Yesterday I spent the day at the University of Kentucky at the OpenStack 6th Birthday Meetup. The day was arranged by Cody Bumgardner and Kathryn Wong from the UK College of Engineering.

UK has an OpenStack cloud that they use for instruction, as well as for research, and they’ve got a 6PB Ceph cluster hanging off of it. There were presentations about the various aspects of this cloud, and how it’s being used.

I gave an introduction to OpenStack – the Foundation, the software, and the community – for the attendees that were just getting started. Patrick McGarry gave a talk about how Ceph works.

Nassir Hussamddin closed the day with a really cool presentation about CloudLab, which is a tool shared by a number of universities that allows users to spin up an OpenStack cloud (not just a VM, but an entire cloud) on demand for testing purposes. Definitely worth looking into further.

Big thanks to Dell, the University of Kentucky, and the OpenStack Foundation, who, along with RDO, sponsored this event.