Kubernetes and OpenStack to collide in Silicon Valley

Mirantis, the pure play OpenStack company, is one of the sponsors of OpenStack Days – Silicon Valley. I caught up with Mirantis co-founder and CMO Boris Renski to learn more about the upcoming event. Here is an edited version of that interview…

Can you tell us more about the event?

OpenStack – Silicon Valley is the event that we started three years ago. This is the third in the series. The OpenStack community in general, as you know, has a summit twice a year and then it has this concept of OpenStack Days, which are different regional events that are organized by various community members.

OpenStack – Silicon Valley has historically been the event that’s organized by the Silicon Valley community of OpenStack. It is essentially the largest community to date because the users from the early days of OpenStack are based in Silicon Valley. The NASA Research Center that started the Nova project is also based out of here. And a lot of engineers are here. It’s probably the second biggest OpenStack event out there after the main OpenStack Summit.

How is it different from the OpenStack Summit?

If you look at the typical OpenStack event they’re very focused on just different OpenStack projects or OpenStack users. On the contrary, OpenStack – Silicon Valley goes beyond that. It’s not just about OpenStack, it’s about OpenStack and the broader container ecosystem.

We have people like SAP talking about their use of Kubernetes and OpenStack in conjunction. We have representatives from different container ecosystems on panels talking about what the next standard is going to be, and many other things that are all about the container ecosystem around OpenStack.

This year, specifically, the theme is OpenStack and Kubernetes. So you can think of it as almost a joint event between OpenStack and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. A lot of the people and developers that are involved in building Kubernetes and using Kubernetes are going to be colliding with the OpenStack Community at the event. If you look at the speaker lineup, it also reflects that. We have folks from Google, Intel, CoreOS…

Who is the target audience?

The target audience for the event has historically been more of a user/business audience. That differentiates it from typical OpenStack Days events because they are developer focused. Our primary audience is director, VP-level type folks that are re-imagining their current infrastructure and are looking to open standards when building their next-gen infrastructure in their organization. There’s definitely some technical audience, but the majority of the folks are actually the ultimate user and business folks.

What’s the turnout?

We expect that we’re going to be about the same size as it’s historically been, maybe a little smaller. Historically, it’s been between 800 and 1,000 people in attendance.

Mirantis just announced refactoring Fuel to use Kubernetes so that customers can run OpenStack as a container. Will you be talking about it at the event?

At the conference, we’re going to be talking together with Google and Intel quite a bit about the benefits of this approach, and possibly doing some demos, and answering audience questions. We’ve done this announcement earlier this week, but we’re seeing it as a precursor to more details about it unraveling at the upcoming conference.

You are also organizing a Kubernetes bootcamp, which when I last checked was sold out. Are you planning to expand such bootcamps? This specific bootcamp right now is sold out. But what we’re planning to do is to expand the bootcamp to other OpenStack Days events around the world. If people like what they hear at OpenStack Days – Silicon Valley in that bootcamp, we’ll start doing bootcamps in other places. We still encourage people to come in and put their name down at the registration home page at OpenStack – Silicon Valley today, and if we’re unable to stick them into the current session, we’ll stick them into the OpenStack – Seattle, or some of the other upcoming sessions.

LinuxCon is coming up, will there be a bootcamp at the event?

We did not plan specifically on Linux Con, but that’s actually a good idea now that you bring it up.

These are physical events. Will there be virtual/online bootcamps? We already offer a whole bunch of online courses primarily around OpenStack, but for Kubernetes we’ll definitely simplify the contents and make it possible to do online courses as well. Our plan is to start doing these bootcamps in conjunction with OpenStack Days, then possibly do some standalone, and then step three would be to do self-paced classes.