Taking place over 5 days (November 8 – 12), the CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2021 was the first virtual annual get-together of the Apache CloudStack community. The conference was 100% community-organised and was attended by over 420 people from over 25 countries, from leading enterprises, cloud and IaaS providers, managed service providers, software providers and telcos. The Conference proved to be a resounding success for our community, attracting not only those with extensive experience with CloudStack, but many cloud engineers and IaaS architects new to the technology.
The conference had 2 tracks with a total of 43 sessions, a hackathon, 5 workshops, a virtual lounge, and many networking opportunities. The sessions had a combined total of 3,537 views, with an average of 74 views per talk/workshop.
In this article, we will share some of the most interesting highlights and our experience of being involved in the organisation of the event. Continue reading to find links to all conference recordings and keep up to date with the latest news and innovations in the CloudStack community.
Without the sponsors these events would not be possible, so the CloudStack community is grateful to Hubilo, ShapeBlue, LINBIT, XCP-ng, StorPool, CloudOps, Versio, ScaleGrid, EWERK Group and IndiQus for supporting the event.
The Sessions
Day 1
The first day of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference was dedicated to a hackathon, giving developers and operators from the community the chance to meet and collaborate on ideas. Some of the topics discussed during the hackathon were API renewal, internal RPC, testing, password-less access to KVM hosts, and implementation of 2FA with Google. A great idea, which will be implemented after the conference, is the organization of monthly online meetings for the dev community to continue to share experiences and ideas.
Day 2
The CloudStack Collaboration Conference started with the opening talk by Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue, Chairman of the CloudStack European User Group and Apache Cloudstack PMC Member. Giles shared more about the event organization and the opportunities the event platform provides to all attendees.
The event continued with the keynote talk “Bringing digital services to 1.3 billion people with CloudStack”, delivered by Abhishek Ranjan, Chief Technology Officer, CSC e-Governance Services India Limited. Government Digital Services have brought a revolution in how nations communicate with their citizens and enable entire countries to become more socially, financially and digitally inclusive. Digital India is a flagship program of the Government of India with a vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. It was conceptualized to ensure government services are readily available to the citizens in every corner of the nation through robust online infrastructure and extensive connectivity network.
One of the most anticipated talks on the second day was “What’s New in CloudStack 4.16“. Giles Sirett presented a walkthrough of the latest CloudStack release, talking about improvements and new features. Тhis session was watched by 150+ people live!
More about the new CloudStack 4.16 release
Download CloudStack 4.16
Тhe day continued with 2 simultaneous tracks of sessions – the Developer’s Track and User Stories and Integrations. Following these talks, attendees could join a workshop “CloudMCs Integration with Kubernetes and CloudStack”, delivered by Will Stevens and Patrick Dube from CloudOps.
Day 3
We started with The State of the Union – Insights from the Apache CloudStack Ecosystem, presented by Apache CloudStack’s VP Gabriel Brascher. Gabriel talked about latest releases and features, the community, and how CloudStack is evolving. He shared interesting insights for CloudStack adoption and a several use cases of how it powers enterprise clouds.
Тhe day continued as before with 2 tracks of talks, leading to the final event for the day: a workshop delivered by LINBIT – “Setup Linstor with Cloudstack”, presenting the new storage integration of CloudStack with LINBIT SDS.
Day 4
Day 4 of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference started with a workshop targeting users who are new to Apache CloudStack and / or KVM. The session “A simple Cloudstack deployment with KVM” was delivered by Andrija Panic, Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue.
After a few hours of exciting tech talks like “Next-Gen Virtual Router”, “VM Ingestion – importing and exporting VMware instances”, “Build your Virtual Infrastructure from Bare Metal Using XCP-ng and Cloudstack” and “IPv6 support in CloudStack”, we again closed the day with a workshop – “Demo of Storage Live Migration in CloudStack”, by Venko Moyankov from StorPool Storage.
Day 5
The final day of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference was the last chance for attendees to meet with the event sponsors and to enjoy another round of in-depth technical talks. Although a little tired after so much virtual networking, the attendees were very active throughout the whole event, right up to the last talk.
Some of the most engaging talks on the last day were “Dell EMC PowerFlex storage plugin integration in CloudStack”, “CloudStack migration between DC’s – How we live migrated VMs to a new site at Leaseweb”, “CloudStack and Tungsten Fabric SDN Integration” and “A guide on contributing to Apache CloudStack”.
All the recordings of the talks from the CloudStack Collaboration Conference will be soon available on the official Apache CloudStack YouTube Channel.
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The CloudStack Community wants to thank all of the event attendees and partners for helping us make such a great event. We are open to any feedback on how we can make future events better and grow our community. If you also have an interesting story or use case, which you would like to share in the community, keep an eye for the next events and become part of them!
Ivet Petrova is the Marketing Director of ShapeBlue. She is responsible for strengthening ShapeBlue’s global brand and market awareness of ShapeBlue’s services. Specifically, Ivet’s team is responsible for brand, advertising, content and digital marketing, social media, and media relations.
Ivet is also an active member of the CloudStack community, working on increasing the awareness of the technology and showing its benefits to a wider market.
Ivet has 13+ years of experience in marketing for IT service providers including a number of cloud and hosting providers, storage companies, SaaS providers and software development companies. She holds a Masters degree in Marketing.
Away from work, Ivet is passionate about travelling around the world and exploring new cultures.
