Last Thursday saw us back at BT, London, for the Summer meetup of the CloudStack European User Group (CSEUG). A full schedule meant a prompt start, and Giles Sirett (CSEUG chairman) brought the meeting to order and started with introductions and CloudStack news.
Since the last meetup, CloudStack 4.9.2 has been released, with 4.9.3 due for early September (4.9.x is the LTS branch). CloudStack continues to develop and add new features, and the recent release of 4.10 introduced OOBM for hosts, user defined roles, additional hypervisor support (including XenServer 7) as well as several other features and improvements – see Giles slides for more detail:
Giles went on to report on recent events – namely the Spring CSEUG meetup in Prague, and the CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Miami – both well attended events that showcased not only the depth of interest in CloudStack, but also the vibrant and continually growing community.
The first speaker was Mike Tutowski (
NetApp Solidfire), with a talk entitled ‘Leveraging VMWare Storage I/O Control (SIOC) in CloudStack’. Starting with a high level overview of CloudStack and storage, Mike then focused in on SIOC and how it works with CloudStack. This was a detailed talk full of information, and Mike’s slides can be found here:
Next up was ‘Policy Driven SDN in CloudStack’, a talk from Sigert Goeminne of
Nuage Networks. Starting with an introduction to Nuage, SDN and the existing Nuage VSP plugin, Sigert went on to talk through the exciting new features coming with CloudStack 4.11, such as VSD managed subnets, and migrating a native cloud to Nuage. More detail in Sigert’s slides:
After a very brief coffee break (as I said – a full schedule!), Giles welcomed Paul Angus of
ShapeBlue, with a talk about Cloudstack and NFV. Paul’s talk stepped through an introduction to NFV, what CloudStack can do with NFV, and some of the exciting work currently going on around NFV in CloudStack… pretty much covering all angles! Paul’s talk was (as always) packed with detail, and you will find much more information in Paul’s slides:
The next talk was all about a new CloudStack UI – given by Ilya Zolotukhin of
Bitworks (who joined us all the way from Siberia). Ilya explained why they started the project: based on their experience of the UI they knew about its shortcomings and knew what functionality they needed it to provide. Ilya then compared the native UI with the new one, and went on to talk through the UX goals before going into technical detail and the future direction that the project may take. This was a presentation packed with detail, and I recommend you take a look through Ilya’s slides:
Continuing to be spoilt by the number and quality of talks, next up was ‘Monitoring CloudStack and Components’, presented by Alexander Stock of leading SAP integrators
Bit.Group GmbH. This was an in depth talk about how Bit.group use Nagios and a front-end tool called Check_MK, what they monitor in CloudStack, and how the monitoring is distributed an automated. Alexander’s slides are right here:
Time was running short, so we moved right along with the last talk of the day: ‘Running Cloudstack with IPv6’, a talk given Wido Den Hollender of
PCExtreme. PCExtreme use CloudStack to deliver their hugely successful Aurora compute service. Wido is not only a CloudStack user and developer, he is also the current CloudStack VP. Opening with some reasons for IPv6 (eg. we are almost out of IPv4 addresses), he went on to state that ‘with the release of CloudStack 4.10 IPv6 is fully supported in basic networking’. Explaining how PCExtreme is currently using IPv4 and IPv6, he also said that they are currently working on providing IPv6 only VMs. Wido’s slides have a lot of information:
Following a Q&A session, the discussions continued seamlessly in a local pub, where the day’s speakers continued to answer questions and discuss CloudStack and future collaboration.
Thanks to all our speakers, to BT for providing lunch and a fabulous venue, and to all attendees for once again proving what a varied and active community CloudStack has. Next event TBC, but should be around November and will be announced on the ShapeBlue website.
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.
