Blog

23/01/2013 - Rocketseed moves virtual environment to Aptira

A nice write up today in Technology Decisions on our awesome customer Rocketseed moving their services to Aptira and what it saves them in effort and cost.

http://technologydecisions.com.au/content/cloud-and-virtualisation/case-study/rocketseed-moves-virtual-environment-to-australian-based-hosting-1043273979

Cheers
Tristan

15/12/2012 - OpenStack India Day

On the 15th of December OpenStack India meetup group held a full day event at Bangalore. The event had over 120 attendees and speakers from companies such as Aptira, Dell, HP, Canonical, Ericsson etc. Aptira was one of the main sponsors of the event. You can read about it on the OpenStack blog by Atul Jha.

22/11/2012 - Australian OpenStack Meetup - Sydney Melbourne Brisbane

Earlier this week we held what may be the first multi city video linked OpenStack User Group meetup. Tristan has blogged about it up on openstack.org!

30/10/2012 - Our CEO featured in Technology Spectator

Our CEO Tristan Goode has had an article featured in the online publication Technology Spectator and indeed a thought provoking piece it is. The rest of the Aptira family are quite proud that our leader is being recognised and published as a technology thought leader and Cloud Computing expert. 

Please follow the link :

http://www.technologyspectator.com.au/argument-active-cloud-management

Luke Collins
Sales Director

11/10/2012 - Protecting OpenStack

I believe a key role of the OpenStack Foundation is to protect the brand that is OpenStack. I also believe that training is of key importance to advancing OpenStack.

Recently Rackspace advertised offering "Rackspace Certified Training for OpenStack". In some media this was interpreted as certified OpenStack training, it was tweeted by Rackspace staff as "OpenStack Certified Technician", and it was emailed to all summit attendees that Rackspace could "accelerate your career by becoming one of the first Certified OpenStack technicians".

Lets be clear here. Rackspace DO NOT have any sort of official certification for OpenStack, from OpenStack. They are tying the words Certified and OpenStack together in PR, and quite frankly, it's makes things grey and not black and white as it should be.

The main problems I see:

1. The timing is unfortunate because there is no clear Board/Foundation policy as yet.
2. I believe it is the Foundation’s right to determine what is certified and what is not under the terms of the Foundation’s trademarks.
3. This type of activity is clearly open to abuse. Any operator regardless of size, integrity or professionalism could adopt a similar approach. Therefore it needs to be dealt with urgently.

Leaving Rackspace’s actions aside, I made a suggestion to the Foundation mailing list and Board mailing list for a certification process for training materials and deliverables that they be offered to an OpenStack community sourced committee for review and approval. If this proposal is accepted then it would be nice to see Rackspace offer up their course materials for this review, and that this might form a baseline for establishing the certification benchmark.

If certified qualifications are not valued in the USA, courses that present an official certification are highly valued in Australia, Asia and Europe as clear markers of achievement. Integrity of that certification is key.

If we cannot gather enough support to resist such opportunistic behaviour then we (as a community) risk letting this run away on us. The Foundation needs to formulate a considered and effective response on this very important topic. Anything else risks tarnishing OpenStack.

Cheers
Tristan Goode
CEO Aptira

10/10/2012 - Aptira Featured in the Rust Report

I am very pleased to announce that Aptira is once again being recognized as a thought leader in the Managed Services and OpenStack community. We have been featured in the Rust Report, and our CEO Tristan Goode was asked about our business and his thoughts regarding the marketplace in general. 

It was a good opportunity for Aptira to get some press around the leaps and bounds that OpenStack is making in the region and the part we are playing in making that come to fruition.

Aptira is getting the attention it deserves as a disruptive technology provider and those that matter are starting to take notice, which is good because we are out to make as much noise in the marketplace as possible.

The featured article can be be found here at the Rust Report interview with Aptira.

Luke Collins
Sales Director

27/09/2012 - Australian OpenStack User Group meetup - Sydney

Greetings everyone,

The latest news from team Aptira is our hosting of the Sydney event for the Australian OpenStack user group last night. It was a fantastic night in which Aptira provided a venue for OzStackers from Sydney to get together, drink beer and learn from our resident technical masters about OpenStack.

Most importantly of all it is where community is built over a few beers and many laughs. This is the essence of what Aptira is all about, sharing knowledge and helping as much as possible. There was also solid representation from enterprise organisations with us as well on the night from such diverse industries such as managed services, video renders and financial data mining organisations all looking to become involved and contribute to the OpenStack project. Interestingly they are all looking to deploy OpenStack in their production environments in the not too distant future.

This proves not only that the community is growing but that big business is starting to take notice of the maturity of OpenStack as a platform that can potentially provide huge value and flexibility in their infrastructure environments.

