We’re here in Montreal for the CloudStack Collaboration Conference, and it’s been a fantastic event with more to come! We’ve had two full days of back to back talks over two tracks, with subjects ranging from storage, billing and diagnostics through to containers, automation and monitoring… and everything in between. Mike Tutkowski (CloudStack VP) set the tone with his keynote at the beginning of the first day, asking the question ‘why are we here?’ The answer? To learn, work together, share ideas and share problems. These fundamentals are what makes for a great community, and what makes Apache CloudStack such a great product. We have never really known just how widely adopted CloudStack is, so we have (for the first time) undertaken some in-depth analysis which Mike shared. In the last 12 months CloudStack management server packages were downloaded 116,796 times from 21,202 different IP addresses. We think this means that worldwide there are about 20,000 CloudStack clouds in production! Mike also mentioned several organisations that have recently adopted CloudStack, including Ticketmaster, from whom we saw a talk illustrating how they deployed their global cloud environment using Apache CloudStack.
The CloudStack community is full of smart, committed, talented people passionate about what they do, and this is clear from the quality and delivery of the talks, and the collaboration before and after. They aren’t just repeating facts or reading what has been written for them – they are talking from first hand experience, often about features and functionality they have personally developed and committed to the project. Thanks to the community, CloudStack is constantly being improved and developed by these real-world users and operators.
So we’re into day three, which means no more CloudStack talks. However – as I said, the event is far from finished. Today (Wednesday) we have an all-day hackathon – a room full of people working together on shared goals and ideas, the sole purpose to talk and share new ideas, and make CloudStack even better!
Every time I attend a CloudStack conference, I am privileged to spend time with a community who genuinely enjoy what they do, and I come away having made new friends, and having learnt something new. I am already excited about next year’s event, and seeing some of our new friends in London at our next CloudStack meetup (December 13).
Sincere thanks to the Apache Software Foundation (our conference co-locates every year with Apachecon). It’s always a well organised and well attended event, and we are delighted to be associated with it. Thanks also to the city of Montreal – a beautiful city which I hope to visit again soon.
All the CloudStack talks were recorded and will be published to Apache.org and our YouTube channel very soon.
Steve Roles is ShapeBlue’s COO and is responsible for all day to day administrative and operational functions of the business, including the consulting, programme management, and support functions. Involved with CloudStack since 2012, Steve has led several large customer engagements including a number of major public and private cloud deployments; co-ordinated and developed worldwide teams and helped implement and deliver an enterprise grade support product.
Away from work, Steve is a music lover and semi-professional musician. Although he doesn’t speak at many technology conferences, he can sometimes be heard providing the evening entertainment.
