The OpenStack Summit wrapped up today in Boston and it was a great week! There were plenty of informative breakouts and some interesting keynotes.

Keynotes

Beth Cohen shared some of the work that Verizon has done with software-defined WAN on customer-premises equipment (CPE). She showed a demo of how customers could easily provision virtual network hardware, such as firewalls or intrusion detection systems, without waiting for hardware or cabling changes. I’m less familiar with the world of telcos, so I found this really interesting.

Daniela Rus gave an amazing keynote about the democratization of robotics. She showed videos of tiny robots doing some amazing things, including robots which could be swallowed. Those robots could help children who swallow dangerous things (like batteries) without painful surgery.

The big surprise on the second day was the Q&A with Edward Snowden. At first, I was skeptical about it being a publicity stunt, but it turned out to be a really good conversation about the value of open source.

My favorite keynote was from Patrick Weeks of GE. He talked about their IT transformation goals and how they selected OpenStack to solve them. They chose a solution from Rackspace and their engineers love it!

Breakouts

Here are some links to my favorite breakouts:

OpenStack-Ansible

Although I couldn’t make it to all of the OpenStack-Ansible sessions, we had a great turnout for the ones I attended! Every seat was taken during the developer onboarding session and we had some helpful comments from new contributors.

Andy McCrae leads the OpenStack-Ansible onboarding session

My talks

The week was a long one for me! I shared two full-length talks, helped with a lightning talk, and joined a panel. Here are some quick links to the videos and slides:

Grow Your Community: Inspire an Impostor Video Slides

Securing OpenStack Cloud and Beyond with Ansible Video Slides

The Open Open Open Open Cloud Video

OpenStack Security Team Update Video



Photo credit: Luciot