OpenStack Summit is now in full swing. The OpenStack Summit will be five days of conferences and networking opportunities for developers, users and administrator of OpenStack Cloud Software.

It starts Monday, May 12, and continues through Friday, May 16, taking place in Atlanta, Georgia.

OpenStack is a cloud software platform that helps deliver infrastructure agility and IT efficiency. The open source and community consensus driven design distinguishes OpenStack from other cloud platforms. At this year summit, the focus will be on continued growth of OpenStack, Cloud Operations (CloudOps) and Community. The focus, in the early years of the OpenStack project, was decidedly around packaging and deployment with the goal of making OpenStack as easy to stand up and configure as possible in order to drive its adoption.

With the integration of OpenStack into the business and enterprise community, IT departments are better able to serve their client-base with the best product available that can be personalized and customized for the specific needs of the organization without sacrificing.

What to expect

There are well over 300 sessions and events taking place during the event. There will be plenty of sessions on getting started with OpenStack including OpenStack’s underlying architecture, how OpenStack’s object storage system works, an orchestration session to learn about how to use OpenStack Heat and how to plan your OpenStack cloud project.

OpenStack strives to be a complete cloud solution. OpenStack will showcase some of the new developer tools that run with OpenStack and Ceph, Chef, Puppet, Solum, Salt, and several other projects that fit neatly into the OpenStack universe.

There will be a session on “Are enterprises ready for the OpenStack transformation?”, which will give some key learnings on what are the required steps to make sure that your enterprise is ready for the OpenStack transformation.

The star of this event will be the latest version of the platform: Icehouse, which stood out from previous versions through a collective effort on fixing bugs and improving several features. As part of Icehouse, the OpenStack platform is now gaining a new project with the inclusion of the Trove database-as-a-service (DaaS) technology. Trove was originally known as Project Red Dwarf and got its start in 2011 with the support of Rackspace and HP. This year’s event focus will be to take the OpenStack platform not only to developers, but also to users.

DevOps is changing how cloud applications and infrastructure are deployed and managed and OpenStack will look for specific challenges within DevOps. OpenStack also continues to explore deployment models on-top of OpenStack infrastructure designed for continuous development lifecycles. For the OpenStack community, tracking DevOps is important it is expected that developers will drive the engine of the current massive cloud build-out.

OpenStack Summit 2013 highlights

At last year’s event, OpenStack changed the game by being more than just an open source software project and led the creation of community built software that runs parts of the cloud computing infrastructure.

As part of that initiative, HP announced its converged infrastructure compatible with OpenStack: the 3PAR StorageServ Storage and StorageVirtual line-ups. Rackspace unveiled composite cloud applications with the AWS CloudFormation template format through OpenStack-native ReST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API.

Red Had launched their own version of OpenStack known as the Red Hat Distribution OpenStack (RDO). OpenStack is used by Red Hat to provide a customized cloud provider with their platform in lieu of the virtualization vendor’s own proprietary software or using the standard of Amazon’s APIs with Eucalyptus Systems.

VMware and Linux distributor Canonical announced a collaboration that will enable users to deploy VMware technologies, namely vSphere and the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP), with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution. Similarly, Cloudscaling has announced the third major release of Open Cloud System version 2.5.