So last week many OpenStack (cloud software) developers met in Hongkong’s world expo halls to discuss the future development and show off what is done already.
Overall, I heard there were 3000 attendees, with 800 being developers or so. That sounds like a large number of people, but luckily everything felt well-organized and the rooms were always big enough to have seats for all interested.
The design sessions were usually pretty low-level and focused into one component, so it was not easy for me to make useful contributions in there. The session about read-only API access (e.g. for helpdesk workers and monitoring) and about HA were most useful to me.
In the breakout rooms were interesting sessions by many large OpenStack users (CERN, Ebay, Paypal, Dreamhost, Rackspace) giving valuable insights into what people expect from and do with a cloud. Many of them are using custom-built parts, because the plain OpenStack is still not complete to run a cloud. SUSE Cloud ships with some such missing parts (e.g. deployment and configuration management), but most organisations seem to run their own at the moment.
Cloudbase was there telling about their Hyper-V support that we integrated in SUSE Cloud.
Apart from the 6 SUSE Cloud developers there were several local (and one Australian) SUSE guys manning the booth.
Overall it was quite some experience to be there (in such an exotic and yet nice place) and listen and talk to so many different people from very different backgrounds.
