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CERN CentOS Dojo, part 4 of 4, Geneva

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This is part 4 of a series about my visit to CERN in Geneva. You can read the entire series here: https://drbacchus.com/cern-centos-dojo-2017/

On Friday evening, I went downtown Geneva with several of my colleagues and various people that had attended the event.

CERN is right on the France/Switzerland border, so we’ve been going back and forth between the two countries several times a day, often not really knowing what country we were actually in.

I had been to Geneva when I was younger, but I really couldn’t say for sure when that was. The only thing I remember was the fountain – the Jet D’Eau – so I wanted to see that again. It was every bit as impressive as I remembered it.

CERN and Geneva

However, it was the end of a very long day, and between that, and jet lag, I was absolutely exhausted, so headed back to the hotel. I hope to go downtown again for a few hours this afternoon, but I kind of wanted to get these articles written while the memories were fresh.

When I was a kid, I dreamed that some day I would have a job traveling around the world, getting paid to see cool things. I think a lot of people dream of that. I have had the amazing good luck to achieve that goal. I have the best coworkers in the world, and I get to do things that I’m passionate about, every single day. The only way that this could be better is if I could have my beloved travel with me. Perhaps some day.

 

Student Cluster Competition

Last week, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I was in Frankfurt, Germany, for the ISC High Performance Computing conference. The thing that grabbed my attention, more than anything else, was the Student Cluster Competition.  11 teams from around the world – mostly from Universities – were competing to create the fastest (by a variety of measures) student supercomputer. These students have progressed from earlier regional competitions, and are the world’s finest young HPC experts. Just being there was an amazing accomplishment. And these young people were obviously thrilled to be there.

Each team had hardware that had been sponsored by major HPC vendors. I talked with several of the teams about this. The UPC Thunderchip team, from Barcelona Tech, (Winner of the Fan Favorite award!) said that their hardware, for example, had been donated by (among other vendors) CoolIT systems, who had donated the liquid cooling system that sat atop their rack.

(When I was in college, we had a retired 3B2 that someone had dumpster-dived for us, but I’m not bitter.)

Over the course of the week, these teams were given a variety of data challenges. Some of them, they knew ahead of time and had optimized for. Others were surprise challenges, which they had to optimize for on the fly.

While the jobs were running, the students roamed the show floor, talking with vendors, and, I’m sure, making contacts that will be beneficial in their future careers.

Now, granted, I had a bit of a ulterior motive. I was trying to find out the role that CentOS plays in this space. And, as I mentioned in my earlier post, 8 of the 11 teams were running CentOS. (One – University of Hamburg – was running Fedora. Two – NorthEast/Purdue, and Barcelona Tech – were running Ubuntu) And teams that placed first, second, and third in the competition – (First place: Tsinghua University, Beijing. Second place: Centre for High Performance Computing South Africa. Third place: Beihang University, Beijing.) – were also running CentOS. And many of the research organizations I talked to were also running CentOS on their HPC clusters.

I ended up doing interviews with just two of the teams, about their hardware, and what tests that they had to complete on them to win the contest.

At the end, while just three teams walked away with the trophies, all of these students had an amazing opportunity. I was so impressed with their professionalism, as well as their brilliance.

And good luck to the teams who have been invited to the upcoming competition in Denver. I hope I’ll be able to observe that one, too!

OpenStack Summit, Barcelona, 2 of n

Tuesday, the first day of the main event, was, as always, very busy. I spent most of the day working the Red Hat booth. We started at 10 setting up, and the mob came in around 10:45.

Day two of booth duty is always interesting, because it’s after the swag feeding frenzy has died down a bit that you start hearing from the people that actually care about what you’re “selling”. You get the questions. And what’s been fascinating in the 6 summits I’ve attended is that the bar has been raised a LOT on the questions. In Hong Kong, my first Summit, there were still a lot of people asking what OpenStack was, and nobody had any idea what RDO was. Now, the questions are about specific deployment scenarios, projects that aren’t yet being packaged, the future of TripleO, and so on, with only a handful of people asking what RDO is.

OpenStack has clearly made the transition from “something to consider some day” to “of course we are, and what are you going to do to make it better?”

Another awesome improvement this Summit was how the RDO community stepped up to help in the booth. Every single hour of the day, I had at least one, and usually two, members of the RDO community in the booth with me, either doing an “Ask Me Anything About RDO”, or doing some kind of a demo. It was *awesome*. Maybe next year, I’ll just stay home. 😉

The highlight of the day was the RDO/Ceph community meetup. We had 4 hours at the Gym Bar in the Princess Hotel.

Members of the Ceph and RDO community presented, lightning talk style (5 minute presentations) on a variety of topic. Speakers were threatened with being thrown in the pool if they went over 5 minutes, but we managed to restrain ourselves.

By the end, we had checked in 215 people overall, and we had 12 speakers. The food was good. The speakers were awesome. The only complaint was that the people not actually listening to the talks would NOT shut up, so it was hard to hear. Eventually, one of the speakers shouted at them to shut up or get out, and most of them moved to the other side of the room.

I have a recording of the event, but I don’t expect it’s going to be usable, due to the noise level. I haven’t had a chance to review it yet. Next week, for sure. I also hope to have (some of?) the presentation slides from the various speakers posted somewhere. Watch rdo-list and/or @rdocommunity for details.

After the talks were over, we had an hour or so left, and I cowardly skipped out. There comes a time when I have just had too much social interaction, and I need quiet time.

So, that was Tuesday. Another success, and another day to be glad that I work with such an awesome community.

 

OpenStack 6th Birthday, Lexington, KY

IMG_1580

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.

