Sydney Harbor, the locations of the fall 2017 Sydney OpenStack Summit.

Sydney OpenStack Summit Container Presentations for Cloud Operators

The 2017 Sydney OpenStack Summit is a wrap and once again, there was an amazing amount of great content being presented on multiple tracks. Thankfully, the Sydney Open Stack Summit organizers and the OpenStack Foundation once again did a solid job of not just capturing these presentations on video, but also getting them up the very day that they were recorded. You can check out the full range of summit presentations here: OpenStack Foundation YouTube Page.

If you’ve been following our posts and presentations over the past couple of years, you know that we’ve come to realize and share the value that containers provided not just to app developers, but to the operations community as well – think your OpsDev and SRE roles. Our CTO, Robert Starmer, presented two talks at the Sydney OpenStack Summit, both showing how containers can actually make working with OpenStack better to work with.

Robert’s first talk, entitled “To K8s—or Not to K8s—Your OpenStack Control Plane”(video below), recognized that there is a lot of buzz around Kubernetes as THE management tool for everything and that it was inevitable that people would begin to explore the use of Kubernetes in launching an OpenStack system. But is this really the right solution? In the talk, he discussed the fundamentals and functionality of Kubernetes, which suggest it might be a perfect fit for launching some multi-controller OpenStack systems, but might be a less-optimal choice for others. He also covered some key OpenStack deployment projects that have arisen in support of this deployment model. Click on the video below to learn about Kubernetes with OpenStack.

To K8s—or Not to K8s—Your OpenStack Control Plane

In his second talk of the summit, “After the Install Party is Over: Operating Container-Based OpenStack,” Robert looked at how containers technology specifically benefits OpsDevs and SREs that need to deal with the challenges of Day 2 operations. He looked at how containers have democratized the deployment of OpenStack. With tools like Kolla and Ansible providing consistent, simplified methods for container creation, deployment, and configuration, OpenStack is positioned for massive growth…provided operators are aware of the new twists that containers bring to the equation. In this session, Robert reviewed the containerization process from the unique perspective of the operator, addressing how it affects debugging, logging, and operations process workflows, and—most importantly—how to optimize the system for actual operability.

After the Install Party is Over Operating Container-Based OpenStack

If you are an Ops Dev or SRE click on the video above to learn about using containers with OpenStack for simplifying your Day 2 operations. If you are inspired by the concepts presented in the talk above, you can follow this tutorial from our blog that walks you through deploying containerized OpenStack using the OpenStack Kolla project.