OpenStack Summit Goes Big On NFV And Telcos

Howdy ya’ll…

This week TechWeekEurope is visiting the capital of the Lone Star State, Austin, Texas, where the OpenStack Foundation is throwing its summer summit.

This year’s agenda speaks volumes about the direction OpenStack is about to head in. After years of really trying hard, it seems as though providing the open source alternative to Amazon Web Services has proven too difficult, especially with the loss of HP’s Helion cloud service last year. Whether it ever was going to be a serious contender divides opinion somewhat.

Nevertheless, in the short term, OpenStack can still thrive off the money flowing through it from the larger customers who are building what they can sell to their own customers as an Amazon ‘alternative’, and reap rewards from the large sums on money needed to manage the often-seen-as-complex products. With the loss of public cloud momentum, we’re also about to see how OpenStack is morphing ever more towards a set of pick ‘n’ mix components.

Telco

It’s to this end that we’ll see Foundation wheel out a variety of big name telco customers to talk up Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and other use cases for the technology this week.
There’s AT&T, China Mobile, MTT Docomo, and Orange all ready to tell summit attendees just how OpenStack is delivering for telcos. “NFV has also become an important use case for the OpenStack community, with many leading telecom providers participating in this week’s event,” said the Foundation today.

Another theme for this year will be how OpenStack can be used as an “integration engine” for new cloud technologies. We’ll also hear about some emerging use cases, namely IoT, container management (think Google and CoreOS) and Industry 4.0.

“Nearly six years in, OpenStack has become the de facto open standard for cloud computing, with a vibrant commercial ecosystem and large footprint of private and public cloud deployments,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “As we kick off the OpenStack Summit Austin, we see more diverse use cases than ever before, highlighting the fact that all applications need standardized and automated access to compute, storage and networking resources.”

There’s already been a heap of releases from various OpenStack members leading up to the summit, and TechWeekEurope understands there’s plenty more to come from the likes of Rackspace, Red Hat, and Mirantis.

We’ll also be investigating how the European Union uses OpenStack, the platform’s relationship with scientists at CERN, and the HMRC’s journey into OpenStack.

Take our cloud quiz here