The CloudStack European User group met on Thursday 11th for our quarterly meeting.
We had a packed room, with standing room only and attendees coming from as far afield as UK, France, Turkey and Germany.
Giles Sirett (CEO of ShapeBlue, Chairman of the Group, and author of this blog) opened the meeting with his usual roundup of all things Cloudstack:
Geoff Higginbottom (CTO of ShapeBlue & Apache CloudStack committer) gave a good overview of the features of the upcoming 4.1 release of Cloudstack:
Oliver Leech (Platform Architect at Tata Communications) demonstrated using puppet to deploy applications within a CloudStack environment. As an example application, he chose to use Cloudstack to deploy CloudStack which did leave some people in the room with spinning heads. Clever guy Oliver!
We then had a look at two different object storage technologies: Cloudian and Basho (although Stuart did keep reminding us that Basho are a “distributed systems company”). Although they’re technically competitors, Bob and Stuart did a good job of providing some solid thinking around the use-case’s for object storage and also how they both are investing in integrating their technologies with CloudStack.
Bob Defoe from Cloudian gave a good overview of the use of Cloudian for object based storage within CloudStack
Stuart Mcall from Basho talked about their RiakCS technology & community
A massive thank-you to the speakers and also to everybody who came along. Citrix very kindly gave us the room and ShapeBlue paid for the beer, pizza and my time to organise.
Everybody seemed to agree that that the next meeting should be a ½ day affair. I will look to schedule something mid June. Proposals for presentations can be emailed straight to me.
Keep an eye on the group on Linkedin for further information on the June meeting
Giles is CEO and founder of ShapeBlue and is responsible for overall company strategy, strategic relationships, finance and sales.
He is also a committer and PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project and Chairman of the European Cloudstack User Group, actively helping promote brand awareness of the technology.
Giles can regularly be heard speaking at events around the globe, delivering visionary talks on cloud computing adoption and more specifically on Cloudstack technologies.
Before ShapeBlue, Giles held C-Level technology positions for 15 years including founder and CEO of Octavia Information Systems, a leading UK Managed Service Provider.
Giles holds a BSc in Engineering Physics from Sheffield Hallam University. Outside work, Giles is married with two teenage children. He coaches children’s rugby, is a competitive masters swimmer and can regularly be seen crying when his beloved Tottenham Hotspur lose.
