OpenStack is the most fast progressing Cloud technology stack at the moment. It has 10 releases for 5 years and at the moment it is defacto the standard in Infrastructure as a Service cloud technology. Currently OpenStack has more than 1500 active code contributors (comiters). The project is supported by some of the largest and well known companies and organizations from any sector of the ICT business. Among the names are operators such as AT&T, vendors such as Intel, Cisco, HP, Juniper networks, cloud providers such as RackSpace and research organizations as NASA and CERN.
In Bulgaria there is a healthy meetup driven OpenStack community that is able to produce one or two events per year. Having meetups and some community events is great but having a dedicated bootcamp training is much better. The closest I was able to find were done by Mirantis and were organized in Romania and Greece. There was no such one in Bulgaria which is somehow unfair :)
Thus my main motivation for preparing this training is to achieve a wider adoption of Cloud and more precisely OpenStack technologies in Bulgaria. Hopefully this in long term will grow some more business to Bulgarian IT companies and will make the life our IT gurus a bit more interesting :) To be honest the words about are true but actually my motivation was a bit different and indeed some more selfish. I was aiming to put together and organize my own knowledge, to spent some good time with friends and quality people in discussing OpenStack and last but not least to convince my wife and frinds that from such a trainings I can make enough money to buy a kayak :)
Considering OpenStack I personally follow the project from about two years. My experience is mostly in designing public SAAS based service that is so demanding that requires its own IAAS based cloud. Prior OpenStack and in parallel with it I also tried SmartOS (OpenSolaris/Ilmus Joyent driven hypervisor which I would say has a number of advantages compared to OpenStack and anything Linux based in terms of working with containers instead of a fully blown instances). I passed through all design decisions and process related to how to lay down compute, various kinds of storage, networking, image considerations, APIs and more importantly I figured out how to put them together in a setup that match the scale an OpenStack would achieve in a small country such as Bulgaria. I also have some experience in designing an orchestration engines around the cloud able to fulfill not only the provisioning of the cloud service but also custom image operations and the whole lifecycle around the SAAS (integration with CRM systems, ticketing portals, 3th party inventory systems, billing etc).
As a matter of fact I also layed down an OpenStack infrastructure and network setup in NBU (New Bulgarian University) sufficient for backing up our courses related to Cloud and SDN networking.
To come back to the course and its content I aim to introduce the participants to IAAS technologies, networking and key design decisions using OpenStack as a background platform.
The course is half-day theory and half-day laboratory exercises. Workshop atmosphere is welcome. Beer drinking around lunch and afterwords is even more welcome.
The theoretical part will learn you what on OpenStack architecture, key components, rational behind them and more importantly the rational in designing and sizing an OpenStack deployments.
The lab hands on exercises will learn you how to install and configure multi-node OpenStack setup with Neutron Networking and VxLAN networking. If we have time we will also add volume storage service based on GlusterFs distributed file system.
Once we reach a point with a stable setup we will continue with an overview of the traditional Horizon OpenStack featureset and various component CLI options. We will learn how to import, convert and export images.
Then we will fulfill an end to end OpenStack provisioning process including tenants & users creation, provisioning of instances and volumes, addition of virtual networking, snapshoting and volume backup in OpenStack object storage.
Finally will do a deep dive in Neutron networking and will introduce you to network namespaces, virtual networks, routers, OpenVSwitch and how can you troubleshoot and monitor all that. If we have time I will also expose you to extra stuff like Juniper OpenContrail and Cisco ACI that actually (I would say almost replace) most traditional Neutron networking and add quite a lot of flexibility and business agility to it.
Obviously for a day I won’t be able to cover all the stuff covered by organized training companies such as Mirantis but I am sure I will be able to put you on solid ground and then you will be able to progress further on your own!
Upon successful completion of the course attendees will not only receive a certificate from ESI CEE but also will be able to investigate OpenStack and cloud computing at least on the level of Dilbert and his top executives :)
The course will be hosted at our lovely host ESI center.
For more information about exact dates, timing and pricing please contact hristina (at) esicenter (dot) bg.