Notes from Open Infra Institute Day at MSU-FTE CS (15/12/2018)
Wait, what?
- MSU-FTE CS stands for Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda — Faculty of Technology and Engineering Computer Science.
- ‘X’ Institute Day basically means the day when X was instituted or created. So, here Open Infra User Group for Vadodara was created for the first time on 15th December 2018 and this was the 0th Institute Day.
- Open Infra is a open-source community led umbrella project with special focus on cloud technologies.
Where?
- It was a half day event held at MSU-FTE Kalabhavan in CS Department. The building has a magnificent facade. Check this out —
Why?
- Surprisingly this is an easier question here. Well, we don’t have many OpenStack(major part of Open Infra) users in India and in comparison to countries like China we are really lagging behind in terms of users as well as developers of OpenStack.
- This was an attempt to spread awareness, create a user group and inspire undergrad students in CS to start to learn this technology.
When?
15/12/2018 from 10:30 to 15:30
By whom?
Organizers
From what I know, it was led by Dr. Mamta C Padole who is an associate professor in the host department along with her team of half a dozen volunteer students.
Participants
The participants' list includes 40+ students of B.Tech in CS from MSU-FTE, a dozen invited guests, professors of CS Department of MSU-FTE and few outliers who happened to find the event on Meetup (yup, that’s me!).
How?
I am not sure how to answer this. I mean it just happened. :P
Authors commentary mid-way
Alright if you are clear with the basics, the bare minimum to know and wanna know the details of the event please process ahead with the notes that I took along with few snapshots.
Who am I?
Well, I am just an undergrad student in computer science who happened to be in the vicinity of this event and out of sheer interest in the topic of discussion of this event and curiosity to visit the campus, went ahead to attend this event. The text that follows might be incomplete, unsolicited, unverified information and does not reflect opinions of the organizers or anyone in particular. Please process with a grain of salt!
The link to meetup event is here or here- https://www.meetup.com/Vadodara-Open-Infra-Meetup/events/257136963/
Before we start
The event was supposed to start at 10:30 am.
I reached the campus well on time.
10:28 am.
Didn’t factor in the time I would need to search for the room within the venue, after a few 100 steps, I found the room in the building at 10:40 am. The event had already started with inauguration ceremony going on and I made the great embarrassing walk to an empty seat in the corner. While on the dice, dignitaries were lighting the lamp and chorus being sung. Alright, we are settled and good to go.
Start!
Session 1 — Cloud 101
After the customary introductions, we begin with the first session by J. A. Gokhale. It was a precedent to the main session of the day by Prakash Ramachandran.
Few notes taken in his session were:-
- Cloud includes on-demand network access and a shared-pool of computing resources. These computing resources are in the form of services. It can be
— infrastructure (hardware level)
— platform (software: os level)
— application (software: application level) - As OS is to a computer, Virtual Machine Manager is to the Guest machine in the cloud. It is the same as the hypervisor.
- OpenStack is an opensource project started by NASA and OpenStack which now has expanded to over 600 companies and thousands of contributors with a codeprint of 20M LOC written in python.
- OpenStack comes with GUI, CLI and API options of use.
- It is composed of various modules with striking names like Keystone for identity management, Telemetry for metering and analytics, Swift for data storage and so on so forth.
- Compute, Storage and Network are the three pillars of OpenStack accessed mostly by API calls by the user and managed with a CLI or GUI (like Horizon).
- DevStack is a bunch of scripts that make installation of OpenStack more automated.
Session 2 — Modules of OpenStack
The second session was by Ruturaj Kadikar, a senior research associate at SRM University, Chennai.
He went hands down in the technical aspects of various modules of OpenStack.
He ended his talk with a brief comparison between VM and containers and a brief mention of LXC that is Linux Containers.
Session 3 — OpenStack: Current State
This session was by R. Prakash who is on the Board of Directors of OpenStack.
Few notes from the session are:
- The container is the bare minimum system and with the addition of functionalities, it becomes a VM although the transition is not always distinct. Kubernetes is a container management software for docker which is a popular container. Almost synonymous with the term container itself in the market.
- TCS, Wipro, HCL etc. have started providing OpenStack and have clients like Maruti, BARC and Tata Motors who are shifting from the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. This has resulted in 75–80% cost reductions for these clients. Another way of saying this would be the price comparison of the same services from the OpenStack vs big tech cloud providers is around 1:4 to 1:6.
- In China, 40% government infrastructure is on OpenStack. In India, still missing!
Following these three sessions, was the lunchtime. Before lunch, Prakash mentioned he has left the exciting part for the final session of the day after lunch. Some new news!
During this small break, I met with Prakash and Ashish Desai the founder of desaitech.in and Google Cloud user. The discussion started with layers of vertical abstraction from physical disk partitions up to the cloud services and shifted gears into the state of startups in India — with uncanny focus on the higher abstraction layers only and little dots of startups in the more fundamental layers.
Session 3 — continued
The first announcement was that OpenStack was being renamed to Open Infrastructure. The rationale being the addition of hardware aspect into the project since rapidly evolving software needs hardware support as well.
The second announcement was addition of new plane- Service plane in the architecture.
He also talked briefly about the major projects under Open Infra each related to specific strategic focus of the organisation.
Pilot projects:
- Airship: undercloud for OpenStack
- Kata Containers: “It is not a container yet it is a container!”
- StarlingX: Edge computing platform
- Zuul: CI/CD multi-project gating system
Panel Discussion
The panel members from L to R are:
Nilesh Vaghela, electromech.info, Amazon Cloud user.
Vibha Naik, VP IT Linde-LE.com, Azure Cloud user, CSI member
Ruturaj Kadikar, a senior research associate at SRM
Prof. J. A. Gokhale, moderator of the panel discussion.
Mr. Prakash Ramchandran, Board of Directors, OpenStack
The panel was diverse with representations from existing cloud service provider users, researchers, industry professionals of OpenStack and academicians.
Nilesh Vaghela, from electromech.info and versed user of AWS, said, quote
Today’s new is tomorrow’s normal
Some other statements:
Increasing cores in a cloud machine may reduce performance if the underlying queues are not tweaked properly.
Security models are separate from the architecture
Formation of User Group
This followed with the formation of the user group. Three students coordinators were nominated voluntarily. The event ended with vote of thanks by Dean of MSU-FTE and everyone dispersed.
