OpenStack India Days 2016 were held on the 8th and 9th of July at Bangalore. The venue this time was the serene J N Tata Auditorium located inside the Indian Institute of Science campus. The program featured two full days of workshops, keynotes and breakout technical sessions.
We have been doing this event for four years now and have managed to grow the event significantly each year. This year we saw 300 people attend Day 1 and 420+ people attend Day 2. This was a growth of more than 75% from the previous year. We also saw a host of sponsors with Aptira hosting and sponsoring the event. Red Hat took the platinum sponsorship followed by OpenStack Foundation being the gold sponsors. Aptira, OPNFV, EMC and ZeroStack were the silver sponsors for the event.
This year was a monumental year for OpenStack India Days and the OpenStack India User Group. We had the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, Jonathan Bryce, and Mark Collier, the Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation visit the event and present a keynote on Day 1. Tom Fifield, the Community manager for OpenStack Foundation was also present at the event. The attendees had a great time engaging with the Foundation staff and after the keynote Jonathan, Mark and Tom were kind enough to stay and engage one on one with people despite having a hectic travel schedule. We also had the current PTL of the Cinder Project of OpenStack, Sean McGinnes attend the event. Sean also presented on both days of the event and it was a pleasure having him there. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Hyde Sugiyama from Red Hat for coming all the way from Japan.
Day 1 then had an Introduction to OpenStack and an introduction to Neutron workshop covered by Alok from Aptira. This was very well received as a lot of people got to get their hands dirty with OpenStack for the first time. A lot of questions were directed to the basics of OpenStack and Neutron.
Day 2 was divided into two tracks with Sponsor Keynotes and Breakout sessions in the first track and tech talks in the second. Tech track was very well attended and people who couldn’t find a seat filled the steps and queued out the doorways. Aptira presented a very popular talk on their GEMINI workload migration engine which lead to a very interactive session. It was clear users had a lot of interest dealing with the problem of moving VMs from legacy and other clouds to OpenStack.
I would like to thank all the sponsors for helping us put the event together and all the speakers for coming and sharing their knowledge. I would also like to thank the Foundation staff and other international speakers for traveling such a long way to attend the event. I would like to thank the organisers and volunteers of the OpenStack Indian user group for their tireless efforts that allow us to host big events like these on an annual basis. And lastly I would like to thank the community members and attendees for their support and helping us build one of the largest and most vibrant communities out there.
The series of successful OpenStack Days held in India over the last 5 years paves the way for an OpenStack summit to be held in India in 2018. India has one of the largest OpenStack communities anywhere and also has a large number of contributors. India is also slated to be one of the largest cloud markets in the coming years. I think the time is right for the OpenStack summit to come to India in 2018!!
Slides and photos from both days are available on the website. Videos will be uploaded shortly.
