At Cloud Connect 2013 in Chicago this week, sessions and keynotes addressed Amazon Web Services, Eucalyptus Systems, and Apache Cloudstack. Google App Engine was recognized as a leading platform-as-a-service. But attendees, voting with their feet, flocked to the sessions on OpenStack.
Speakers from newly publicized OpenStack implementers Gap, BrightTag and Argonne National Laboratory talked about their experiences with it. Surprisingly, one OpenStack cloud was initiated on a handful of used servers purchased “cheap” off eBay. Another implementer warned that moving to OpenStack is a good idea, but you won’t be able to find operations people with any experience with it.
Sessions at Cloud Connect, held in the new conference center next to the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, included: Hype vs. Reality: What Works and What Needs Work in OpenStack; APIs, Architecture and the Realities of Cloud Bursting (OpenStack); and Three OpenStack Case Studies. These sessions appeared to be among the best attended.
A panel Wednesday pitted Mathew Lodge, VMware’s VP of cloud services; Jim Anthony, VP of sales engineering for the Verizon Terremark cloud unit; and Monty Taylor, HP’s manager of automation and deployment. HP operates an OpenStack cloud, and Taylor is an OpenStack Foundation board member and runs the command line and developer automation for the OpenStack open source project.