Voting for the OpenStack Summit is now open! To vote for OpenStack Presentations for the Summit in Hong Kong, use the link provided here. The presentations being voted on now are for the conference portion of the event. There are a lot of great presentations out there. I’d like to highlight the ones I am lucky enough to be a part of here. OpenStack Neutron Modular Layer 2 Plugin Deep Dive: This is a presentation myself and Robert Kukura from Red Hat are putting together.

So, it’s now official: I am a member of the OpenStack Neutron core team. I was voted onto the team last week and made official at the weekly Neutron meeting this past Monday. I will initially focus on the Open Source plugins (Open vSwitch, LinuxBridge) and the Modular Layer 2 (ML2) plugin. I wanted to thank Mark McClain for nominating me! The OpenStack Neutron core team is a great group of developers to work with, I’m very excited to continue contributing to OpenStack Neutron going forward!

Last week I attended the OpenStack Summit in Portland. This was my fifth OpenStack Summit, and a lot has changed since I attended my first OpenStack Summit in Santa Clara in 2011. Everything about this spring’s event was bigger: The crowds, the demos, the design summits. It was pretty awesome to see how far OpenStack has come, and even more exciting to see how much is left to be done. So many new ideas around virtual machine scheduling, orchestration, and automation were discussed this week.

As we get closer to the OpenStack Summit next week in Portland, I wanted to reflect back on the last 6 months of my community involvement with OpenStack. It was almost 6 months ago when I created the Minnesota OpenStack Meetup in an attempt to drive some discussions, education, collaboration, and community around OpenStack in the Twin Cities. Since that time, the Minnesota OpenStack Meetup group has grown to over 120 members (at 127 at the time of this writing).

Recently, I had a need to create a multi-node OpenStack Folsom deployment with Quantum. I needed to test out some deployment scenarios for a customer. To make things even more interesting, I wanted to test it out with the recent VXLAN changes in Open vSwitch which went upstream. I thought others may be interested in this as well. I’m planning to document this for Grizzly as well, but the steps should be mostly the same.