OpenStack Summit Austin

OpenStack Summit is a five day conference for OpenStack developers, users and administrators of OpenStack Cloud Software! It happens twice a year at different places around the world. This time OpenStack Summit was held in Austin from 25th to 29th of April’16.

I was so excited and glad to be able to become a part of such a huge and amazing OpenStack event and meet the people with whom I have been interacting remotely since long and learn awesome things from them.

Journey

This was my first international travel and I was prepared for the long journey from Pune to Austin and indeed it was. My flight journey was around 24 hours and overall it took around 35 hours to reach. That was really a long journey but it was truly worth it.

The moment I entered hotel, I met vkmc, who has inspired and helped me a lot since the start of my OpenStack journey. It was so good to meet her in person for the first time.

Before I start telling about the Summit, I would like to thank all of those because of whom I could attend the Summit especially my family, my mentor, Outreachy team, Travel Support Program and the entire OpenStack community.

Pre-Summit Social Women of OpenStack Event – 24th April

This was the party organized on the eve of OpenStack Summit by Women of OpenStack (WOO) and I was about to miss it as I reached my hotel around 6 pm and the party had already started. Did not want to miss it. So I quickly did the hotel check in, got ready and rushed to the Austin Convention Centre where the bus which would take me to the party venue was standing. Initially, the driver told me that now he has stopped taking people from Convention Centre to the party as the party was about to get over but looking at my sad face, he smiled and said “You know what, I will take you there!”. Yayy!! I hopped onto the bus and within few minutes I was there at the party :-).

Was glad to see so many amazing people (mostly women) from the OpenStack community, live music and food. I met few people (mostly from Intel) from the community who were working full time as OpenStack developers and they introduced me to OSIC which is a joint initiative by Intel and Rackspace. At the end got some WOO goodies as well. I was super tired. So just went back to the hotel and slept so as to start afresh the next day.

Day 1 – 25th April

It was an early start with my first session at 7.30 am. Women Of OpenStack Speed Mentoring session.

Here I met another bunch of amazing folks from OpenStack Community. The mentors explained us about their experiences with OpenStack and mentees were supposed to say about their experiences.

Yih Leong Sun from Intel told us about his experience as an OpenStack developer and Kim Wallace from NetApp gave us guidelines from her perspective.

I explained them about my contribution and future goals in OpenStack. Got some tips on how I can proceed further.

After this, I did the registration.

My Badge

And directly proceeded towards the Keynotes session. Some were quite tough for me to understand but some I really found interesting.

The sessions were happening at three places in parallel, Austin Convention Centre (Talks, marketplace and user sessions), JW Mariott (Workshops)  and Hilton Austin Downtown (Design Sessions).

Next I attended few talks of which I enjoyed Using Containers to create world’s fastest OpenStack the most. Here I got to learn about a new concept called machine containers. Amazing stuff people are building! Then was the lunch time. Being a vegetarian, it was a tough time to get some good food but I was prepared for anything.

While grabbing the lunch box, I met dims who is one of the leading OpenStack contributors. It was nice interacting with him.

Few more sessions I had planned to attend after lunch, some on containers again and the one which I found interesting but tough was Baremetal Inspection. It was tough to understand but got some pointers on what I need to learn more.

The day ended with an Happy Hour at the Marketplace Booth Crawl event. It was so much fun to see excitement everywhere. Some were busy understanding the demos while some wanted to collect as many goodies as they can. I myself watched few demos, collected some goodies and did a lot of networking. It was nice interacting with Akash Chandrashekar on the machine containers stuff.

Day 2 – 26th April

I was again supposed to wake up early this morning for the Women of OpenStack Working Session but I reached a little late. Missed the entire WOO group photograph 😦 but fortunately I had a picture with my own group. Here I was supposed to join any group where a discussion was going on, on what and how we as Women of OpenStack can bring a change in the next Summit. Every group was supposed to conclude on an idea and present it. It was nice interacting with our group’s facilitator Nithya Ruff and other talented women from the community.

Next was the keynotes time again. I enjoyed all the keynotes but found OpenStack and Kubernetes: Inception as the most fascinating.

I then attended few talks of which I found Security of Containers and Advances in Role based access control of keystone Auth as most interesting. Both sessions taught me a huge bunch of interesting new things. I also wanted to attend a Docker – 101 session but till the time I reached there, the session was full of attendees. So I spent some time at the Austin Convention Centre exploring things which I learnt in the previous sessions and then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the official OpenStack Summit Party.

The party was arranged in the bars at Rainey Street and we could hop into any bar and have fun. Me, along with my Indian friends started with the first one as the second one had a long queue. I was quite hungry and went to look for some food and was so glad to see fulkas (Indian bread) and tacos there. I ate it like anything and went to the second bar.

Austin being a city of live music, we were greeted with live music at both the bars. Here we clicked few photographs with a hat that I rented from a fellow community member.

One With Hat @ The Stackers Party!!!

Me @ The Stackers Party!!!

While moving onto the next bar, to my surprise, I met my mentor. He is the most amazing person I have ever met. I wish to become as great contributor as he is. I interacted with him for few minutes. It is always so much fun interacting with him. He advised us not to stay till late :P. We then went onto explore each of the bars. Sadly, there was nothing but coke for me as I don’t have alcoholic beverages but it was fun to do the bar hopping and listen to some great music. Finally we went back to the hotel (following my mentor’s advise), clicked some pictures on the way back and had a nice sleep. A long but the most interesting day I must say.

Day 3 – 27th April

Design Summit was actually planned on this day. I was interested in attending Sahara design sessions and the first one I attended was on Sahara API v2. As opposed to the earlier sessions, this was more of a discussion within a small team where we had a discussion on what are the milestones and how we are going to achieve those in the upcoming release. Priorities were decided and etherpad was updated.

Attended one more Sahara work session on security. This was quite interesting as there was a discussion on bandit, barbican and kerberos.

After the session I spoke to my mentor for quite a while on what I should be working on next and about my internship experience with him.

Then I went to the Threat Analysis session with my mentor. Got to know on how this is going to be implemented in OpenStack.

Few more sessions after that, did some sight seeing in the evening, had dinner and that was for the day.

Day 4 – 28th April

I had planned to attend full day OpenStack hands on training on 4th day. I went for the training and found that I already knew most of it. So I attended few more design sessions and interacted with community members most of the day.

Went out with friends in the evening. Visited few places and had a delicious pizza for the dinner. It was a fun filled day.

@ The State Capitol

@ The State Capitol

Day 5 – 29th April

Finally the last day of the Summit arrived. So true it is that time runs fast.

I packed my bags, did the checkout and went to attend the most awaited event, Sahara Contributors Meetup. I interacted with all the Sahara folks and I must say that I am honored to be a part of such an amazing and wonderful community. Ethan explained me what was discussed before my arrival. Everyone was so welcoming to me. My mentor told me about what places he would like to visit in India if and when he comes. We then had a group picture.

OpenStack Sahara Team

Some more networking and I headed back to hotel. Met my friends on the way back to hotel, took luggage and headed to the airport. I so wish the Summit would have been a bit longer. Was in no mood to come back 😦

It was truly a wonderful experience I had at the Summit :). Thank you OpenStack for giving me this opportunity.

Looking forward to attending the next Summit!