Barton's Blog

Last month I attend Open Source Summit (OSS) North America which was held in Los Angeles from September 11- 14.

This year the Linux Foundation brought four conferences under the umbrella name,  “The Open Source Summit” (OSS).  The four conferences were LinuxCon, ContainerCon, CloudOpen plus the new “Open Community Conference.”

Interviewing and being Interviewed

While at the conference, besides giving away an Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition aka “project Sputnik,” I found myself on both sides of the camera.  I was interviewed by Swapnil Bhartiya around the history of Project Sputnik and I in turn interviewed representatives of ARM, Red Hat’s OpenShift, and Bitnami’s Kubernetes effort.

Enjoy!

Project Sputnik

Here I am holding forth with regards to the origins and ideas behind Project Sputnik, our line of Linux-based developer systems.

Bitnami and Kubeless

• Sebastian Goasguen’s Kubernetes-focused company SkipBox was recently acquired by Bitnami – the name comes from “(Skip)per” like Kubernetes and Tool(box) — which helps onboard people to Kubernetes.
• Bitnami acquired SkipBox as a way to get into the Kubernetes space.  SkipBox’s key offering was “Kubeless,” a Kubernetes-native serverless framework which helps people move from Physical machines/VMs/cloud to containers and then to Kubernetes.

ARM’s development platform

• Julio Suarez of ARM walks us through their demo at the Open Source summit.  The team was demoing their server enterprise development platform “Mali.”  Unlike Raspberry Pi, Mali is pretty beefy with 10GB Ethernet ports, SATA, PCI etc.
• The platforms are clustered into a group of three using Docker Swarm (could also use Kubernetes, Marathon Mesos).  The swarm is running an ecommerce website, ported to ARM from x86.  The website is composed of 14 microservices.

Red Hat’s OpenShift

• Harish Pillay talks about Red Hat’s Container as a Service offering, OpenShift.  While OpenShift began life with its own version of containers, they have pivoted to employ industry standard containers and Kubernetes.
• Different pieces and technology can be swapped in and out as long as they are written to standards.

Conference reflections

Given the continued growth in the number of Linux Foundation projects and the number of sub events, the attendance of little over 1,900, albeit from 37 different countries, seemed a bit light.  Additionally the show floor seemed sparse compared to past.

I’m guessing that high level Open Source events don’t have the allure they once did, particularly since open source is a given in most environments today.  In turn, people are seeking out more targeted events around specific technologies eg DockerCon, KubeCon.  All that said it was a valuable conference thanks to the always interesting hallway track.

Dell EMC’s presence

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention my employer’s presence at the summit.

Dell EMC was represented by the rebranded “{code}” team who now represents the open source efforts across Dell Technologies.  While {code}’s press release introduced their new name and remit, the news they led with concerned REX-Ray:

REX-Ray, an established open source container orchestration engine that enables persistence for cloud-native workloads, now includes plugins for 15 storage integrations, with the addition of NFS, local block services and VFS, immediately making those storage platforms CSI-compatible.

Extra-credit reading

• Open Source guides:  At the event the Linux foundation introduced a set of succinct Open Source guides targeted at enterprises to help
  • guide their use of and contribution to open source software and communities
  • explain the value of open source to management
  • formalize and organize their existing open source efforts

• Videos: The keynote sessions were recorded and are available to watch.
• Event Photos: To view a selection of photos from the events visit the Linux Foundation’s website.

Pau for now…