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CloudStack European User Group – November 2015 | Case Studies

An intimate feel at yesterday’s European User Group only seemed to encourage discussion, and despite slightly lower numbers than usual we managed to run a little late! Hosted by our friends at Trend Micro here in London, we started with lunch, and once everyone had eaten it was down to business.

Giles Sirett (chairman of the user group) sent his apologies, as he was unable to assume his usual meetup duties. Hosting was therefore down to Paul Angus and me (Steve Roles). I started by welcoming everyone to the group, briefly running through the agenda and talking about the recent CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Dublin. All the videos of all the fantastic talks from that event can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGeM09tlguZSeNyOyQKJHNX4pxgK-yoTA. It’s looking like next year’s conference will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil (dates TBC) but we’re already looking forward to another great event. Paul then took us through the CloudStack news, including new features in 4.6 (currently in the voting stages). For more details take a look through our slides:

Time for our first speaker of the day – René Moser of Swiss TXT joined us from Switzerland, to talk about Ansible and CloudStack. Rene started with some general use cases for Ansible before going into some detail on how Swiss TXT use it with CloudStack. He then gave us an overview and brief history of Ansible. Ansible has 21 CloudStack modules, all integration tested and included in v2.0, and to show this integration René was brave enough to give us live demos. René’s slides are here:

Next up was Daan Hoogland of Leaseweb, who made the trip over from Amsterdam. Daan talked about testing, and the need for more of it! The need for the community to run almost continuous functional testing against CloudStack, by using ‘mini clouds’ or nested environments. The importance of integration into customer environments, and the benefits of using Jenkins were discussed and provoked lively discussion in the room. For more information Daan’s slides are here:

After a coffee break, it was the turn of our host – Jon Noble of Trend Micro to give us his talk on securing a cloud environment, which probably provoked the most discussion and questions, continuing in the pub well after the meeting had finished! Jon spoke about the changing landscape of security, and how more traditional security measures were increasingly incapable of protecting cloudy workloads and VMs. He then referenced the recent, high profile attacks (Talk Talk and Sony), and talked about the various tools that may have been used, and how they could have been purchased on the dark web. Jon’s slides are here and they’re well worth a look:

Last up was our very own Paul Angus, with a talk on CloudStack Networking. Starting with physical (networking), Paul talked about why you would separate networks, converged networking, labelling, mappings and some of the mistakes it is easy to make. Touching on storage and guest networks, Paul moved onto the pros and cons of isolated and shared networks. Paul finished by talking about an exciting new feature that ShapeBlue are currently working on – OSPF and routed VPC. There is much, MUCH more detail in Paul’s slides:

Following Paul’s talk and questions, we enjoyed a few beers in a Paddington bar where the discussions continued. Our next European CloudStack User Group will be in London in March 2016 – if you’re interested in CloudStack and want to get involved – come to the meetups, join the CloudStack European User Group on LinkedIn, and join the conversation on the mailing lists https://cloudstack.apache.org/mailing-lists.html.

Thanks to Trend Micro for hosting our meetup, and thanks to Rene, Daan, Jon and Paul for giving us their time and expertise to prepare talks.

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