In a progressive series of live demonstrations at the OpenStack Summit Boston, global IT leaders in the OpenStack ecosystem showed off powerful integrations between open source components and simultaneously deployed the CockroachDB cloud-native application on Kubernetes on top of OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation also launched a new version of the Project Navigator featuring new project mascots, where users can learn more about OpenStack capabilities and explore popular reference architectures.

Composable OpenStack Services: Ironic, Neutron and Cinder

Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation kicked off day two describing how OpenStack is composable, open infrastructure, meaning users can consume different pieces of OpenStack and combine them in useful ways with other open source technologies.

"We want to break the myth that OpenStack is a monolith and you must consume every piece of it, because in fact OpenStack is a collection of robust services including storage, networking and identity that provide great value on their own," Collier remarked. His keynote built upon last year's push to encourage and facilitate cross-community collaboration and integration among open infrastructure and application technologies.

Julia Kreger, developer advocate at IBM, demonstrated how to run the Ironic bare metal service along with Neutron networking service in a standalone context, which is an emerging use case. John Griffith, principal software engineer at NetApp, and Kendall Nelson, upstream developer advocate at the OpenStack Foundation, then demonstrated how to deploy the Cinder block storage service as an independent system using standard Docker tools in a matter of seconds. The demo showed how easy it is to leverage the maturity and vast number of backends provided by Cinder as a Kubernetes FlexVolume plugin.

One Platform to Manage VMs, Containers and Bare Metal

In addition to the emerging use case of standalone OpenStack services, many organizations find value in embracing the full suite of OpenStack services to run containers, virtual machines and bare metal together on a single network. Many OpenStack users are running container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Swarm on OpenStack today in virtual machines or directly on the Ironic bare metal service. They benefit from consistent infrastructure APIs and the largest number of enterprise storage and networking backends.

During the keynote, Jakub Pavlik, director of product engineering at Mirantis, demonstrated OpenStack's interoperability with Kubernetes and ability to serve as one platform for bare metal, VMs, and containers. Pavlik deployed a big data application using Spark, Kafka and Hadoop Distributed File System on a common OpenContrail-powered network.

Interoperability Challenge

In a live demonstration on Tuesday, 15 global IT leaders in the OpenStack ecosystem simultaneously deployed Kubernetes on OpenStack clouds and used the container management tool to concurrently deploy a distributed CockroachDB database and NFV applications.

The demonstration underscores OpenStack's strength in facilitating application portability across a diversity of OpenStack public and private clouds. Participants in the Interoperability Challenge were Canonical, Deutsche Telekom, EasyStack, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Platform9, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, T2Cloud, VEXXHOST, VMware, Wind River and ZTE.

"Last year, we challenged the OpenStack ecosystem to illustrate the value of common infrastructure by deploying the same unmodified application across multiple OpenStack environments in simultaneous demonstration at the Barcelona Summit," said Brad Topol, IBM Distinguished Engineer and OpenStack Foundation Board Member. "With today's Challenge, the OpenStack community has raised the bar substantially, showcasing interoperability with CockroachDB and Kubernetes. It shows both the community's commitment to interoperability and to embracing innovation that works across different OpenStack clouds."