Thursday, June 30, 2011

Bay Area OpenStack Meet & Drink Highlights

For those of you that weren’t able to make it yesterday and maybe for those of you who want to reminisce about the events of last night, Bay Area OpenStack Meet & Drink was probably the most well-attended OpenStack meetup in the valley to date, outside of the OpenStack summit this spring. A diverse crowd of over 120 stackers showed up – ranging from folks just learning the basics of OpenStack to hardcore code committers.





We originally planned on hosting a 30-40 person tech meetup session in a small cozy space at the Computer History Museum. However, with over 100 RSVPs we had to go all out and rent out Hahn Auditorium, making space for all of those wanting to participate.





First 40 minutes – people eating drinking and mingling. The food line was a bit overwhelming.





Cloud wine was served with dinner.





Joe Arnold from Cloudscaling brought a demo server, running SWIFT for people to play around with.





I opened the ceremony with a 5-minute intro – polling the audience on their experience with OpenStack, saying a few words about Mirantis and upcoming events, as well as introducing Mirantis team members.





Meanwhile, Joe was getting all too excited to do his pitch of SWIFT.





Joe did his 10-minute talk on “Swift in the Small.” You can read up on the content that was presented in Joe’s blog: http://joearnold.com/2011/06/27/swift-in-the-small/. You can also view the slides here: http://bit.ly/mMRcpt. And the live recording of the presentation can be found here: http://bit.ly/mJOr2R





We gave out Russian Standard vodka bottles at the meetup as favors. To complete the theme and give the audience a taste of Russian hospitality, we had an accordionist perform a 5-minute stunt immediately after Joe’s pitch on Swift (see his performance here: http://bit.ly/iiYveN).





Party time…





Mike Scherbakov from our team of stackers talked about implementing Nova in Mirantis’ internal IT department, taking quite a few questions from the audience. The deck of his presentation is here: http://slidesha.re/jyS4WL. The recording of the talk can be found here: part 1; part 2; part 3; and part 4.

I’d like to thank everyone for coming and we’ll appreciate any comments or suggestions on the event. We plan to have our next meetup at the end of September. If you would like to help organize, present your OpenStack story, or offer any ideas on how to make the experience better, please ping me on twitter @zer0tweets or send me an email – borisr at mirantis dot com.