I got the opportunity to attend as well as speak at gnuNify 2012 , Pune. It was my first FOSS conference as a speaker and it went really great. I was there for two days 10th and 11th Feb and was accompanied by Atul Jha one of our Eucalyptus community member in India. Thanks to Atul for joining me in from Chennai and spreading the word about our community . This was the 10th version of gnuNify at SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research) Pune.

This year the main theme for the conference was Cloud Computing as well as Mobile Computing and I was happy to see lot of good talks and workshops on the same.

Day 1

Day started with a south indian breakfast. Idly and sambhar after a month’s gap for me. Felt pretty good. I met Shakti Kannan now with RedHat India, Santhosh Thottingal from Wikimedia Foundation and Arky from Mozilla.

My talk on Eucalyptus was scheduled at 11:15am in the auditorium at SICSR. I got delayed because the first talk on building your own cloud computing infrastructure by Mr. Arun Khan took some more time, by some 15-20 minutes, but that was fine. I spoke with Mr. Arun briefly before my talk and he told me about his team’s recent work with openstack and Eucalyptus , we shook hands and decided to take the talk further during dinner/lunch which we did and I hope I was able to answer his questions and give my honest opinion.

I had around 40+ people in the audience for my talk and was introduced by one of the college volunteer to the audience. It was a very formal introduction digging into my past which refreshed my memories. I had prepare my deck hoping that I would be talking to an audience who may not be so familiar with Cloud Computing as most of them would be college students. It was a good guess and I was able to figure that based on the first few questions I asked the audience as part of the regular polling exercise I prefer doing.

My slide deck is now available for you to view here. I was talking about Eucalyptus during a time where we are so close to the new release (Eucalyptus 3.0) so couple of things in the deck might need a modification or new addition though I had a slide on Eucalyptus 3.0 and I discussed with the audience about that.

I realized that talking about Eucalyptus can be a serious technical discussion and one needs to balance out the technical and the non-technical stuff well sometimes because the audience might not be too technical. I had a slide on the new Starter EMI stuff we have started doing, a slide on community and the various projects we have been hosting on our projects website.

My talk went well above the time allocated (around one and a half hour long) to me but I believe the audience liked it because I saw everyone seriously listening to me and I received few questions during my presentation as well as some after it ended. I am sorry I don’t have photographs right now because I was all busy talking to people but hopefully Atul and the gnuNify volunteers will be uploading/sharing the same pretty soon.

After the talk we distributed around 40 Eucalyptus t-shirts to the audience. It was really great. Everyone just jumped right on top of the t-shirts and grabbed one for themselves before we were out of t-shirts in few minutes time. I had some Euca goodies which we gave at the reception so people registering for gnuNify can get one for them. Lot of stickers and pens. Thanks to Greg and Diana for sending those to us!

After my talk , Atul presented on Juju at the same place but I was not able to attend his talk because I was busy answering questions and talking to people outside the auditorium. Apologies to Atul for stealing some of his audience I hope he don’t mind.

I met a team of college students who developed something on live VM migration and I shared with them my experience on VM migration in VMWare world and asked them to join our mailing lists and tell a little about themselves and their project. I met one other team who was planning to use Eucalyptus as a private cloud for a parallel processing project and suggested them few things again my general request to everyone was in the end join the mailing list and introduce themselves. I know we have a very active and vibrant community and its growing so it is helpful to get associated. I had one college faculty who wanted to know what he could do to try out Eucalyptus in his college LAB. He had a bad experience with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud it seems , I requested him to join my workshop on setting up your own private cloud based on Eucalyptus and use CentOS with Eucalyptus 2.0.3. He did attended the workshop and I hope he liked it!

I was able to meetup with some more folks during lunch. I would like to take this opportunity and congratulate the organizers on getting us awesome food, whether it was breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks it was really delicious. I met Ramakrishna Reddy from RedHat, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Karunakar Guntupalli from Symantec and Harshad Oak from Indicthreads. It was a nice time talking to all of them and also Mr. Arun Khan from Silver Arc Solutions Pvt Ltd.

I also happen to meet Mr. Manish Kumar from CDAC who is into Cloud computing and building up a integration using various tools and openstack the platform.

The key take aways from Day 1 were,

• People need to know about Eucalyptus. Go and speak at such conferences and meetups. Socialize face to face.
• There should be a easy way out for them to learn and use Eucalyptus. Ideas ? Faststart, Silvereye can be the answer to the ease of installation.
• We are based on JAVA some people don’t like it. The primary reason they put is that its slow and they can’t understand the code.
• Localization efforts in Indic languages for Eucalyptus. We actually took this one pretty seriously and Atul had a lot of useful discussions and good feedback on this one, day 2 updates follows.

I was not able to work on the lab setup for my workshop but had one dedicated volunteer, a BBA (Bachelor of Business Administration) student, Chirag Jain who figured out along with the help and guidance of Mr. Harshad Gune what we would do on day 2.

The day ended up with a awesome drinks + dinner where I was able to catch up with lot of folks and socialize a bit more. It was great meeting lot of people who are active for a long time in FOSS world and it was also nice seeing the active volunteers. I should say I saw more volunteers than attendee’s but everyone was so active and seems excited about gnuNify!

Would like to thank Harshad Gune, Sudhanwa, Atul, Greg in getting me this opportunity to speak and interact with some real good folks , follow up post on Day 2 is next.