I was asked to present a workshop at the Spring 2014 Open Networking Users Group (ONUG)  this past Monday. The workshop was focused on OpenStack and OpenDaylight. My slides are embedded below. The room I was given held about 40 people, but it was overflowing with attendees and was standing room only. It was great to see all of the interest in these two technologies! I’m a firm believer in Open Source, so seeing this level of attendance is always a welcome sight.

I was very happy with the questions asked by attendees as I went over my material. There is a healthy interest by the enterprise in deploying OpenStack and finding a way to scale their networking into a cloud environment. One very interesting data point, which should be no surprise, is the fact enterprise customers have requirements and use cases which are vastly different from the typical service provider users of OpenStack today. Since the OpenStack Summit is next week, I look forward to spending some time talking with both SP and enterprise deployers next week to see how we can provide a robust IaaS platform for both sets of use cases.

Another interesting discussion point was around the work being done in the community around Group Based Policy and OpFlex. Interest in learning more about both technologies was very high, and a good number of questions were asked. Both GBP and OpFlex are being worked in the open as part of both OpenStack (GBP) and OpenDaylight (GBP and OpFlex). OpFlex was recently accepted as an incubated project into OpenDaylight, and work is ramping up. GBP has been incubated in ODL since January. And on the Neutron side, GBP has been actively developed since the Hong Kong Summit last fall. Expect big things from both projects in the coming months.

ONUG was a great event. Open Networking is clearly the future, and Open Source projects including OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight are a huge part of this future. I look forward to attending and presenting at future ONUG events!