insideHPC » OSCON

Interview: Puppet Labs Continues Momentum at OSCON 2012

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:12:17 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p9-kPlHDrA

In this video, Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies describes the company’s latest datacenter automation technologies. Recorded at OSCON 2012 in Portland.

Puppet is IT automation software that helps system administrators manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to patch management and compliance. Using Puppet, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud.

As reported here, CERN is planning to deploy and manage its new datacenter using Puppet Labs software.

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Video: The Mudslide Hypothesis of Science

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:10:23 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv5tsyPb5Og

In this video, Kaitlin Thaney from Digital Science presents: The Mudslide Hypothesis of Science.

The Web has transformed not only the way we approach modern day science, but a number of other facets of the research cycle: tools for analysis, mediums which now serve as “information inputs”, how we exchange ideas and even discover knowledge. Yet despite the pieces being there, changing practice is like trying to shake a castle. In scientific research, we’re dealing with special circumstances, trying to innovate upon hundreds of years of entrenched norms and practices, broken incentive structures and information discovery problems dramatically slowing the system, keeping us from making the advances needed to better society. Technological solutions exist and processes are slowly changing, but the machine is not nearly as well-oiled (or straightforward) as we’d like to think, and there are still breaks in the system keeping us from doing more efficient work. In this talk, Kaitlin will posit that we’re not only “getting this wrong” in the academic research context, but that we need a shift in mindset towards openness as well as better tools to truly disrupt the system, and bring our methods (finally) into the 21st century.

Recorded at OSCON 2012 in Portland. Most of the otherOSCON 2012 talks and slides are now posted.

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Video: The Clothesline Paradox and the Sharing Economy

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:34:02 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbcgmf6eDKU

In this video, Tim O’Reilley presents The Clothesline Paradox and the Sharing Economy. Recorded at OSCON 2012 in Portland.

Open source software was one of the earliest successful examples of a sharing economy that has had huge economic impact. But as alternative energy advocate Steve Baer once noted, ecosystem services are often ignored in economic analysis: when you put your clothes in the dryer the energy you use is measured and counted, but when you hang them on the line, they disappear from the measured economy.

As presented to a room full of 3000 open source developers, this was a fascinating talk that may give you pause. The idea that we need to give more than we take from an ecosystem is something that I think really resonates in the HPC community. Download the slides (PDF).

Update: The Economic Impact of Open Source on Small Business: A Case Study uses data provided by Endurance International Group’s Bluehost division to explicate what Tim terms the “clothesline effect.” In addition to the free report, Tim and colleagues gathered for a roundtable discussion of this topic.

You can watch the final day of streaming talks from OSCON today starting at 9:00am PT at inside-BigData.com.

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Interview: Edd Dumbill on the Drivers of Open Source at OSCON

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 17:02:01 +0000

The OSCON conference returns to Portland this week with recurring themes of open source, innovation, and Big Data. To learn more, I caught up with Program Chair Edd Dumbill.

inside-BigData: What do you think brings attendees back to OSCON year after year?

Edd Dumbill: Simply put: each other. OSCON is a fabulous gathering of the open source community across a broad variety of projects and technologies. What makes it so special are the speakers and the attendees, and what we learn from each other.

inside-BigData: From the outside, it almost seems to me as if Big Data has breathed new life into open source by providing new challenges for the community. What do you think?

Edd Dumbill: I’d say open source gave birth to much of big data! Many of the developments with cloud and big data right now have sound foundations in open source projects.

inside-BigData: As program chair, what would you say will be different, new, and exciting this year at OSCON?

Edd Dumbill: I’m excited at the continuing growth of OpenStack. That has the potential to do for the data center what the IBM PC design did for personal computing. I’m also thrilled at the depth of programming expertise we’re continually able to bring to OSCON. One particular highlight will be Rob Pike presenting on the Go programming language.

inside-BigData: I was following your twitter stream, and you wrote that you had just finished reading every one of the 650 plus Strata New York and Hadoop World proposals. What drives you to invest that kind of time into event content?

Edd Dumbill: For me personally, I feel so much more certain about the choices I make when I put the effort into reviewing everybody’s proposal. All our would-be speakers put a lot of effort into their submissions, and as much as possible they deserve the chair to have seen

inside-BigData: Did you notice any new trends in such an exhausting exercise?

Edd Dumbill: The biggest trend is the sheer explosion of interest in big data. With that comes both the good and the bad. On the downside, in their haste to join the bandwagon, people forget the important thing at the event is educating the attendees: these people don’t get asked to speak. On the good side, there’s such a thrill in uniting people across many industries doing cutting edge work in big data. If you want some high level trends, I’d say they were the need to deliver analytic power to the end user, and making big data processing more real-time and interactive.

inside-BigData: As a long-time media pundit, what would you say has changed the most in the open source community since the dot.com boom? Is the typical attendee starting to suit up, put on ties, and mature?

Edd Dumbill: We’re all maturing, for sure OSCON has always had a strong mix of both open source developers that work both for very large and very small companies. Nobody puts on ties at OSCON, but we have people who are solving big problems inside industry, which might have seemed improbable to the attendee from ten years ago. As open source becomes increasingly the default, we have projects such as OpenStack that start off their life with companies collaborating, rather than growing from individuals.

inside-BigData: As a resident of Portlandia, I think its great that OSCON makes it home here for the annual conference. How do the show organizers feel about our town and what kind of reception have your attendees come to expect here?

Edd Dumbill: We love being in Portland, and always receive a warm welcome from the city. When OSCON’s in town, it’s always a great atmosphere, and we’re able to make the convention center our own for the week.

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Video: Data Flow at Netflix – Live from OSCON Data

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:00:13 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idu9OKnAOis

Our Video Sunday feature continues with presentation from OSCON Data 2011 in which Adrian Cockcroft discusses “Data Flow at Netflix.” The company uses open source software on the Amazon AWS cloud to stream millions of movies per day.

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Video: 10gen Delivers Agility with Open Source MongoDB

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:30:59 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwzwzHa6wTQ

In this video, 10gens’s Jared Rosoff and Max Schireson discuss how the MongoDB database software delivers agility and scalability for the enterprise. MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database. Founded by former DoubleClick Founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki Founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz, 10gen offers production support, training, and consulting for the open source database.

Recorded at the OSCON 2011 conference in Portland.

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Gluster Rolls Out First Unified File and Object Storage for OpenStack

RichB — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:57:16 +0000

John Kreisa writes that today’s release of the Gluster Connector for OpenStack is big news for the cloud.

So what are we about to release for OpenStack? This line from the press release says it all: “The Gluster Connector for OpenStack …supports the virtual motion of the VMs within the OpenStack compute environment.” This is huge. The OpenStack community will now be able to deploy or migrate VM’s anywhere in the world, more flexibly, quickly and at greater scale.

Read the Full Story from OSCON in Portland.

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