Kiratech @ Openstack Summit in Tokyo! Day 2 Overview

Welcome back on Kiratech blog! Today we’ll resume day 2 Keynote @ Openstack summit in Tokyo.

It started with Marc Collier, Openstack foundation Chief Operating officer, on the stage.

He introduced the core value of Openstack Summit: the fact of meeting people and learning why they are enthusiastic about Openstack, what they are learning with it and so on..

Then he started talking about Liberty, the 12th release of Openstack; with it Openstack knew a new way of organising and talking about the structure of its different projects.

Through Liberty, they have tried to help users to understand better the OS world. He introduced so the Openstack eco-system, starting from the core services that we can find in every OS cloud. Outside of these there are many different options that bring innovation into Openstack community.

He went then through the most active project in the circle: Neutron. There are a lot of investments from a lot of companies and passion and time from many different developers that bring forward this project.

Looking at results: considering users survey data of 2014 around the Openstack clouds in production, the 68% of them were running on Neutron. Considering then 2015 data we can see that now the 89% of clouds in production are running on Neutron. All of this is due to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of developers.

Then he considered “why is networking so hard right now?”, and he answered by saying that if you think at the fundamentals of cloud – computer, storage and networking – the first two matured so fast, while the third is pretty much complicated and very difficult to automate. Now it’s time to do this, to develop it in particular through the Software Defined Networking.

If you look at the SDN market, it’s pretty amazing to see that it’s growing twice as fast as server virtualization. It is said that SDN market is going to be a 10 billions $ market by 2018.

Another market where there is a lot of investments is called NFV (Network functions Virtualization). This one in particular is completely changing the way Telco handle traffic and data. Also the carriers have a big quantity of proprietary hardware and the datacentre contains packets of data. They need a huge quantity of time and money to make this transition. When we hear that Software is eating the world, this is completely true in Telco market and in always more industries. Data from a recent analysis describe that the reason why people are embracing software: when Telco has embraced NFV they were able to reduce their capital expenditure by 68% and operating expenses by 67%. And, more important, the timeline to introduce a new service can be reduced from 15 months to 6 months. Openstack is a core part of this solution.

Looking at the entire networking industry, the top 5 largest companies in the world are embedded on Openstack. They are working on:

• Pluggings for Neutron
• NFV solutions

And Openstack is a default component of this big platform. Also all other Networking companies are working on a strategy to get to market for software networking and NFV based on Openstack.

So Openstack is a great integration engine for new technologies in addressing new markets.

Looking at technologies that are emerging over the next 10 years, Openstack want to be a platform that bring all the markets, all the members of data centre under one common roof, under one API.

Then Mark underlined some areas of Neutron where there have been big improvements driven by users’ requirements:

1. RBAC (Role-based access control): in the area of networking the security is very important, so big improvements have been done here.
2. IPAM (Pluggable IP Address Management): this feature is about allowing enterprises to plug demand.
3. QUALITY OF SERVICES APIs

To talk more about Neutron he invited on the scene Kyle Mestery, Distinguished Engineer @ IBM. Kyle started talking a little bit about Quantum History (the old name of Neutron). We all know that Openstack has been launched in 2010. Quantum was born in 2011 with the objective to create a common Openstack Networking API. The project was developed and was renamed Neutron, and the main goal was to create a unified API, so a logical abstraction; developers wanted Neutron to be a small core, and they wanted it to be pluggable. This allowed them to have a growing and extensible eco-system. Looking at Neutron abstractions, they are very powerful because they let you build some complex logical structure overlapping IP addresses, with multiple routers. The next things they looked at were services, in particular they focalised on which type of networking services they could have; so they started with load balancing as a service, virtual power network as a service, firewall as a service. He also alluded to new projects like 2 gateways, service function chaining (SFC) and BGP – MPL VPN. He mentioned also Octavia, the reference implementation for the V2 LBaaS API.

After this he started making an industry overview: new solutions like bare metal, containers and virtual machines have a common factor that ties them together: Networking. Then he spent some time on LIBNetwork, a networking abstraction that Docker team has been working on, composed by network Sandbox, EndPoints and Networks. Its structure is very similar to Neutron’s one. He then introduced Project Kuryr that, he said, wants to be the integration point between Network and Neutron.

Mark took the stage in order to introduce some Neutron case studies that have deployed it in different ways.

The first is Toshio Nishiyama, Senior Vice President @NTT Resonant. NTT Resonant is the 3^rd largest web portal in Japan, the company has 18 years old and it operates also websites for corporations. They have 1 billion page views per month and the portal is growing every day more. He introduced the 3 main reasons why they introduced Openstack:

1. Ungent need to accelerate the business operations (reduce the period between service design to release)
2. Need for costs reduction (Opex)
3. Need of accumulation of technology and support by NTT Group

They introduced Openstack in only six months. Looking at introduction design and policies, they had 3 fundamental points:

• Selection of components in order to introduce Openstackin a short period of time ensuring stability
• Integration with existing operational tools and rules (ex. They used Puppet in order to manage and install Openstack)
• Taking up a challenge for the next development in collaboration with NTT R&D

The results they had after introducing Openstack were:

1. Reduction of delivering & deployement time
2. Flexibility to response to requests from service development teams
3. Costs reduction

For the future they plan to:

• Develop a system that will support ongoing updating
• Introduce SDN/NFV
• Introduce Ceph for develop distributed storage systems
• Create a world where multiple datacenters can be treated as a single data center.

After Toshio was the moment of Rackspace; it started a video that showed the key points of Openstack: commitment, innovation, expertise, a common vision, ease of use, ease of deploy ease of manage. Then went on the stage Scott Crenshow, Senior Vice president – strategy and product, and Adrian Otto, Distinguished Architect at Rackspace, that talked about what their company is doing, also in collaboration with Intel, regarding the Openstack innovation center. The most transformative aspect of containers are containers as a service. With their instant-on native container, it allows to run apps on VMsor on Bare metal, all with zero infrastructure: they call this solution “Carina by Rackspace”. He made also a Demo in order to demonstrate that with Carina containers adoption will become more simple, and it proved that Rackspace can take containers to a cloud scale.

They announced that in the future Rackspace will deliver also Private cloud as a Service.

Then Mark welcomed on the scene Kong Won Lee, senior vice president of R&D @ SK Telecom, and Head of Network IT @ Convergence Lab. SK Telecom, the 1^st service provider in Korea with 50% of market share, has always been at the forefront in developing and commercialising the most innovative wireless technologies. Now they are going to develop the next mobile network generation called 5G Network. This will be 100 – 1.00 times more speed then the actual 4G Network and it will be used for new richer emerging media called “The internet of things”. The technology that allows this is called Virtual Network Slicing and has 3 fundamental features: it’s virtualised, programmable, flexible. They call this “All IT Network Infrastructure” and they choose Openstack, so an open source technology, as their infrastructure solution because of it: solid tracked record, growing community, great eco-system.

Then Mark introduced another user of Openstack, Rakuten, and he called on the stage Neal Sato, Executive Officer, and Kentaro Sasaki, Technical Lead.

This is a Tokyo based company and it provides e-commerce and internet business services (like financial services and Telco services). The company has approximatively 1 hundred million customers and transactions for 10 trillions JPY.

In order to support all these services they have been providing a private cloud solution to internal customers. They have adopted this year the Openstack setup and the aspect they appreciate the most is contribution: the fact of being part of this opensource project.

After this Mark introduced Makato Hasegowa, cloud Architect and Lead of System Admin Team @ Cyber Agent. This company provides services like online games, online communities and Ad-Tech. He explained that they began the Ad-Tech services on their private Openstack cloud and he talked about their future plans with OS.

Then it was introduced a video about the IBM companies that are involved with Openstack (like Blue Box), and then Angel Luiz Diaz, VP Cloud Architecture & Technology @ IBM and Jesse Proudman, CTO @ Blue Box went on the scene. IBM has always been involved in all technological changes; and now they are involved in cloud technology and in the opensource changements. IBM and Openstack work together to innovate and to create an infrastructure as a service platform in the opensource: compute storage and Network. They announced just yesterday the general availability of Blue Box local: it brings all the same capabilities of Blue Box dedicated into the local datacenter.

After this the Keynote ended. Thanks for reading us! If you want to see the Keynote day 2 video click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iITZBYUerpA