CENGN attended the OpenStack 2017 Summit this past week from May 8^th– 11^th, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston!

The OpenStack Summit is an opportunity for members of the open source community to meet, share ideas, and collaborate with one another on a bi-annual basis. This enormous networking event focused on teaching attendees about the open technology infrastructure stack, including OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, Ceph, OVS, OpenContrail, and OPNFV. The guest list featured Cloud architects and operators, CIO and IT decision-makers, app and upstream developers from organizations across the globe.

The event also allowed attendants to get familiar with OpenStack Academy, where 90 minute workshops were held for Operators and Cloud App developers. Training sessions were held for new contributors, and self-paced labs were conducted for cloud app development. One-day boot camps were also provided, as well as preparation for those looking to take the Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam. COA is a certification of OpenStack User Fundamentals that attendants had the option of completing during their time at the Summit in Boston.

Featured speakers at the OpenStack 2017 Summit included Brian Stevens, Vice President of Cloud Platforms at Google, Suneet Nandwani, Senior Director of Cloud Infrastructure and Platforms at eBay, and Jacob Rosenberg, Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Bloomberg. CENGN’s Ritch Dusome, President and CEO, attended the summit and spoke on Wednesday in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Smart Cities panel alongside member organizations Juniper Networks and Nokia. Ritch spoke about the infrastructures required to support Smart Cities, and the benefits of creating an open, standard structure to connect all city systems. Ritch also spoke about Ontario’s cloud infrastructure expansion project which warranted funding from the Ontario government to provide opportunities for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) to demonstrate their innovations. Check out the video below to watch the panel:

CENGN also sent its tech team and brought along three SMEs to learn and contribute to the open infrastructure forum, and to participate in the OpenStack training sessions. Our three SME companions, BreqWatr, CloudOps and Inocybe Technologies, joined us at our booth at the OpenStack Summit and were happy to show off their innovative solutions to the OpenStack community!

BreqWatr is a Canadian SME providing cloud hardware and software infrastructure, as well as cloud solutions for a variety of professional clientele. We are eager to continue fostering our relationships with Canadian SMEs like BreqWatr to see where our collaborations can take us!

Inocybe Technologies is a partner of CENGN that provides turnkey solutions for today’s Networking and IT challenges, making it open, easy and inexpensive to own and operate shared infrastructures. CENGN collaborated on a Smart Cities project with Inocybe and Juniper Networks to build an SDN/NFV-driven infrastructure and portal for the management of a unique Smart Community. This collaboration demonstrates the importance of inter-connectivity between different ICT organizations to continue innovating the industry. At last year’s CENGN Summit, Inocybe Technologies’ CEO, Mathieu Lemay, spoke about the future of IoT and next generation networking (NGN) in his presentation, The Value of CENGN and the Future of Smart Infrastructure, further representing the collaborative relationship that CENGN maintains with our members and partners.

CloudOps is an organization based in Montreal who recently partnered with CENGN and Wind River on a new project. The new project will help CloudOps evolve Cloud MC’s new features, especially regarding VNF management. If you’re interested in reading more about this new project, click here. CloudOps’ Ian Rae, CEO, also spoke as a panel member at last year’s CENGN summit about Innovation Across Canada, and held the Ottawa OpenStack MeetUp at CENGN this past March. The next Ottawa OpenStack MeetUp is scheduled for May 31st at CENGN! We take pride in expanding our relationships with different members, as well as our innovative SMEs who contribute greatly to collaborative CENGN projects and events like our MeetUps. 

As part of the 2017 OpenStack Summit Forum, attendants were able to participate in critical conversations during project-specific sessions, cross-project sessions, and community discussions. During these conversations, participants were welcomed to discuss feedback on previous versions of OpenStack and Ocata to start drawing Queen’s requirements. We were so excited to share our voice with other members of the OpenStack community to ameliorate the next version of the software. It was amazing getting to see different ICT industry competitors setting aside their differences to share ideas and innovations.

CENGN is a consortium of its members and partners, focused on sharing ideas, research and technology to help expedite the commercialization of ICT products and services. Events like OpenStack Summit are vital to our mission of connecting industry leaders, and creating an open technology environment that propels Canada’s place as a leader in the world’s ICT industry.

A big thanks goes out to OpenStack for hosting another spectacular event, and a shout out to all the Canadian SMEs who attended the event with us!

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

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