OpenStack Summit Tokyo: Day One

Yesterday was our first full day here at OpenStack Summit Tokyo, and the themes seemed pretty clear. Increased focus on applications and containers – containers – containers. The best part about that is how validating it feels. We’ve been focused on improving the usability of containers for several years now, and that’s been realized in LXD – the container hypervisor. Of course, applications – scalable, intelligent, hands-off and dynamic, well, Juju’s been doing that for years, and is by far the most mature, modern application deployment and modeling tool.

There was a great session on OpenStack installers, and it touched on upgrades, as well. The cool part was that Juju got high praise for its maturity, stability, and ability to upgrade consistently. And that’s just for OpenStack. Juju does so much more than just that. It deploys and upgrades OpenStack, but what’s really cool is how it manages all the applications on top of it. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Juju, check it out at http://jujucharms.com. It’s way cool, and we’ll be talking about it more this week.

Another theme that’s not specific to this week but has been building momentum from one summit to another, is the inclusion of more than just developers and development cycles around OpenStack. There are sessions here in Tokyo at all levels. There are business-focused sessions, extremely technical how-to sessions for engineers and ops folks, and best practices sessions, like the one Canonical’s Billy Olsen gave, around everything you should know and keep in mind during an OpenStack upgrade.

Are you here in Tokyo this week? Come visit us in the Marketplace at booth S3, in the back room on the left side. We’d love to hear about your take on the summit, what you’re doing with OpenStack, and how we can help you. If you’re not here, subscribe to Insights below and follow along.