The news from all of our friends in other OpenStack cells across the country who held similar events in the other capital cities was just as promising, that an inclusive and increasingly business focused community is growing and growing quickly.

There were many brilliant technical discussions that everyone learned from and the big buzz is definitely around the increased capabilities of the Quantum component of the new “Folsom” version of OpenStack that is slated for release on the 27th of September. This promises to give network virtualisation a huge boost in functionality and the community waits with baited breath to see it in full flight.

Ultimately the night was in aid of celebrating the fact that the Foundation can now give a solid direction to the project through the board and it can develop in a much more coherent and focused way. It is also to support the people around the world that have tirelessly given their time and expertise in their fields to make the project what it is. People such as our own CEO, Tristan Goode, that now sits on the Foundation Board and gives his time to help make the project what it is today and he is one of many dedicated individuals from users and vendors alike.

Most importantly though, the night was FUN! All tiers of the IT industry were represented from end users to resellers and distributors and celebrating the OpenStack foundations inception and what that means for users all around the world. We got some great feedback about what the user groups would like to see and this helps us to be able to help the community and deliver that to the OpenStack users which we will be doing over the next few months with several events planned for November and December, so watch this space !

Luke Collins
Sales Director 

25/09/2012 - Indian OpenStack User Group meetups - Chennai and Bangalore

Indian OpenStack User group - Chennai Meetup

The Indian OpenStack User group’s First Chennai meetup was held on the 19^th September 2012 at the Malles Manotta hotel in T. Nagar in Chennai. We saw a decent turnout of 31 people at the event. The even started off with Yogesh from CSS Corp talking about OpenStack and its various components. This also led to a very interesting Q&A session about the OpenStack eco system and cloud computing in general. Next a demo of an OpenStack setup was given by Johnson and Yogesh from CSS Corp. This was very interesting and a lot of a first time users got to see the working of the OpenStack solution first hand. Atul from CSS Corp then spoke about the OpenStack foundation and gave us a brief overview of the Foundation and its layout. Kavit from Aptira then spoke briefly on the impact of OpenStack on SMEs and the Hosting community in general. After the talk, delicious lunch was provided and the users continued to chat and network. This was a successful first meetup in Chennai and we hope there are many more to come here after.

Indian OpenStack User group - Bangalore Meetup

The Bangalore chapter of the Indian OpenStack User Group held their 4^th meetup on the 22^nd of September at JP Nagar. The venue was provided by Ahimanikya Satapathy and 20 users attended the meetup. Deepak Garg of Citrix provided a demo and live installation of Devstack and discusses the various developments happening in the world of OpenStack. Kavit Munshi of Aptira gave a talk on the OpenStack foundation and the future direction of OpenStack. There was networking between the users over pizza and drinks. The community also discussed what they wanted to see happening in the future OpenStack meetups. The organisers from the various cities have also decided to collaborate a bit more with the other cities and the users to organise more focused meetups.

Kavit Munshi
CTO 

03/09/2012 - Greetings from Luke, and Tristan sits on the OpenStack Foundation Board

Greetings everyone, my name is Luke Collins and I am the most recent addition to the Aptira team. I am both honoured and excited to join Aptira and to be a part of a company at the forefront of the OpenStack project. I have been involved with several open source technologies over the years as they took flight and became enterprise ready and supported platforms, none nearly as fast as OpenStack has made that transition. My role within Aptira centres on sales and marketing and I am planning to make a lot of noise in the channel over the next 6 to 12 months as Aptira consolidates its place as a thought leader in the enterprise open source space. I look forward to working with all of you and blogging up a storm in the near future.

But enough about me.... 

Tristan sits on the OpenStack Board of Directors

I would like to congratulate our CEO Tristan, who was voted to the OpenStack Board of Directors. Our thanks go out to all our customers and associates that joined the Foundation and voted for Tristan. Tristan has just returned from San Diego where last Tuesday he sat at the first meeting of the Board of Directors. Aptira is very proud to see Tristan on the Board and we trust he will be as valued on the OpenStack board as he is within the Australian OpenStack community.

Luke Collins

Sales Director
Aptira

27/08/2012 - All the latest news from Aptira

New to Team Aptira

The biggest news at Aptira this week is we have some new crew on the team! I welcome on board Sina Sadeghi our Cloud Engineer. Sina comes to us with a wealth of OpenStack production experience on NeCTAR’s world leading deployment and he’ll be pulling our OpenStack Public Cloud out of beta in the coming weeks, as well as heading our Piston Enterprise OpenStack engineering and support team. I also welcome on board Luke Collins as Sales Director. Luke is charged with business development for Aptira, and as such will be charged with growing our business right across our product range, from our traditional hosting products, right through our OpenStack cloud deployment and consulting business, establishing vendor relationships, and to establishing Piston Enterprise OpenStack as the defacto private cloud operating system for SMB and enterprise.

