Ceph Day London 2018 Recap

Some days since the Ceph and CloudStack Day in London last month now. It was a great event, great presentations and a lot of networking with the local community.

You can find my presentation on "Email Storage with Ceph" online as also the break slides with some impressions from some of the last few Ceph events.

Some of the other presentations can be found here and some pictures from the day in this album.

Get ready for Ceph Day London 2018

Next week the combined Ceph and Cloudstack Day will be hosted in London (2018-04-19). The agenda is online, get ready and your ticket to a great event!

I will speak about our Email at Ceph project (librmb). See you all in London!

Cephalocon APAC ... is comming

Two weeks till Cephalocon APAC 2018 in Beijing (22-23th March), the first Ceph-only conference. Finally! Two full days of talks and speaker from the world wide Ceph Community. The agenda is available since a few days now.

I will speak about "Email Storage with Ceph" on the first day. Looking forward to meet the developers and community members again and this time without being distracted by another host conference. See you in Beijing!

OpenStack Summit Vancouver '18: Vote for Speakers

The next OpenStack Summit takes place again in Vancouver (BC, Canada), May 21-25, 2018. The "Vote for Presentations" period started. All proposals are up for community votes. The deadline for your vote is will end February 25 at 11:59pm PST (February 26th at 8:59am CET)

I've submitted two talks this time:

• How to store billions of mails in your Ceph cluster
• OpenStack Vanilla and Distributions - Distinctions and Statistics

As always: every vote is highly welcome! And don't forget to search for other interesting proposals around Ceph, NFV and OpenStack as e.g. the as always expected to be excellent presentations from Florian Haas [1][2][3].

Ceph Day Germany 2018 - Follow-Up

Last week the Ceph Day Germany took place at Deutsche Telekom in Darmstadt. Around 160 people took part in the event and attended the talks of the 13 speakers over the day.

It was a great day with a lot of discussions, feedback and networking for the Germany/European Ceph community. The event ended in a networking reception with drinks and fingerfood, planed for an hour but actually ended after nearly two.

A big thank you to the sponsors (SUSE, SAP, Deutsche Telekom AG, Tallence, Intel, 42on.com, Red Hat and Starline) which made the event possible. The same applies to the speakers and attendees, without you it would have been a meaningless event. A special thank you to Danielle Womboldt from Red Hat for all the organisational help and Leo as the Ceph community manager.

We didn't manage to record all sessions due to technical problems, but the most of them. You can find the videos and slides from the speakers in the agenda of the Ceph day or directly in the following Google Drive folder. We will upload the recordings also to the Ceph YouTube channel later. There is also a subfolder with some impressions of the day.

I'm proud that we hosted the event. If you could not attend or would like to learn more about the community I recommend to attend to the next Ceph Day in London in April 2018. See you next time and at the Cephalocon APAC next month in Beijing.

Ceph Day Germany 2018 - Update

The German Ceph Day 2018 in Darmstadt is finally only a few days away (07. February 2018).

The agenda is now complete. There are 13 talks and a short Q&A session planed during the day. 

Already 150 attendees signed up and due to the support of our latest sponsor Intel we now are able to host for up to 175 interested members of the big Ceph community. There are only a limited number of tickets left, be quick to register for one while they are still available.

I would like to give already a big thanks to the Ceph community team, all sponsors (SUSE, Deutsche Telekom AG, Tallence AG, SAP, Intel, 42on.com, Red Hat, Starline), speakers and supporters which make this event possible. 

Some information if you attend: 

• The location is at T-Online-Allee 1, 64295 Darmstadt. The entrance to the Deutsche Telekom building is here. Please check this page for directions, traffic, parking and hotel information.
• The registration will be open from 8:15am on. Please register at eventbrite so that we can be sure that you get a security badge to access the venue. In case the Ceph Day registration desk is closed, get you security badge from the front desk and refer to the Ceph Day in the Forum. You will get you name tag and goodies during the next break.

See you in Darmstadt! Enjoy the Ceph Day!

Ceph Day Germany 2018

I'm glad to annouce that there will be a Ceph Day on the 7th of February 2018 in Darmstadt. Deutsche Telekom will host the event. The day will start at 08:30 with registration and end around 17:45 with an one hour networking reception. 

We have already several very interesting presentations from SUSE, SAP, CERN, 42.com, Deutsche Telekom AG and Red Hat on the agenda and more to come. If you have an interesting  15-45 min presentation about Ceph, please contact me to discuss if we can add it to the agenda. Presentation language should be German or English.

I would like to thank our current sponsors SUSE and Deutsche Telekom and the Ceph Community  for the support. We are still in  negotiation with potential sponsors and will hopefully announce them soon.

The agenda will be available here soon. You can register through this link. Stay tuned for updates! See you in Darmstadt!

OpenStack Summit Sydney - Slides and Videos

Back from the OpenStack Summit in Sydney. It seems all my sessions were recorded this time. Here you can find the slides and videos:

• Multicloud requirements and implementations: from users, developer, service providers (Panel Discussion) [video]
• Email Storage with Ceph (Lightning Talk) [slides | video]
• Vanilla vs OpenStack Distributions - Update on Distinctions, Status, and Statistics (Talk) [slides | video]

OpenStack Summit Sydney - librmb presentation

Presented today about the librmb project at the OpenStack Summit in Sydney. You can find the slides from the Lightning Talk on github and a video record of the session is available here.

Sydney OpenStack Summit - Started

Today the OpenStack Summit started in Sydney with the keynotes. This time the keynotes are only on the first day, which is really nice since it's only a 3 days event - more time for the presentations.

This time I have every day a presentation or panel discussion:

• Multicloud requirements and implementations: from users, developer, service providers (Panel, Mon 6 , 2:20pm-3:00pm, step in for Kurt Garloff from T-Systems)
• Email Storage with Ceph (Lightning Talk,  Tue 7 , 9:15am-9:25am)
• Vanilla vs OpenStack Distributions - Update on Distinctions, Status, and Statistics (Presentation, Wed 8 , 9:00am-9:40am)

OpenStack Sydney: Turning one into two

Last week I started to update/prepare the slides for my Lightning Talk ("Vanilla vs OpenStack Distributions - Update on Distinctions, Status, and Statistics") at the OpenStack Summit in Sydney (November 6-8, 2017). But then  I have been asked by the Summit Speaker Support to present on the same topic also in a 40 min slot. No problem, but I didn't like to speak twice about the same. I asked to use the Lighning Talk for another topic on Ceph: "Email Storage with Ceph". 

Since they accepted, I will speak in two sessions on different topics. If you are interested, check the schedule. See you in Sydney!

SUSECON - librmb slides

Presented some minutes ago at the SUSECON in Prague again on the librmb project. It seems it was the first Ceph talk today and the room was full. You can find the slides from my talk at github, they slightly changed compared to the Ceph Meetup slides.

SUSECON - librmb

I will be next week at the SUSECON in Prague to present about the new librmb/rbox project sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. The presentation slot is Tuesday, Sep 26, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM. If you attend and are interested on how to store emails directly in Ceph RADOS add the session to your schedule.

Ceph Meetup Berlin - Followup: librmb

On Monday I presented at the Ceph Meetup in Berlin about a new project sponsored by Deutsche Telekom to store emails on Ceph. The project consists of librmb and rbox. While librmb (librados mailbox) is a generic abstraction layer to store emails in RADOS, rbox is a plugin for Dovecot to make use of the new library.

The code is released under LGPLv2.1 and now available at github. The project is still under heavy development and not in a released state. Therefore the code and APIs can still change, but we really would like to invite every interested party to check it out, test the code and report findings and bugs back to the project. Be part of the project and contribute code! We plan to move the librmb code later to the Ceph project and the rbox plugin to Dovecot. For more information on the project check out the README or take a look at my presentation from the Meetup.

I would like to thank our partners in this project: Tallence, Wido den Hollander (42on.com), and SUSE.

Ceph Meetup Berlin

I will give a presentation at the next Ceph Meetup in Berlin on the 18th of September. It will be about a exciting project we work on, at Deutsche Telekom, since a while. The goal of this open source project called librmb is to store emails directly in Ceph RADOS instead of using e.g. a NAS system. 

For an short abstract checkout out the Meetup description. The Meetup is already full, but there is a waiting list you can subscribe to. The slides from the talk will be available afterwards if you are not able to join. Otherwise see you in Berlin.

OpenStack Summit Sydney: Vote for Presentations

The next OpenStack Summit takes place in Sydney (Australia), November 6-8, 2017. The "Vote for Presentations" period will end in less than a day. All proposals are still up for community votes. The deadline for your vote is will end August 3th at 11:59pm PDT (August 4th at 8:59am CEST).

