Meet the Devs Cloud Workshop @Birmingham, UK

Meet the Devs returned this October with a trip to University of Birmingham (OK, so I didn’t have to travel very far…).

This time, we focussed the day as a workshop on cloud and Spectrum Scale, Dean Hildebrand (IBM Research, Master Inventor, Senior Research Scientist) was in the UK speaking at another event and we were lucky enough to catch him for a meet the devs. We were also joined by John Lewars (IBM, STSM) who flew in pretty much for the day, and also MTD usuals, Ulf Troppens and Dan Kidger.

For those not familiar with Dean, he worked on pNFS, AFM and the OpenStack integration when they were all part of IBM Research. I’ve been lucky enough to know Dean for a couple of years and he was extremely helpful with getting the right contacts when I was developing CLIMB (www.climb.ac.uk) a few years back and using Spectrum Scale as an infrastructure.

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UK Meet the Devs – Cloud Workshop

Back by popular demand! We are holding a UK ‘Meet the Developers’ event to focus on Cloud topics. We are very lucky to have Dean Hildebrand, Master Inventor, Cloud Storage Software from IBM over in the UK to lead this session.

IS IT FOR ME? Slightly different to the past meet the devs format, this is a cloud workshop aimed at looking how Spectrum Scale fits in the world of cloud. Rather than being a series of presentations and discussions led by IBM, this workshop aims to look at how Spectrum Scale can be used in cloud environments. This will include using Spectrum Scale as an infrastructure tool to power private cloud deployments. We will also look at the challenges of accessing data from cloud deployments and discuss ways in which this might be accomplished.

If you are currently deploying OpenStack on Spectrum Scale, or plan to in the near future, then this workshop is for you. Also if you currently have Spectrum Scale and are wondering how you might get that data into cloud-enabled workloads or are currently doing so, then again you should attend. To ensure that the workshop is focused, numbers are limited and we will initially be limiting to 2 people per organisation/project/site.

WHAT WILL BE DISCUSSED? Our topics for the day will include on-premise (private) clouds, on-premise self-service (public) clouds, off-premise clouds (Amazon etc.) as well as covering technologies including OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes and security requirements around multi-tenancy. We probably don’t have all the answers for these, but we’d like to understand the requirements and hear people’s ideas. Please let us know what you would like to discuss when you register.

Arrival is from 10:00 with discussion kicking off from 10:30. The agenda is open discussion though we do aim to talk over a number of key topics. We hope to have the ever popular (though usually late!) pizza for lunch.

WHEN Thursday 20th October 2016 from 10:00 AM to 3:30 PM
WHERE IT Services, University of Birmingham – Elms Road Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT
REGISTER Please register for the event in advance: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ssug-meet-the-devs-cloud-workshop-tickets-27725390389 Numbers are limited and we will initially be limiting to 2 people per organisation/project/site.

Trip Report: Meet the Devs – Oxford February 24, 2016

In January I took over the advocate role for the Spectrum Scale UK user group from Ross Keeping and was asked to join the ‘Meet the Devs’ in Oxford on February 24th, 2016. ‘Meet the Devs’ is an informal meeting with about 20 customers and partners. Typically there are 3-5 topics which will be discussed. This format was new to me, so I was very interested to travel to Oxford. Rick Welp of the IBM Manchester Lab volunteered to come to Oxford to help with the transition. In addition I was accompanied by Simon Lorenz and Stefan Schmidt of the Mainz Development team.

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Meet the Devs – Oxford

On Feb 24th, the latest iteration of the Spectrum Scale – Meet the Devs took place in Oxford. We met on the Oxford University campus and as always, the meeting was well attended. I had the pleasure of meeting some new members in addition to catching up with a few familiar faces. Simon Thompson, the User Group Chair, introduced three IBMers from the Mainz Germany Lab, Ulf Troppens, Simon Lorenz and Stefan Schmidt. After the introductions by Simon and our hosts from Oxford, we started the meeting.

Ulf Troppens started the meeting off by introducing his German colleagues, and he presented a high-level overview of Spectrum Scale’s history through 4.2.

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Performance Round Table – Round Two

On January 12th, Paul Roberts, Patrick Byrne, Sophie Carsten and I ran a second iteration of performance talks with a small subset of UK Spectrum Scale users. As Paul covered in a previous post, the goal of the meeting was to have an informal chat with these users to gain insights on how they use their clusters, what issues they have concerning their cluster’s performance, and what we can do to help improve the product. We met in the IBM Manchester Development Lab, which allowed us to have developers from the performance, install and upgrade, and system health teams available to discuss the product.

As is the case with all Spectrum Scale User Group meetings, the participants were very happy and open to discuss their Spectrum Scale deployments with us. Since the meeting was designed to be an open and free-flowing meeting, there were a few issues raised by the users and our conversations ebbed and flowed from there.

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