Congrès Paris photo courtesy of Laganart / Creative Commons)