▷ the Bright blog

If the 20-percent year-over-year deployment growth is any indication, as reported in 2016 per the latest organizational report, the clear benefits of OpenStack are no match for the historic complexity of deployment. As OpenStack continues to evolve with each new release, a pattern of improvements that make it more stable and usable emerges.

Although we’re well into adoption of release 16 known as Pike, release 15 known as Ocata is where the process of improvement for existing attributes really picked up steam. This is a significant point because the goal with Ocata was to increase stability, manageability, user experience, and interoperability of core services. By reviewing some of the latest developments in Ocata as a “mature” version of OpenStack, we can see how many adopted services have been improved in terms of management, scalability, performance, and reliability.

The latest IDC big data report says the world will go from producing a current annual average of 30 zettabytes (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes) of data to 163 zettabytes by 2025.

We’ve just returned from OpenStack Days Nordic, a two-day conference in Copenhagen. As was to be expected, it was a worthwhile event.The keynotes, especially, did not disappoint.

Remember the feeling you had when you first learned to drive a car? Everything was new to you. Sure, you knew what a steering wheel was, and what each pedal was for, but you had to learn how much steering input you could safely use at different speeds. Discovering just how much clutch and throttle was needed to get rolling without stalling doesn’t come easily to most people. And I’ll bet figuring out how hard (and how soon) to press the brake pedal as you came up behind another car at a stoplight created a few anxious moments for you and your instructor. But what does this have to do with managing clusters? In many ways, learning how to drive a cluster is much like learning to drive a car. At first, it can seem overwhelming, but once you master the individual skills, you can use them together to create a genuinely exciting experience.

If you are a system administrator, an engineer, or a developer working with cluster and cloud infrastructure in general, these videos are designed for you.

I had the pleasure of attending the UK HPC & Big Data event, organised by GovNet, yesterday in London.

At Bright, we have our own private cloud based on Bright OpenStack. We use it to run R&D, dev, and QA workloads for our engineering teams. 

One of the ways we use it is to test the GPU integration of our cluster management software. To do this, we need to expose the GPUs to the VMs via PCI-passthrough. That’s the easy part.

As the year draws to a close, we have been thinking about what the HPC industry is likely to face in 2017. How will the role of HPC change in the modern data center? What new uses will HPC be put to? What about HPC in the cloud? We wanted to share our thoughts with you, and ask you to weigh in with your own predictions. Here’s what we think will happen in 2017:

A few months have passed since the must-attend cloud computing event — OpenStack Summit Barcelona — rocked the Spanish autumn and brought together a truly international crowd ready to enjoy the grueling schedule and benefit from all activities the organizers had lined up. We wanted to share our take-aways from the event.