This week is a big step forward for the OpenStack community as we come together at the Design Summit to share our ideas about building the Essex release, the current development release from OpenStack scheduled for final release in the spring of 2012. I’m at the OpenStack Summit, and the excitement and feeling of participation in the creation of this important new platform is everywhere.
So what am I doing there and what is Cisco doing with OpenStack? First off, OpenStack represents Cisco’s strategy in action, helping customers build and use clouds. Our partnering effort in OpenStack represents a big part of our progress this year. By our efforts, we are ensuring that OpenStack performs well with Cisco technologies, and hopefully will contribute to the advancement of the cloud computing through abstractions and APIs that enable rich use of networking technologies and services.
Here are a few highlights of Cisco’s involvement to date, all of which will play into the activity in Boston this week:
1. Cisco has been a key contributor to the Quantum Networking project for OpenStack, which aims to provide more advanced, user accessible, networking options and capabilities that allow application developers to more effectively request and control network devices and policies. Through Quantum, Cisco engineering resources helped develop API extensions and plug-in drivers for creating virtual network segments on top of Cisco NX-OS and UCS.
2. Because we all need to ensure that OpenStack succeeds, we also contributed resources to build more than 135 individual unit tests for the OpenStack Quantum Test Framework and OpenStack Compute (NOVA), the open source software designed to provision and manage large networks of virtual machines.
3. Lastly we contributed to the Dashboard project, to make it easier for system admins and end-users to manage OpenStack resources.
In each of the efforts, it was amazing to watch how the community worked together, across many different individuals and companies, to review design docs and make helpful suggestions toward building the best possible solution for our users. My deep thanks to the community project managers who kept us all on track.