SCALE 11x - Day 3 Report

Breakfast - I had breakfast with Kir, his wife and daughter (the son must have been doing homework or playing video games back in the room?) at Dennys. I had a veggie-skillet. It was great.

OpenVZ Booth - Sunday was a much slower day. Activity in the larger exhibit room seemed to be much higher than it was in the Pacific room where the OpenVZ booth was. I spent quite a bit of time twittling my thumbs.

Daniel Robbins stopped by to see Kir again but he was temporarily away from the booth. When he got back I sent him over to talk to Daniel.

I talked to a long, blond-haired Google employee for an extended length of time... about fingernails. He had very long fingernails (for a dude) that kind of looked like claws so I asked if he played the guitar. He told me quite a bit about fleet programming and mapping memory to the disk... and mentioned that Google uses Ganeti and Xen for internal virtualization stuff... but not for running their external facing services. I learned more about fingernails than I thought possible.

OpenVZ Booth - KirTwo guys came up to the booth to ask if they could borrow my terminal window for a minute. I asked why and one said he wanted to show the other GNU Screen for the first time. I told them not to use screen but to use tmux instead... and then broke into an impromptu demo of tmux. They were amazed. Then a third friend came up who said he had been using screen for years but as a serial communications program (after having previously used minicom)... and that he had no idea that screen had the terminal multiplexing features that 99.9% of other screen users use it for. Showed him tmux too. I referred them to a UTOSC 2012 video on Screen vs. Tmux. They were very happy to learn it and thought it was awesome that it came from an OpenVZ booth and wasn't about OpenVZ. :)

There were about a dozen people who stopped by the booth to ask about OpenVZ. One guy said he had been to Bozeman before because he wife was on a trip skiing in the Bozeman area and broken her leg so they ended up visiting the Bozeman hospital.

Other Booths - Hard KernelI visited the Fedora booth and got the Multi-Desktop Live DVDs for Fedora 17 and 18 along with some stickers. I also got some media from the OpenSUSE booth. I really enjoyed several of the hardware related booths. For example there was a company there named ODROID Hard-Kernel that had a number of tiny Linux machines. The Tiny-Core booth had a few tiny machines as well. The server hardware guys were there with HP, ServerMicro and ServersDirect among others. Inkscape, KDE, LibreOffice and VideoLAN were represented. Several Linux distros had booths including Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Tiny-Core. Did I leave anyone out? Cloud providers were there in numbers... as were storage solutions, databases, and backup solutions. The usual third-parties were there like the FSF, EFF, FreeBSD / PC-BSD, OpenBSD, OLPC, and Haiku. Linux box makers were there like System76 and Zareason. Various area user groups had booths. There were close to 100 booths in total. I believe I got pictures of everything.

OpenShift Presentation - I went to a presentation at 3PM entitled, Build Your Own PaaS using OpenShift Origin given by Red Hat's Steven Citron-Pousty (ODP slides). He was giving away 4GB USB thumb drives that were stainless steel with a bottle opener to those who asked good questions. I asked a good question but I didn't want the swag. OpenShift is available as an online hosted service (public cloud on Amazon EC2 known as OpenShift Online), as a pay service from Red Hat known as OpenShift Enterprise, or as a do-it-yourself upstream project known as OpenShift Origin. The only thing OpenShift requires is either Red Hat Enteprise Linux 6 (or clone) or Fedora. I learned that OpenShift uses SELinux and cgroups to make service gears which are functionally very similar to containers. OpenShift is an elaborately designed system whereby a wide variety of components can be mixed and matched quickly and easily to stand up almost any web-based service. Some of those services include databases, middle-ware, development languages, frameworks, developer tools, and some packaged web applications. Each category is a who's who of big name open source projects. OpenShift grabs what you want it to, creates a gear of out of it, and then auto-magically configures everything with a unique private IP address and uses HA-Proxy to tie it all together. Other, non-web-based, services are on the road map but do not currently have a target date. OpenShift looks very interesting for hosting companies or any mid-to-large company that is constantly deploying a number of new web-services. The fact that they have tied together SELinux and cgroups to make psydo-containers is very interesting. Someone in the audience asked if they considered OpenVZ and Steve said he didn't think so because he was unfamiliar with it. In summary with OpenShift, System Administrators can easily deploy anything that developers want and developers can do what they need to do and very little more.

Post Show - After the show I just went back to the room and watched TV. The Oscars came on. They come on much earlier in L.A. They ended at 8PM. I watched more TV (while uploading pictures I took from the show). Then the local news came on. It had the normal news stuff except they also included who was attending whos after oscars party. Being in L.A. on Oscars night is kind of cool.

Conclusion - This was my first visit to SCaLE and I must say I was impressed. The Hilton was a very fancy place to have it and the accommodations for the presentations were reasonable. SCaLE definitely was not the only stuff the Hilton had going on as I saw a number of other events in a few of the other conference rooms.

Wnen the show was over there was a team of about 10 people from SCaLE breaking down all of the network stuff. This was their 11th year and it went like clockwork. There was a significant amount of Linux luminaries and a wide variety of talks that ranged from beginner to kernel development and everything in-between. There were close to 100 exhibit booths and tons of swag. The exhibit floor was packed for much of Saturday but quite a bit thinner on Sunday. The exhibitors were made up of a good mixture of commercial venders as well as .org projects. While I was stuck in a booth for most of the show I did get to attend a few presentations. Supposedly most of the presentations were video recorded and I hope to see them posted online ASAP so I can check them out. I'd definitely attend a future SCaLE if given the opportunity.