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!
