Presentation to Linux Users of Victoria, 7th February, 2017

An overview of cloud computing platforms in general, and OpenStack in particular, is provided introduces this presentation. Cloud computing is one of the most significant changes to IT infrastructure and employment in the past decade, with major corporate services (Amazon, Microsoft) gaining particular significance in the late 2000s. In mid-2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched an open-source cloud-software initiative known as OpenStack, with initial code coming from NASA's Nebula project and Rackspace's Cloud Files project, and soon gained prominence as the largest open-source cloud platform. Although a cross-platform service, it was quickly available on various Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE (2011), and Red Hat (2012).

OpenStack is governed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012. Correlating with the release cycle of the product, OpenStack Summits are held every six months for developers, users and managers. The most recent Summit was held in Barcelona in late October 2016, with over 5000 attendees, almost 1000 organisations and companies, and 500 sessions, spread out over three days, plus one day of "Upstream University" prior to the main schedule, plus one day after the main schedule for contributor working parties. The presentation will cover the major announcements of the conference as well as a brief overview of the major streams, as well the direction of OpenStack as the November Sydney Summit approaches.