I am very lucky to be a part of six great presentation submissions for the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. The OpenStack Foundation uses voting to help decide which of these talks, panels, and tutorials will be scheduled. I would appreciate your vote for my submissions! I’ll highlight them below. Using OpenStack Within An OpenStack Environment: This is a talk which will be similar to the tutorial Madhu, Brent, Ryan and I did at the OpenDaylight Summit, except it will be less tutorial focused and more presentation based.

If you’re a fan of networking, you are no doubt very excited by all of the recent excitement in the industry as of late. And there is no larger area of innovation in networking at the moment than Open Source networking. Two of the projects at the forefront of Open Source networking innovation are OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight. OpenStack Neutron is driving an API around networking for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds, and has been very successful at driving mindshare in this area.

Last week I was in New Orleans for LinuxCon. This was my first LinuxCon event, and it was pretty awesome. The event was co-located with a smattering of other Open Technology events as well: CloudOpen Linux Plumbers Conference Xen Project User Summit OpenDaylight Mini Summit Gluster Workshop 2013 ENEA North America Hacker Event UEFI Plugfest Linux Wireless Summit Linux Security Summit As you can see, that’s a lot of events to pack into a single week.

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.

Yesterday I hosted the first Minnesota OpenStack Meetup at the local Cisco office in Bloomington. It was an event I had been planning for about 2 months. I was very excited to meet with other Stackers in the Twin Cities. But the story starts much before this, I’m getting ahead of myself a bit here. Let me backup and tell you the full story of how the Minnesota OpenStack Meetup came to be.

Increasingly, I’ve been spending more and more time playing around with and utilizing OpenStack. If you’re looking for a highly configurable and quickly maturing cloud operating system, you can’t go wrong with OpenStack. One of the more interesting parts of OpenStack to a networking guy like me is Quantum. Quantum allows you to create rich topologies of virtual networks, encompassing as much or as little as you want by utilizing different plugins.