Airframe Launch

Another big event this week was the launch of Airframe by Piston Cloud. As Piston Cloud partners this is great news for Aptira. Airframe is all of OpenStack, easily installed and free of charge. You will be up and running with a production ready OpenStack private cloud, and, coming from Piston Cloud you can be sure it’s solid and secure! Aptira will be handling local support for Airframe, a 30 day support package is available offering professional assistance beyond the Airframe Aid forum, and is ideal for people who may be using an uncertified hardware configuration or who are considering upgrading to Piston Enterprise OpenStack. To get Airframe, got to https://airframe.pistoncloud.com/ and Sign Up and a download link will be sent to you on September 4.

Beijing APAC OpenStack event report

It’s been a big couple of weeks for Aptira. The weekend before last I was in Beijing for the OpenStack APAC conference, it was officially the biggest OpenStack event yet! This is half the main room.

Along with Tom Fifield from NeCTAR, it was a pleasure to join a discussion panel with representatives of the OpenStack User Groups from China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the USA.

We also had some great dinners with many of the attendees, everyone had a great time. Boris from Mirantis has written a great account of his visit and experiences which we all shared at http://www.mirantis.com/blog/apac-openstack-conference-update/

Cheng from COSUG has blogged the event at openstack.org, uploaded a bunch of photos to Flikr, and he links to the slides as well. I’m told there will be videos posted at some stage. https://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/08/openstack-won-unprecedented-popularity-in-asiapacific/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/85376316@N02/sets/72157631160199442/

Hobart Puppet and Chef Code Dojo

Last Friday I went to Hobart for the first OpenStack Code Dojo. Not having been in a code dojo before I was unsure of what to expect, but my fears of looking like a n00b due to my elementary Python skills were soon cast away. The morning started off with Nan Liu and Matt Ray being beamed in from PuppetLabs and Opscode respectively to give us all a run down on where Puppet and Chef is at. Photos are at http://aosug.openstack.org.au/photos/10338012/#151469192

Then we went for a great lunch at the Ball and Chain Grill in Salamanca Markets. http://aosug.openstack.org.au/photos/10338012/#151469622

The afternoon was spent on the dojos, Led by Chef Dojo Steve Androulakis, we took a dive into Chef by stepping through what needs to be done to deploy a VM entirely with Chef from scratch. Following this, Puppet Dojos Russell Sim and Clint Walsh then took us through the same steps with Puppet. The goal was to spin up 100 VMs to produce a random number! http://aosug.openstack.org.au/photos/10338012/#151469792

Naturally afterwards we met at the Birdcage Bar at the Wrest Point Casino for a post event beer.

The Dojo is a great fun event and the Hobart day was a trial run for many more to follow, there's another big 2 day one on in Melbourne on September 24 and 25, which is unfortunately already sold out with 35 attendees and 20 on the wait list but I assure you there will be MOAR in Melbourne and all around the country! It's great to be working with NeCTAR and ANDS on these events that benefit all of us. Thanks to David Flanders at ANDS for his efforts getting ANDS, NeCTAR, AOSUG and the Research institutions around the country together.

Check http://nectar-ands.eventbrite.com/ for details of upcoming events, and I will be cross posting the Eventbrite events at http://aosug.openstack.org.au.

PyCon Australia in Hobart

Last weekend I attended PyCon, and it was great to meet so many talented Python enthusiasts and check out what's what in the Python world. With my "Hello World" Python experience a lot of content was way over my head, but there was much of it that was comprehendible and I can count myself as  Python fan now, but still a long way from contributing to the OpenStack code base, unless someone wants Hello World on a welcome screen for Horizon.

Aptira and OpenStack in the News

During the week the good folks at OpenStack put out a global great press release about OpenStack in Australia, mentioning us, and our friends at Haylix and NeCTAR, you can read it at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/8/prweb9824216.htm

OpenStack Mini-Conf announced for Linux Conf in January!

We've had an OpenStack Mini-Conf confirmed for Linux.conf.au in late January. This will be a big event at a big event and I know many people have submitted OpenStack oriented props to Linux.conf.au so we will have an outstanding line up. I'm arranging an information web site for the mini-conf where we'll be taking proposals for talks, workshops and the like. Some of the already submitted props for the main conference tracks will make it to the main event, and details of those that dont will be considered for the Mini-conf. I'd like to put together a committee from our User Group to evaluate and nominate the submissions, so please contact me if you'd like to be part of the committee. I'm not yet sure of sponsorship and such and how that works but will post details on the mini-conf site when it goes live. Because of the significance of Linux Conf, we will have support from the OpenStack Foundation to hold this event.

Cheers
Tristan Goode
Chief Executive Officer
Aptira