OpenStack User Survey (Juno Summit)

Last month at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, the highly-anticipated OpenStack user survey results were released. For reasons of respondent anonymity, the raw data of the survey will not be released, but rather just a summary of the numbers. Even with that, the new numbers are very interesting.

It should be noted that the results of any survey like this have to be understood in the light of the respondent sample set. People answering this survey are those who are somewhat engaged with the OpenStack Foundation, and (obviously) aware that there even is a survey. When software is available freely, like OpenStack, there is simply no effective way to contact everyone that’s using it, so we’re necessarily seeing only a small percentage of the total population, and have to hope that it’s a representative percentage. There’s also a lot of marketing of the survey in the various “camps” in the OpenStack ecosystem, trying to get people to fill out the survey. Here, too, we have to hope that this is roughly fairly distributed, and does not itself skew the results.

That said …

The results of the survey are here: http://www.slideshare.net/ryan-lane/openstack-atlanta-user-survey

As the RDO community guy, of course my initial interest was in the distribution of deployment OS platform, as well as the deployment tools.

Let’s start with OS.

*Note: Graph corrected – I had the wrong numbers in this earlier*

Note that since the survey combines paid and non-paid Ubuntu, it seems reasonable to combine CentOS and RHEL deployments. I’m sure that there won’t be universal agreement that that’s the right thing to do. So be it.

Compare these to the numbers six months ago:

We’re not comparing apples to apples here, but here’s a graph of all the combined deployments across the categories, in the 2014 survey:

Several interesting conclusions that I draw from these numbers. Although, again, we’re not comparing apples to apples, so I’m sure that other folks will interpret differently.

Overall, the Ubuntu to RHEL/CentOS split moved from 55/34 to 47/39, indicating, overall, a movement away from Ubuntu towards CentOS and RHEL as the preferred platform for OpenStack deployments.

More interesting, looking at the breakdown into poc/dev/prod categories, there’s an even stronger motion towards CentOS (and RHEL) as a preferred platform for *new* deployments. Looking at the versions deployed in production, it’s clear that once folks have something deployed, they leave it alone, with a pretty high number of people running versions that are as far back as Essex, Diablo, or even earlier.

On the deployment tool side, I think that the question could stand to be clarified. I wonder, of the people who indicate that they are using Puppet or Chef to do their deployment, whether they’re using another tool such as crowbar or packstack to run those tools, for example, or if they’re actually writing their own Puppet/Chef scripts. I would also have expected, just anecdotaly based on various conversations, to see devstack much further out in front. Perhaps I’m just talking to a rather unrepresentative group – which is, of course, why surveys like this are so useful.

Also of great interest to me is the distribution of industries. I need to do more work on comparing the numbers side-by-side, but the academic sector (the #2 industry) has grown against the previous survey, from 11 to 13%, and some other industries have also grown a little. The fact that IT is still far and away the largest consumer of this stuff seems to confirm everyone’s impression that we’re still very early days in this stuff, and the more we see it grow in non-IT industries, the more we’ll know that it’s here to stay. (It also seems likely to me that people outside of the IT sector are unaware that there’s even a survey to fill out.) So that’s something to keep watching in the next time around.

Day One at LinuxCon

Although much of yesterday at LinuxCon was spent in a jet-lagged fog, it was a great first day. I arrived at the Edinburgh airport at 8 in the morning (I know, I should have come a day or two early!) and took the bus to downtown, then walked up to the conference venue. It’s a lovely conference center located a short walk from numerous lovely pubs, bakeries, and shops.

I spent most of the day at the OpenStack booth, talking with people about what OpenStack is, as well as with people who have been using it for a long time and had deeper questions, or wanted to share what they’re doing with it.

In the evening, I met up with several colleagues – one of whom I had talked with online but never met – for dinner and discussion. I’m frequently impressed by my coworkers and their passion to solve problems, rather than simply jockeying for position and prowess. These guys really want to identify and squash bugs, both technical and relational. I love it.

After a very long day (I was up for nearly 40 hours, I think – time zones confuse me) I finally crashed around 9pm and got 11 hours of sleep. I feel much more human today and am really looking forward to the day. I have a few interviews I have tentatively scheduled for today and tomorrow to record for the RDO blog. Hopefully I can track these folks down.

RedHat Summit Summary

Last week I attended the Red Hat Summit in Boston. It was, for me, equal parts pep rally and intensive OpenStack training.

Jim Whitehurst’s keynote was just great, because it reemphasized how much RedHat really *gets* Open Source, at all levels of the organization. So, this part was pep rally for me, and confirmed to me that RedHat is the place where I want to be. Same for Paul Cormier’s keynote. Both of these are well worth watching if you care about cloud computing, IaaS, or PaaS, or expect to at any time in the near future.

I attended a number of sessions about OpenStack, and you can see a wrapup of all of that content in Perry’s blog post about the conference.

And I helped out at the RDO table in the Developers Lounge. In the process I met many of the engineers that I’ll be working with, and I learned quite a bit about RDO and OpenStack, as well as who I need to go to when there’s something I don’t know yet. And I got to play around some with TryStack, a free service where you can experiment with an RDO installation, launch virtual machines, and connect in to them to see how RDO behaves.

There’s a huge amount of interest in OpenStack, and the ecosystem around it is full of really cool stuff. I was particularly interested in OpenShift, with which you can launch a non-trivial webapp in just minutes minutes. Very cool stuff.

Another high point of the week was the RedHat Summit 5K.

RedHat Summit, Boston

There were a few hundred people in the race, which wasn’t a traditional road race, in the sense that there wasn’t any official time keeper, and traffic wasn’t stopped. We had pace groups (I ran with the 8:30 minute group), and a pacer who knew the route. I had set a goal of breaking 27, and I ran a 25:32, with which I was very pleased. This was the first 5k I’ve run since, I believe, 1994, so, not too shabby.