Thursday, September 29, 2011

OpenStack Meet & Drink: Toast to Diablo – Event Highlights

As usual, here are the highlights from the last Bay Area OpenStack Meet & Drink: Toast to Diablo – September 28th, 2011. Thanks to WireRE for hosting us, Dave Nielsen – for helping to organize, and all the attendees – for coming. Once again, this was the biggest MeetUp thus far with 150 in attendance. For those of you that didn’t come – here is what you missed:




We started our Diablo release celebration with wine, beer and pizza. Fun mingling with fellow stackers. As people kept arriving it got almost too crowded.




Mirantis founder – Alex Freedland – passionately explaining something to David Allen.




Mike Scherbakov from Mirantis, Josh McKenty from Pison and Eric from CloudScaling debating OpenStack with noticeable vigor.




Eric Windisch proudly sporting his uber cool CloudScaling shirt, listing to Mike Scherbakov from Mirantis.




While the crowd was mingling, Dave Nielsen took people on datacenter tours. The datacenter basically looked like this.




As usual, I opened with some thank you's and acknowledgements to our sponsors and organizers. Marc Padovani of HP Cloud Services – clapping and anxiously waiting his turn to tell the crowd about OpenStack based hpcloud.com.




With 150 stackers in attendance, we didn’t have quite enough chairs to accommodate everyone.




Dave Nielsen talking about our venue host – WiredRE.




Chris Kemp – CEO and Founder of Nebula announced the OpenStack Silicon Valley LinkedIn group that Nebula recently started.




…meanwhile, Josh McKenty was waiting for his turn to speak…




Don’t remember why, but for some reason Josh’s presentation involved talking about O-Ren Ishi from Kill Bill. Whatever it was, Chris Kemp got a kick out of it.




Everybody likes Kill Bill, so the crowd was cheering.




Geva Perry shared his perspective on why OpenStack’s strength is in its ecosystem of developers and partners.




Jason Venner of X.com talked about OpenStack and CloudFoundry. He was careful not to reveal anything with respect to the upcoming “October 13th” announcement of X.commerce platform.

In closing we had Marc Padovani from HP talk about hpcloud and HP’s commitment to OpenStack. The presentation quickly turned into a Q&A grilling session, with stackers expressing their suspicions over hpcloud.com being a smoke screen, rather than real offering. Marc did his best to address the questions without incriminating his big corporation… My wife got too tired of taking pictures at that point, so there are none of Marc… sorry Marc.





Hungry stackers drank most of the wine and ate most of the food. Whatever was left over, people took home. We kept one last bottle of Cloud Wine. I intend to give it as a gift to our 500th MeetUp member – Ilan Rabinovich. Ilan – if you read this, ping me on twitter @zer0tweets to claim your prize!

Thank you to everyone and we’ll do it again in 3 months.