Several members of the Research Platforms team, as well as members of the NeCTAR Reseach Cloud, attended the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona from Sunday October 23 to Friday October 28th. OpenStack is big enough to have major conferences, "summits", twice year since 2010, correlating with an OpenStack software release. The Barcelona Summit was held at Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona Plaça (CCIB) and consisted of 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. It coincided with the release of "Newton".

The previous release of OpenStack, "Mitaka", concentrated on integration and management. This included developing a client to have a common command-line across all projects. "Newton" included a very long list of incremental updates, as well as improvements in security, container support, and networking. There were significant improvements in security, including encrypted credentials in Keystone. There was strong development between the the Neutron network project and Kuryr container networking project. Every system that implements Neutron API can now be used for container networking. Full support for Neutron networking within the OpenStack client. Integration between Ironic bare-metal deployment with Magnum container orchestration for containers.

For members of the Research Platforms team, there was special interest with the presentations on the HPC stream. The University had a presented accepted on "Spartan", a HPC - Cloud Hybrid: Delivering Performance and Flexibility, which attracted a great deal of attention, with an enthusastic reaction of audience members: Why isn't everyone doing this?" , was the first question (answer: They will!). Representatives from Red Hat wanted to know when we were going to visit the U.S., and met with a Research Platforms member on Monday October 31st to discuss the application of the model to other very large installations - in other words, Spartan achieved the purpose of being a small reseach cluster-cloud hybrid which could be expanded.

The conference also was timed with the release of a new OpenStack publication edited by Stig Telfer, The Crossroads of Cloud and HPC: OpenStack for Scientific Research (Open Stack, 2016)

Originally posted at: http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/researchplatforms/2017/02/16/openstack-summi...