Snakes on a cloud: the OpenStack project

OpenStack is an innovative open source project written in Python, backed by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, building a massively-scalable and reliable cloud computing platform.

The first part of this talk will clarify the place of OpenStack in the general "cloud" landscape and explain why a fully open cloud infrastructure stack is necessary to avoid vendor lock-in. We'll then focus on the OpenStack project goals, its developer community, its open design and release processes, and the developer tools it chose.

The second part of the talk will present into more technical details the different components of OpenStack: Nova (compute) and Swift (storage), including the Python libraries that are used (libvirt, SQLAlchemy, eventlet...). A Q&A session at the end of the talk will give the audience a chance to clear any remaining dark area.