The Linux Foundation recently announced CloudOpen, a technical conference dedicated to open source cloud computing and big data. The conference is intended to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas about the use of open source cloud and big data technologies. The inaugural CloudOpen technical conference will take place from August 29 to August 31, 2012 in San Diego, California. The conference expects to showcase content of a technical nature related to products such as, but not limited to “Chef, Gluster, Hadoop, KVM, Linux, oVirt, Puppet, and Xen.” The Linux Foundation is currently soliciting Calls For Proposals (CFPs) by June 1. Sponsors of CloudOpen include Dell, Citrix, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Puppet Labs and SUSE.
CloudOpen is unique amongst cloud computing conferences because of its explicit focus on open-source technologies. The conference enables collaboration and conversation amongst open-source cloud professionals at a historical juncture where CIOs, development managers and software developers are increasingly used to navigating hybrid IT infrastructures featuring a combination of proprietary and open source solutions. Because many open source cloud and big data technologies are new or have only been recently deployed in combination with other solutions, technical resources are likely to benefit tremendously from the conference’s design of facilitating lateral conversations about topics such as best practices, regulatory requirements, deployment challenges, integration with 3rd party software, automation, inter-operability, APIs and ongoing operational challenges.
The Linux Foundation announced CloudOpen in the wake of weeks of recent conversation about open source cloud computing products Eucalytptus, OpenStack and CloudStack. First, Eucalyptus reached a deal with Amazon Web Services such that AWS officially endorsed its API for promoting inter-operability between the Eucalyptus private cloud and the Amazon Web Services platform. The deal means that Eucalyptus customers can migrate data between their data centers and the Amazon Web Services platform by using Eucalyptus APIs that are compatible with Amazon Web Services products such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Then, Citrix open-sourced CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation despite having made a prior commitment to using OpenStack for CloudStack’s IaaS technological platform. Meanwhile, OpenStack has continued to make waves given the launch of its Foundation, Rackspace’s Beta launch of a commercialized OpenStack platform as well as an endorsement from Puppet Labs. Expect the open source cloud and big data juggernaut to gather steam this spring and summer. Red Hat, for example, will open-source the code for its Platform as a Service, OpenShift, at the Open Cloud Conference from April 30 through May 3.
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