I attended the OpenStack Summit, the fifth Summit for me, in Boston this week, May 8-11. For me, the highlight was Open Source Days, a new element for this summit. For Open Source Days, the OpenStack Foundation selected 11 open source projects related to OpenStack, Open vSwitch among them, and gave each of them a room for a day for presentations. OpenStack handed out these rooms at no charge, which is incredibly generous given that conference space ordinarily costs thousands of dollars for a room. They additionally gave 10 free registration codes to each open source project to distribute to speakers, also incredibly generous given that full registration is $600 or more.
For the Open vSwitch Open Source day, we sent out a call for presentations back in February, received several submissions, and accepted about 10 talks, each 10 to 20 minutes long, plus an hour-long tutorial session. We held the Open Source Day on Wednesday. I was anxious about attendance before it started–I always am–and the first few talks were lightly attended. Around 11 am, the room started filling up for a talk about NFV performance, and from then on the room was well filled. Over 100 people attended my tutorial on using OVN, the open source network virtualization system that is part of Open vSwitch, with OpenStack in the afternoon. The day of talks wrapped up around 5:20 pm. The event was a big success and I hope that they will make Open Source Days a regular feature of their conferences.
In addition to the Open Source Day, on Monday I gave a joint talk in the main conference on the latest features and the future of OVN, with Justin Pettit from VMware and Russell Bryant from Red Hat. I also had numerous meetings, lunches, and dinners with folks who have an interest in Open vSwitch and OVN.
A video recording from my talk about OVN is already available on the OpenStack website at openstack.org/summit/boston-2017/summit-schedule/events/17833/openstack-and-ovn-whats-new-with-ovs-2-7. Over the next few weeks, audio recordings and slides from the Open vSwitch Day talks will be posted and made available on the OVS Orbit podcast at ovsorbit.org and at openvswitch.org/.
