LinuxCon North America 2013: an air of Jazz

It was really great to be able to attend LinuxCon in New Orleans in September. I’d like to thank again HP’s OSPO team and in particular Eileen Evans, VP leading it, to sponsor my travel there. HP is also a Platinum sponsor of both the Linux Foundation, CloudOpen & LinuxCon events.
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As I arrived in the afternoon of Monday, I missed the keynotes and presentations that day, but could join the HP booth where HP was presenting HPcloud:

and also demonstrating the new Moonshot converged system there:

This event is always attracting lots of people from various background and the booths area was crowded

as well as elsewhere in the hotel

Jeanne, who was coodinating the event for HP was even interviewed by the Linux Foundation team

Cocktails (nice hurricane !) and a light dinner were provided to the attendees during the booth crawl session which allowed me to talk with some of my US colleagues to learn the latest news

I started to feel the effects of the jet lag, and went to my hotel room (couldn’t help make some mail !) and rest thinking I was singing Renaissance music just some hours ago !

Speaking of the hotel, this was a very nice venue, with futurists elevators with no button in them 😉

Second day was more active, and I attended all keynotes and sessions I could.
Among the most interestong for me I was able to see, there was the keynote of Kevin Kelly who talked about the notion of “Technium”, this idea that 7 billions people all connected all together all the time, with the latest technologies available will create a new entity he called the Technium and described. Not entirely convincing, and this is good, as it’s also a bit frightening. I consider and hope people will keep enough independance to watch this type of evolution with distance and won’t become a big brother type of system managing itself.

Then it was time for an OpenStack refresh with Thierry Carrez who did a great job explaining that a release manager is not just working 1 day every 6 months 😉 I can’t agree more with him ! (even if I have much smaller projects to deal with). Thierry also covered the various sub projetc and how to manage coherency in such a project. When you think about it: 3 years ago nobody was talking about OpenStack and now they have as many company and contributors as the Linux Kernel had in roughly 20 years ! Quite amazing.

Then James Blair continued on a related talk explaining the continuous process pushed to the extreme set up in the project with the development of ad-hoc tools such as zuul. I must admit it really gives incitation to look more closely at it, gerrit, jenkins and take what could be relevant, even for a small project.

After the lunch, it was time to go back to keynotes, which were a bit less interesting than usual for me, even if the concepts brought by Candy Chang to revigorate a neighborhood was original. I decided to continue with Cloud and look at what Red Hat had to propose around openshift. In complement to their RDO (sort of Red Hat OpenStack distribution), they have this offering which exists for some time, but seems now to grow in activity. Diane Mueller presented well the offer, the various aspects of the project, but I definitely lack a demo or a more detailed explanation of the technical aspects of this PaaS offering. Worth digging later on with my Red Hat EMEA friends 🙂

I attended then the openVswitch presentation from Jesse Gross, but again was a bit disappointed as I was expecting a more concrete presentation of this important tool in todays cloud environments.
Finally, I attended a session on storage management I already attended last year, by Ric Wheeler, which is always interesting, and allowed me to see which progresses were made on their way to storage unification, and principally what remains to be done !! I particularly think to the global architecture they try to put in place, which would be really great to have but is not there yet.

The business day was then over, and it was time to move to the VIP party.

Of course, it was time for my first air of Jazz as well in New Orleans. And even if that’s not my preferred style of music, it was pretty good that night, as well as the buffet !

Lots of VIPs were there of course, which allowed for entertaining discussions

The inside was worth the outside !

The atmosphere was nice, and I stayed there till 10:00PM but wasn’t alone

Some mail, some sleep and I was ready for day 3 ! Which as usual started with a Keynote (the “usual” Dirk Hondel talk)

and the session the most expected by the audience I think, the Kernel Roundtable.

This time, they had invited Sarah Sharp, Intel (I like her clarity) / Tejun Heo, Red Hat (I discovered his enthusiasm which was great)

Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman, both Linux Foundation.

The panel was moderated by Ric Wheeler, Red Hat.

The room was as usual full, and laughed frequently on Linus or Tejun jokes.

The most amusing part was probably when Linus was asked if he had been contacted to introduce backdoor code in the Linux kernel and when he replied “No” doing “Yes” with the head 😉

After the keynote, Linus passed 20 minutes with fans who wanted to take pictures with him, always nice, even when the camera wasn’t working (and cound’t resist to hack it !). Maybe next time, I’ll also have the courage to ask one picture, even if I diserve none having nearly never worked at the kernel level myself. I will never thank him enough to have created an ecosystem which allows me to earn my life and still have fun at work and at home 🙂 This is a great man !

As this was the day of my own presentation on Mageia, I didn’t attend as many sessions as the previous day.
The OpenDaylight one was interesting for me, as it was my first exposure to the ecosystem. Mostly it was an overview of the multiple components. The project is young, but deserves to be followed, as it could become as openStack on the SDN side, despite what some people say. Also the UEFI presentation was very interesting, in particular in preparation of the UEFI plugfest which was the 2 following days.

And of course, it was my pleasure to have a 15 people choir to sing “Happy Birthday Mageia” during my session this afternoon 😉

And the day ended with … Blues, not jazz this time ! At the house of blues of course.

With Voodoo art inside

This event is organized for all LinuxCon participants, so there are multiple threaded buffet to satisfy the appetite 😉

The blues band was great, really (they even had a pinguin, look closely !)

I think it will be part of the memorable dinners organized during LinuxCon as it gave everybody energy for the rest of the week

I really enjoyed this event again, made new relationships, learned and hopefully transmit to some the fantastic beauty of Open Source. Hope to have the same pleasure end of this month in Edinburgh. But for me the week wasn’t finished as I attended the UEFI plugfest as said earlier, but that’s for another article.

You can see more pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcornec/sets/72157636383786144/with/10184624874/

Tags: HP, HPLinux, Linux, LinuxCon, LinuxFoundation, Mageia, Open Source