I just came back from the OpenStack Day CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest (Hungary) and all I can say is: the event was an incredible success. Although it was the first OpenStack gathering targeted at the CEE region, almost 250 people from 10 countries joined. My (subjective) key takeaways:
- CERN (with datecenters in Switzerland and Hungary) is leading the game as the largest and most advanced OpenStack user in the region. Their ambitious plan for OpenStack is to ramp 15,000 hypervisors with 100,000 virtual machines by 2015.
- There are opportunities to do business in that region (read: provide trainings, deploy OpenStack etc.) and most companies and organizations I spoke with are at a very early stage of contemplating to utilize OpenStack.
- Most impressive to me was see how boldly CEE based companies seize opportunities globally: such as CloudBase Solutions – headquatered in Italy and with branches in Romania, helping companies to integrate their Microsoft environments with OpenStack. Most of their customers are based in the US and in Asia. It's a good example that country borders do not matter anymore, as well as the size and localization of the country you run your business from.
- Key OpenStack backers such as Red Hat, Canonical, VMware definitely have the CEE region on their radar and they are super supportive. If you are contemplating to start an OpenStack User Group for example, they will surely support you with resources and contacts (by the way: running an OpenStack User Group is the best way to join forces with other OpenStackers, grow your local community and rock the world).
You can view the recorded sessions here– you can find both high level presentations of OpenStack as well as technical deep dives into OpenStack deployment, management, storage and networking. Also, if you are interested in an OpenStack Bootcamp: register for a 3 day course in Lubljana, Slovenia (11th– 13th June 2013).
I will do interviews with Márton Kiss and Gergely Szalay shortly who organized the OpenStack Day CEE. Watch out for those interviews at Dell TechCenter. In the meantime, please find below some short interviews I did during the event:
Tim Bell, CERN
[to be published soon]
Alessandro Pilotti, CloudBase Solutions
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Nicolas Thomas, Canonical
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Nikola Dipanov, Red Hat
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Bruce Davie, VMware
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Yves Fauser, VMware
(Please visit the site to view this video)