Day 2 at Linux.conf.au

Those interested by the start of the story can read the previous article on LCA14.

Day 2 at Linux.conf.au started with another keynote.

This time we had a presentation of a subproject of OpenStreetmap called HOT and showed how they’re using and promoting Open Street Map in humanitarian situations such as earth quake or floods. Typically was intereting that they now use it proactively in some part of the world such as Indonesia to *prevent* disasters, rather than reacting afterwards.

Listening to that, I thought that each country should propose to their young people in age of conscription (when they still have such thing in place) to contribute freely during a 3/6 months period to such an initiative: They don’t need high skilled IT engineers, but just people able to make correct maps of a given area in their neighbourhood. We could end up having a large Open Data collection in Open Street Map, regularly up to date.

Anyway, I was impressed by the generosity of this project, and to see how concretely useful some of the work which is done by hthe Open Source community is used.

The rest of the day was again dedicated to Miniconfs. I passed my time in OpenStack one. The track was organized by Michael Still of Rackspace who was last year Conference Director and made probably the most interesting session of the week in introduction, which consisted into giving an OpenStack T-shirt to all attendees 😉

There were then some changes in the set of sessions due to infortunate problems for some speakers. So James E Blair from the OpenStack Foundation and Michael Still did the presentation on Open Stack governance on behalf of Tristan Goode.

Followed by Paul Holland’s presentation on the move to a foundation made by the Open Stack community to manage their brand and governance model just explained, which is quite unique in its willingness to be egalitarian, which is probably a big concern when you gather thousand+ developers and dozens+ companies, and you want everybody plays the game. So the whole election mechanism, to board, to PTL roles, the gated trunk, … are probably mandatory now for such huge project with such a young history. I’d not necessarily recommend every project to adopt it as it will IMO be overkill for most of them,even if continuous testing (for them with Jenkins) is for sure a good idea (I wish they would do continuous packaging as well ;-)). However, for the projects I’m leading, it’s still an objective rather than a reality.

In the afternoon, there were presentation on an incubated Open Stack project by Bruno Lago for billing called Artifice and based on the recently introduced telemetry OpenStack Ceilometer. There are different proposals around this billing need, and time will say which solution is retained as a project.

The following presentation was more interestig for me as it was on improving Network support in OpenStack by Iain Robertson from Brocade. It’s interesting to observe how this area of Network Functions Virtualzation (NFV) and Software Defined Network (SDN) is moving so fast, which is surely only possible due to the rapid evolutions made on lots of Open SOurce components to support them. I think there will be more and more overlap betwee nthe functions provided by the major Frameworks such as OpenStack (python based) OpenDaylight (java based) if only for language eason (API, interfaces, reuse of code) …

Then we had a very good presentation of Erasure Code for Open Stack Swift by John Dickinson, Swift PTL. which explained how this sort of RAID technology for Swift, the object storage brick of OpenStack, will be provided, and made a demo which helped understanding the concepts exposed.

Anita Kuno, HP, came back on stage for a short presentation on some unknown aspects of OpenStack around the CI tooling (grab her presentation when it will be published to ge tthe links).

Then again Robert Collins, HP, took over Joe Gordon’s presentation on the evolution of OpenStack between Diablo and Havanna. Which on one hand looks very similar with the same core components, and also lots of differences with three times the number of lines of code and many additional bricks added. Of course, while not the original speaker, Robert’s extremely large knowledge of OpenStack in a whole, allowed him to very precisely show the dynamism of this project and the progresses made in the last 2 years. He also explained how Nova lost most of the features it had initialy to create separate components instead.

Overall remarks about LCA2014: timing are respected very strictly, and they provide enough time in order to move from one conference to another (which could take 5 minutes crossing the university), they have timekeeper in each room, video in each room (at least all the one I was in). The first day they forgot to print banner to indicate where the rooms were, so it was a bit difficult to find its way (despite online maps, but regular readers know I’m old(fashioned) and also like signs !). Day 3 was thus perfect with regards to that !

I had a very nice dinner that second day at the Friends Restaurant, with a Grilled barramundi fillet, quinoa risotto, roasted almonds and confit summer vegetable in extra virgin olive oil ! Of course, with such a title, It could only be a french touch, and indeed the chef was french. But the fish was local and very good !

That was a long evening full of mail, and some coding. More pictures are available at https://plus.google.com/photos/112434061686721373729/albums/5966194867275136465

Next day is the start of the main conferences !

Tags: Australia, Event, HP, HPLinux, Linux, Linux.conf.au, Open Source, Open Street Map, OpenStack, presentation