We are just back from the European 2013 Cloudstack Collaboration Conference in Amsterdam, November 20th to 22nd, and we loved it. Here is our individual feedback:

Antoine notes:

This conference is one of the (too) few events in Europe where we can actually meet engineers and technical geeks alike.

The Cloudstack ecosystem is rising fast

Integration from vendors is everywhere. This is really the new trend pushing forward and it is great. Without imposing rigid standards, the CloudStack core is getting more and more flexible for better integration.

Now also with API interfaces compatible with EC2 and GCE, any tool, language can tap in this rich infrastructure orchestration platform.

Application awareness

I just love the fact that we are moving up and up the application layer stack. Cloud, and automation through configuration management has enabled many to achieve a much more robust and industrial IT platforms. Those have traditionally focused on computing - deploying VMs, OS, and low level services -, and on packages and middleware used. Rarely do these implementation tackle the Networking, Storage, Data-location issues.

Enter the Blueprints world

Now with concepts of application blueprints, namely from formats like CloudFormation and Stackmate, it is now possible to describe a complete application including external constraints like price, SLA, data-location,…

Standards are emerging like TOSCA and CIMI for tools Open Source tools to consume and help designing.

Conclusion

A bright future for IT industrialization and control lays in front of us, with IaaS sorted with Cloudstack and Open Cloud services like ours, the virtual datacenter is at last going to change radically.

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