As I flew home from OpenStack Summit Tokyo last week, I had plenty of time to reflect on what proved to be a truly special event. OpenStack gains more and more traction and maturity with each community release and corresponding Summit, and the 11th semi-annual OpenStack Summit certainly did not disappoint. With more than 5,000 attendees, it was the largest ever OpenStack Summit outside of North America, and there were so many high quality keynotes, session, and industry announcements, I thought it made sense to put together a final trip overview, detailing all of the noteworthy news, Red Hat press releases, and more.

As always, the keynotes were much-anticipated and informative. The day 1 keynotes started with Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation provided a nice welcome speech, and an overview of what attendees could expect in the next three days. He was then followed on stage by technologists from various organizations focusing on real-world use cases, including Egle Sigler from Rackspace, and Takuya Ito from Yahoo, who shared their experience and use case with OpenStack at Yahoo Japan.

Red Hat had its share of news that first day as well. A press release hit the wire that morning highlighting FICO’s use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, along with Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Ceph Storage as the basis of its cloud infrastructure. As the announcement noted, moving to an OpenStack and Ceph-based cloud has not only helped FICO reduce time to market by 50 percent and costs by 30 percent compared to previous infrastructure implementations, but it has helped transform FICO into a Software-as-Service (SaaS) company, helping to bring in more than $10 million in sales to new customers in expanded markets.

In another press release, it was announced that Dualtec Cloud Builders, part of the UOLDiveo group, selected Red Hat to deploy Brazil’s first OpenStack-based cloud. Working with Red Hat to design and deploy its integrated, OpenStack-based cloud environment in just 45 days, Dualtec has improved operational efficiency by 35 percent.

A third press release, with Dell, announced that Yale-NUS College, Singapore’s first liberal arts college, has created a hybrid cloud – one of the region’s first – based on Red Hat and Dell solutions. With Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, a comprehensive solution that supports organizations on their journey from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-powered clouds – running on a certified platform of Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell Networking, Yale-NUS College has created a hybrid cloud platform to gives its researchers, students, and administrators access to automated, self-service processes for server requests and enable faster deployment.

In a Lenovo press release entitled Lenovo and Red Hat Expand Trusted Portfolio of Cloud Offerings, Lenovo announced “an extended strategic collaboration with Red Hat to deliver powerful IT infrastructure, automation and management capabilities including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and CloudForms. Building on an open and flexible ecosystem to integrate easily with existing infrastructures, Lenovo servers, storage, and networking combined with Red Hat software deliver a competitive and efficient cloud platform. Engaging with two of the industry’s most trusted providers will help customers increase agility and efficiency in responding to new business opportunities and transform their cloud framework into a growth engine.”

Last but not least, there was a multi-vendor release announcing the formation of a Ceph Community advisory board to assist in driving the direction of open source software-defined storage technology. The advisory board launched with the goal of expanding and enhancing community participation and collaboration for the Ceph project, and working closely with the community’s technical and user committees. The charter advisory board includes Ceph community members from global IT organizations that are committed to the Ceph project, including individuals from Canonical, CERN, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.

There were also eight Red Hat-related sessions at OpenStack Summit that first day. [As mentioned previously, many of the links that follow provide access to the actual videos of the sessions themselves].  One of the most interesting was a customer panel, moderated by Red Hat’s Darrell Jordan-Smith, VP of Worldwide Service Provider Sales, entitled “OpenStack’s Success with NFV in the Telecommunications Industry.” Customer panelists represented TELUS, China Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, exploring how OpenStack and network functions virtualization (NFV) has become one of the telecommunication industry’s first choice for meeting rigorous networking requirements of high reliability, low latency, and massive scalability.

Vijay Chebolu and Vinny Valdez, led a popular session entitled “A Day in the Life of an OpenStack & Cloud Architect.” Later, in his session “Building Web Applications using OpenStack Swift,” Christian Schwede explained how Swift makes an ideal storage solution for web applications that need to store large volumes of data, be it photos, videos, or any other larger type of media data. In the afternoon, Ethan Gafford teamed with NetApp to deliver a talk entitled “Manila and Sahara: Crossing the Desert to the Big Oasis.” Later, in “Running an OpenStack Cloud for Several Years and Living to Tell the Tale,” Alexandre Maumené and Gaëtan Trellu shared common issues, and lessons learned from the Essex release to the present. Their talk included interesting first hand accounts such as recovering from outages, storage issues, monitoring and more. Ethan Gafford then led a session entitled “Data Processing Is Made of People: A Case Study in Role-Empathic API Design in Sahara.” Data processing users left Ethan’s talk with details on a powerful model for easing communication between development and operations in Sahara.

Red Hat presented in two partner sessions that first day as well. In Dell’s guest session, Nick Barcet, Red Hat’s Director of OpenStack Product Management, presented his perspective on exactly what it will take to make OpenStack completely mainstream. In an Intel session, entitled “Cloud for All: Rapid Deployment of OpenStack Clouds,” Nick presented again, discussed our collaboration with Intel to drive enterprise-ready features upstream. He then detailed the collaborations with Dell and Cisco under the Red Hat-Intel OnRamp to Enterprise Private Cloud program to deliver a complete private cloud solution.

The second day keynotes started with a session from Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation. Mark shared several statistics and details from the newly launched Liberty release, including the fact that Neutron had overtaken Nova as the OpenStack project with the most activity. He was followed by Kyle Mestery, the project team lead (PTL) for Neutron, who provided further details and also gave an update on Project Kuryr, a service that brings container networking to Neutron. Toshio Nishiyama, SVP of NTT Resonant, then explained how NTT uses OpenStack to power their popular Goo search engine and web portal, the third largest in Japan. Additional keynotes were delivered by Scott Crenshaw and Adrian Otto of Rackspace, Kang-Wong Lee from SK Telecom, Kentaro Sasaki and Neal Sato from Rakuten, Makato Hasegawa from CyberAgent, Inc., and Angel Diaz from IBM and Jesse Proudman from Blue Box, an IBM company who teamed to deliver the final keynote of the morning.

Red Hat led or jointly presented in six sessions that second day. In a joint session with Mirantis entitled OpenStack and Hadoop 101: Getting Your Big Data Cloud Done Right, Trevor McKay, Senior Software Engineer, helped provide an overview and roadmap of the Hadoop ecosystem, while exploring real-world benefits and ways to build out a working Hadoop/Big Data solution on OpenStack. In another joint session, Red Hat’s Michael McCune and Chad Roberts teamed with Nikita Konovalov, a Mirantis engineer, to give a talk called This is Sparkhara: OpenStack log processing in real-time using Spark on Sahara. In the session, they examined how to configure a deployment to produce log data that can be consumed and analyzed in real-time by Spark applications, running on Sahara, the OpenStack data processing service. Later, Red Hat’s Dan Radez and Platform9’s Kenneth Hui, led a crowded hands-on lab called Getting Started with OpenStack. In the RSVP-required workshop, the pair walked participants through an overview of OpenStack components and offered practical suggestions and resources for learning OpenStack.

In a short “brown bag” presentation during lunch, Diane Mueller delivered a talk entitled Scale or Fail: Containers on OpenStack. Containers are obviously a hot topic, and the presentation was informative and drew a large crowd. Later in the day, Sage Weil led a session entitled The State of Ceph, Manila, and Containers in OpenStack. The talk covered the current state of CephFS support in Manila, including upstream Manila support, Manila works in progress, a progress update on CephFS itself, including new multi-tenancy support to facilitate cloud deployments, and a discussion of how he sees this impacting container deployment scenarios in an OpenStack cloud. Finally, as the day drew to a close, Fabien Boucher and Matthieu Huin, Red Hat Senior Developers, delivered a presentation entitled  Software Factory: Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) on OpenStack. The two provided an overview of Software Factory, an open source platform developed and used at Red that embeds, among other tools, Gerrit, Zuul, and Jenkins. As they explained, the platform can be easily installed on an OpenStack cloud, thanks to Heat, and can perform CI/CD for customer applications.

The third day meant another busy day for Red Hat presenters. Erwan Gallen, Red Hat’s OpenStack Technical Architect, participated in a panel and helped provide an Ambassador community report. Among other things, the group of OpenStack ambassadors introduced several improvements over the past six months, since the last OpenStack community release (Kilo), and shared many of their overall feelings and experiences about the community. Mark McLoughlin, Red Hat’s OpenStack Technical Director, then gave an interesting talk entitled The Life and Times of an OpenStack Virtual Machine. Erich Morrisse and Massimo Ferrari then teamed up to give a presentation entitled Elephant in the Room: What’s the TCO for an OpenStack cloud? The pair discussed recommended tools and methods to provide the best quantifiable answer to this challenging question.

In his talk, Debugging the Virtualization layer (libvirt and QEMU) in OpenStack, Kashyap Chamarthy, a Senior Software Engineer, explored virtualization drivers (e.g. libvirt, QEMU/KVM) and explained how they are the core part of the OpenStack Compute layer.

Josh Durgin, Senior Software Engineer, and Sèbastian Han, Senior Architect, then delivered a presentation to a packed room entitled Ceph and OpenStack: Current Integration and Roadmap. In his talk Dude, this isn’t where I parked my instance!?, Steve Gordon, Senior Technical Product Manager, explained that OpenStack Compute provides a number of facilities for moving instances around, but affirmed that it’s not always obvious how they differ from each other.

Later in the day, Mike McCune, Red Hat Senior Software Engineer, joined Andrey Brito, Professor from the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) and Telles Nobrega, a Software Engineer and Masters Student at the Laboratório de Sistemas Distribuídos, to discuss Sahara+Storm: real-time data analytics in OpenStack. And finally, last but not least, Sean Cohen, Principal Product Manager from Red Hat, teamed with Akshai Parthasarathy from NetApp, and Thomas Becktold from SUSE, to give a talk entitled Manila – An Update from Liberty. The three provided a demonstration of how to install Manila using popular distributions, and discussed proposed blueprints for the Mitaka release.

It goes without saying that it was a busy and informative three days, jam-packed with a wide variety of best practices, industry uses cases, community news, and plenty of updates. Like all OpenStack Summits, it was also a lot of fun! For those who made it out, we hope you enjoyed the event and found time to visit the Red Hat booth, as well as network with friends and colleagues from around the world.

For full daily summaries, we welcome you to read our detailed day 1, day 2, and day 3 recaps. And also, for continued Red Hat and industry cloud news, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @RedHatCloud or @RedHat.

We’re already counting down the days until the next OpenStack Summit — we look forward to seeing you again in late April 2016 at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas!