Takeaways from OpenInfra Days Krakow 2019

Every year in June, the team from Compendium Education Center organizes a community event in Krakow, Poland. This year signaled the first event under the new name, OpenInfra Days Krakow.

Roughly 200 people boarded Forum Wydarzen directly on the river Vistula for the two-day event with three session streams. In the workshop stream the attendees played the Phoenix Project Game, a business simulation around DevOps and Agile Work.

The keynotes were from Thierry Carrez, VP of engineering at OpenStack Foundation and Simon Briggs, senior solutions architect for cloud at SUSE, also one of the main sponsors for the event. Both talked about open development and open source. Carrez emphasized the importance of integration as the last mile while Briggs traced the history of the SUSE mascot chameleon as a symbol of innovation. The fitting title for his session: “Evolve or Die.”

The breakout sessions toggled between Polish and English, with the slides predominantly in English. Stream two started after a break with Kenneth Tan from Sardina Systems advising attendees to “Be ready for OpenStack and Kubernetes highly efficient while optimizing your resource management.” It was very deep dive into the business of OpenStack and Kubernetes operations, cost avoidance and optimization.

“Are your containers secure?” asked Michał Gutowski from Oracle Open cloud infrastructure asked in his talk. He touched on several points about risks, e.g downloading containers from unknown sources or using unknown installations. Overall, a very practical talk with a lot of good advice.

After the lunch break, a full block of NFV sessions were served up. All of them focused on OpenStack and in demo sessions attendees could see the power of virtual networks.

At the end of the first day, it was my turn to talk about the business case for OpenStack, offering use cases on how to adapt working methods from the OpenStack community to enterprise outfits.

Next on the agenda in the evening was the party, started on a boat at the foot of the castle Wawel with the fire-breathing dragon:

But that was only the starting point. To reach the next stop of the party, attendees had to solve some riddles and puzzles — each pub meant solving another riddle. A really fun event with lots of conversations, mostly in Polish.

After this scorching evening (about 35 degrees — that’s 95 in Farenheit), day two started at Forum Wydarzen.

“Beyond the hype: the real promise of AI” was the first talk given by Kaimar Karu at Mindbridge. A very good overview about the status of AI and how about the future.

After that, Szymon Datko at OVH, another event sponsor, talked about Zuul. The session was held in Polish and a lots of people are interested in Zuul, the gate automation system, a fairly new topic for the audience.

Szymon showed some nice demos with Zuul Containers, which provides a completely Zuul installation in minutes. Very impressive! That we are still with OpenStack during the Open Infra Days showed the session by Piotr Kopeć from Red Hat. He was explaining configuration management in TripleO and how is the current project status.

And also Bartosz Żurkowski from Samsung combined different OpenStack projects for his use case. He is still develop Trove and showed a way for self-healing database operations with Vitrage and Mistral.

At the end of the event we had a lot of winners: