oVirt recently had a strong presence at FOSDEM 2013, 2nd-3rd of February in Brussels. The amount of people attending FOSDEM has been estimated in 5000+ "geeks" from all over the world and the exposure that the oVirt project had there has been outstanding.
The oVirt sessions presented at the conference were:
oVirt Live Storage Migration - Under the Hood (Federico Simoncelli)
oVirt introduction (Doron Fediuck)
oVirt SLA - MoM as host level enforcement agent (Doron Fediuck)
oVirt and GlusterFS integration (Doron Fediuck)
Supporting and Using EC2/CIMI on top of Cloud Environments (Oved Ourfalli)
Using Foreman from the oVirt-engine Administrator UI (Oved Ourfalli)
Here you are some photos of the event.
(Please feel free to contribute sending additional pictures or links to other albums)
Thanks to Doron, Michal, Dave, Leslie, Frederic and James an oVirt stand was present at the event with a live demo that left many people impressed.
The stream of people interested in the project was never ending also when the session were in place. The questions were ranging from simple curiosities on the features oVirt is providing to the very technical ones, many people were shocked of never having heard of such a complete project. This really means that we should get more involved into spreading the word out on a more daily basis.
Also the integration with GlusterFS and our close cooperation was driving many questions. We received a suggestion about considering Lustre as an addition. In this area the questions were much more technical and the GlusterFS stand on our right side helped a lot.
Some of the attendees were a little bit confused about the differentiation between oVirt and openstack (this is recurring quite often lately). I think that in the future events we should try to point out more explicitly during our sessions the two different scopes and the eventual interoperability of the two solutions.
The feedback about the oVirt session has been really positive proving the general interest towards our project and features, here's an extract of few relevant tweets:
Managed to squeeze into two places for the ovirt intro talk. Roo. Is packed and hot like hell #fosdem - Link
Storage live migration in oVirt @ FOSDEM. Would #openstack cinder be able to do same someday? pic.twitter.com/SDoflJkN - Link
Intro to #oVirt session. Packed house! #fosdem http://pic.twitter.com/Y5Uwq5hh - Link
Learning about oVirt's GlusterFS integration; looking forward to upcoming features, too #Fosdem - Link
Despite the great success there are still few things that oVirt can improve. Here are several suggestions aggregated from multiple feedbacks:
the oVirt introduction should be the first presentation as it gives a backgroud that helps the listeners to understand the other sessions
stickers might not suffice anymore as swags, we should try to add something else (mugs, keychains, or something more original)
oVirt logo, most open projects have an animal in their logo (mozilla) or a relevant object (foreman), some other have a very distinguishable shape (fedora, openstack). A redesign of the logo might help the community to relate and connect better to the project
distribution support, many people were asking for debian/ubuntu support, they're not ready to switch to fedora only to try oVirt. The live usb image is a good start but nonetheless users want to use their preferred distribution as platform for oVirt
Based on the amount of exposure oVirt got this year in FOSDEM, we are looking forward to do our best to have a meaningful presence next year as well. The natural evolution is to present a session in the main track to gain even more attention.
The general audience of the conference are "geeks" and "hackers" (as advertised by the FOSDEM website), curious attendees from all over the Europe (the event is free), developers and some contributor. In general the event is more much oriented to university students rather than business companies, and you can definitely feel the hackfest spirit all around the campus.
This is a great place for oVirt to be, the people are open minded and ready to make their own opinion based on the features delivered rather than news articles.
A proof that FOSDEM is the place to be for oVirt, we want to mention some similar (and related) sessions in the Virtualization and Cloud room that we attended:
QEMU USB status report 2012 (Hans de Goede)
Vtrill: Rbridges for Virtual Networking (Renzo Davoli)
Apache CloudStack features and tools (Sebastien Goasguen)
Apache Deltacloud API v1.0 (Michal Fojtik)
Orchestrating complex deployments on OpenStack using Heat (Tomas Sedovic)
Measuring OpenStack: the Ceilometer Project (Nick Barcet, Eoghan Glynn, Julien Danjou)
A co-located event "Build a Cloud Day" in Ghent also provided really interesting sessions:
Ceph integration (Wido Den Hollander)
Supporting and Using EC2/CIMI on top of Cloud Environments (Oved Ourfalli)
CloudStack at Spotify (Noa Resare)
We want to thank all the people involved into making this event a great success for oVirt, we got much needed support from Dave Neary, Leslie Hawthorn, Frederic Hornain (brought screens in the rain and snow), James Read (brought 2 laptops all the way from Farnborough in his baggage), Fedora representatives who drove
all the way from Brno (14 hours) and took back the heavy stand stuff.
Thank you all and see you soon at the next event!