HONG KONG - If ever there was a master of doing live demos on a keynote stage, that master is Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth. Speaking at the OpenStack Summit here, Shuttleworth continued his tradition of doing a live demo of what many would normally consider to be difficult and time-consuming tasks.

At the San Diego OpenStack Summit in October of 2012, Shuttleworth demonstrated a live server migration before a live audience. This week in Hong Kong Shuttleworth went a step further, demonstrating how cloud server admins could pick from any number of different technologies and then have it all deployed in as much time as it takes to make an ice cream.

Shuttleworth threw a rubber duck into the audience, calling it a "random number generator" to select a volunteer that would help him choose the cloud options. The audience was asked to raise their hand on each choice for virtualization, storage and networking, and the volunteer would make the final call on what was deployed.

The fact that all the different pieces work together isn't magic, it's a concerted effort. Ensuring that all the different pieces of a cloud deployment work together as they should, Shuttleworth today officially announced the OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL).

"Today inside OIL, we have multiple hardware clusters from different vendors and we build the cloud again and again with different permutations and combinations," Shuttleworth said.

PaaS

Shuttleworth said that simply building a cloud isn't all that difficult or exciting at this point; the more interesting part is what organizations will do with the cloud. To that end, Shuttleworth sees Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as being a critical part of the story and Pivotal's CloudFoundry technology as being the key technology for PaaS.

"Pivotal and Canonical will be working together to make the experience of CloudFoundry on OpenStack absolutely fantastic," Shuttleworth said. "We're going to work together to build a turn-key CloudFoundry solution, not just for Ubuntu OpenStack but for any OpenStack."

CloudFoundry No Stranger to OpenStack



CloudFoundry is no stranger to OpenStack. In August, Pivotal announced a partnership alongside OpenStack vendor Piston Cloud Computing. The Piston partnership involves Pivotal, leveraging the OpenStack IaaS from Piston.

Shuttleworth has his own initiatives with Piston's CloudFoundry PaaS. The first effort will see Ubuntu's Juju server orchestration system get set up to benefit from CloudFoundry for PaaS deployments. As well, the plan is to have joint Pivotal and Canonical Ubuntu offerings for customers with an OpenStack and CloudFoundry Solution.



Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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