OpenStack Day India 2016
Last week I was able to attend the OpenStack Day India event in Bangalore, July 8-9. A big thank you to my employer, Dell, and NEC Technologies for making it possible for me to attend. And a big thank you to Sheel Rana from NEC for helping make my attendance possible and being an incredible guide and host while I was there.
This was a long way to go for a couple days conference, but I was actually kind of excited to go. Developers in India make up the second largest group of OpenStack contributors after the US. It as great to get out and support this strong community and do whatever I could to help contribute to its success.
Day 1: Workshops
The first day kicked off with Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, and Mark Collier, OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer, providing some insight on the state of OpenStack while attendees got ready for some hands on workshops.
Over the next few hours folks worked on spinning up local devstack instances and walking through various OpenStack functionality to explore Nova, Neutron, and other core project functionality.
To close out the day, we switched over to more of a developer focus. I have a walkthrough of how contributing to OpenStack works. From initially getting set up to the basics of code reviews, to how to submit code changes and various tips and tricks along the way.
There is a lot of context missing without the audio, but here are the slides from my first day presentation:
Day 2: Workshops and Keynotes
The second day was a little larger, with a split between two tracks with more of a keynote and presentation track happening in the main auditorium, and workshops/tech track on various topics in another room.
Unfortunately I was only able to attend the presentation track, but there were a lot of interesting topics presented by Aptira, Red Hat, and other conference sponsors.
As part of these presentations, I gave an overview of the Cinder project:
There were some good questions by the audience, but I think the biggest value for me was all of the hallway conversations I was able to have with folks interested in OpenStack and Cinder, and being able to meet some existing Cinder contributors face to face for the first time. There were many names I knew from IRC and patches, so it was awesome being able to meet them in person and be able to shake hands. That was one of the more rewarding parts of the event.