While I was unpacking my bag this morning, I found my new OpenStack T-Shirt that we got at the summit. It brought up really good memories.

The energy at the summit was driven by the Rackers ( RackSpace employees). They feal really lucky to be working on such a cool project, and coming from the open source community, they really “get it”. During the design (review) sessions there was a lot of openess and good mood, with geek-jokes on every possible subject.

For example, during the session about rolling upgrades and database metadata changes, I claimed that if you have a backwards compatible replication protocol, a schema upgrade may not be needed. After the session, one of the Rackers (on his own accord) sat with me for about 15 minutes, and the next morning asked me to do a 5min lighting talk about it. He practically took me by the hand to speak in the middle of the “circle”. Things like that don’t happen that often (at least not to me 🙂

During the summit, there was so many know how pouring from all sides from so many companies. At the risk of over generalizing things, I would point out that NASA has a lot of hands-on experience dealing with large amounts of data, Citrix/KVM/Cannonical brought virtualization and low level tech savvy know how, and NTT described a complete IPv6 migration plan. There were many other companies giving their inputs ranging from usability, network virtualization, storage devices, scalability and agile software design practices.

I was really sorry when the summit ended, so I’ve decided to wear the OpenStack T-Shirt to work today … one more day with the stackers.