I have submitted this time one proposal:

• Vanilla vs OpenStack Distributions - Update on Distinctions, Status, and Statistics - One year ago in Barcelona we have taken a look behind the curtain of OpenStack Vanilla and the products of the four major OpenStack distributions. Let’s have an update and deeper look into it. You have the agony of choice if it comes to the question: Vanilla or an OpenStack distribution. It will highly depend on your usecase, technical requirements, resources and organization. This presentation will not only highlight differences between these choices but also between the distributions and their offerings. There is more to take a look at than only the OpenStack product itself as e.g. different hypervisor, Ceph, the base distributions and support. This time we also include new topics like SDN, NFV, Container and Managed Cloud. And for sure we will have a lot of new and updated statistics on community contribution and market share. This talk will cover besides Vanilla also at least RedHat, SUSE, Ubuntu/Canonical, and Mirantis OpenStack.

As always: every vote is highly welcome! And don't forget to search for other interesting proposals around Ceph, NFV and OpenStack as e.g. the presentations from Florian Haas [1][2][3].

opendev: OpenStack Foundation failed to learn the lesson

Yesterday I got an invitation to the opendev conference (September 7-8, 2017) from the OpenStack foundation. The conference is about edge computing. 

While the topic itself is very interesting I was surprised that the opendev will be held in the U.S. (San Francisco, CA). I thought the foundation would have learned a lesson from the Boston summit this year. And as far as I understood it they decided to have currently no summits in the U.S. anymore until the political climate changed to allow risk free travel for all community members (see Kurt Garloff's talk at DOST around 8:45min). But it seems this applies only to the summits, very inconsistent! Some people would call it slightly duplicitous.

In light of the OpenStack Foundation's decision I'm still proud about the Ceph community. They decided with a clear statement to not held any event in the U.S. that requires travel for community members from foreign countries while there is the risk to potentially suffer harassment, digital privacy violations, or rejection at the border.

Reminder: OpenStack Summit Sydney - CFP Deadline

A short reminder: the "Call for Presentations" deadline for  the next OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia (November 6-8, 2017) is less an a day away. 

If you would like to present in Sydney submit your proposal till July 14, 2017 at 11:59pm PDT (July 15, 2017 at 6:59am UTC).

CEPHALOCON 2017 - CANCELLED

I already submitted to talks for the Cephalocon 2017 in Boston end of August this year but unfortunately - for the community - the conference was cancelled on Friday this week.

Here a quote from the cancellation statement:

The Ceph community has always been based on the principles of openness, inclusion, and a level playing field for all participants. We have worked hard to ensure that no matter what time zone you’re in, who you are, or how technically knowledgeable you are there is always a way for you to participate and contribute to the Ceph community.

It is our sincere hope that the people of the United States will course-correct their leadership to conform to the principles that the country was founded on, and has served so well throughout history. In the meantime, we wont be hosting any events that require members of our community to travel to the U.S. and potentially suffer harassment, digital privacy violations, or rejection at the border.

For the full statement please check this page. 

Though these are `SAD` news for the community, I fully support the decision and the statement. I'm looking forward for a new date for a Cephalocon, propably in Canada, Mexico or around the next OpenStack Summit in Sydney end of this year. It would be really good if the full Ceph community - including the developers - could get together at least once in a while.

OpenStack Summit Boston: Vote for Presentations

The next OpenStack Summit takes place in Boston, MA (USA) in May (8.-11.05.2017). The "Vote for Presentations" period started already. All proposals are now again up for community votes. The period will end February 21th at 11:59pm PST (February 22th at 8:59am CEST).

This time I have submitted a proposal together with WDLabs:

• Next Generation Hardware for Software Defined Storage - Software Defined Storage like Ceph has changed the storage market dramatically in the last few years. While software has changed, storage hardware stayed basically the same: commodity servers connected to JBODs utilizing SAS/SATA devices. The next step must be a revolution in the hardware too. At the Austin summit the Ceph community presented a 4 PB Ceph cluster comprised of WDLabs Converged Microservers. Each Microserver is built by starting with an HGST HE8 HDD platform and adding an ARM and DDR running Linux on the drives itself. WDLabs provided access to early production devices for key customers such as Deutsche Telekom for adoption and feedback. This talk will provide insight into our findings running a Ceph cluster on this platform as a storage provider to OpenStack.

This period the voting process changed again unique URLs to proposals seems to work again. So if you would like to vote for my talk use this link or search for the proposal (e.g. use the title from above or search for "Al-Gaaf"). As always: every vote is highly welcome! 

As the last times I highly recommend to search also for "Ceph" or what ever topic your are interested in. You find the voting page here with all proposals and abstracts. I'm looking forward to see if and which of these talks will be selected.