OpenStack at large in open source: Voices from OSCON 2013, Part 1

We're at OSCON this week, taking a dip in the warm waters of the open source motherland; a fitting place to celebrate OpenStack's third birthday. As with any social network, it's fun to connect up with the open source community off-line and in person, and there's lots to talk about.

Same goes, of course, for the OpenStack cadre, and we're well represented here. For those of you who aren't in Portland (and those who are), we stopped to talk to some of our fellow OpenStackers to talk to them about the state of all things OpenStack.

Yesterday, Cloudscaling's Randy Bias put out an open letter to the community saying that OpenStack must support Amazon Web Services APIs or face "irrelevance and death".  So we thought we'd ask him about this directly. His contention is that OpenStack should be the defacto cloud controller, enabling hybrid clouds from many providers. In fact, he's advocating not just support for the AWS APIs, but also Google Compute Engine and even Microsoft's cloud engine, Azure. Here's more of what we talked about with Randy.

As you'd expect, "if this, what about that?" is by no means limited to picking clouds. We also talked with some of the people behind both the Ceph and Swift open source cloud storage frameworks.

Patrick McGarry and Ross Turk of InkTank talked about the upcoming Ceph Day in New York City, as  well as the Ceph Developer Summit for the upcoming Emperor release.  Anyone submitting a blueprint gets a session at this virtual summit on August 5 and 6.  In particular, McGarry and Turk talked about continuing efforts in the realms of geo-replication and erasure coding, as well as making Ceph more devops-friendly, with recipes for Chef, Puppet, Juju, Salt, and other frameworks.

Back in the OpenStack homecourt, Swift PTL John Dickinson gave us his views on how an open source project such as Swift and a corporate body such as SwiftStack (his current employer) can complement each other, before discussing some of the improvements coming in Havana, such as performance improvements and code cleanup that will enable further optimization.  Most important, he discussed Swift's upcoming georeplication functionality in Havana, enabling you to have data centers around the world treated as a single storage pool.

We have more voices from OSCON as the conference continues.