Who Down With OCP?!?

YEAH YOU KNOW ME!

I went to six conferences in forty eight days and that’s just a bit overwhelming.

I had this abstract idea that it was over the course of the around eight weeks or so but then I looked at the actual dates and pulled it up on a calendar calculator and now I want to vomit.

FORTY. EIGHT. DAYS.

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the year when i didn’t attend ANYTHING.

Wait, no, I did That One Thing – OpenStack Project Team Gathering where I did a ton of interviews and OMG I just realized I have to edit SO MANY VIDEOS.

Aw, crap.

Now, part of the not travelling AT ALL is because I was coming back from maternity leave and didn’t want to travel while the twins were so young and part of the travelling WAY TOO MUCH is because dayum if I didn’t just plan for that so poorly but also I really missed travel and speaking and doing All The Things.

Let’s make 2019 much more balanced and not have entire quarters of no travel NOR have entire quarters of all the travel, mkay?

Also, my partner will kill me, understandably, kthxbye. Cause three kids and one parent is ROUGH.

#OneYearOldTWINS
#FourYearOldBOY
#OneParent
#OW

But first, let’s look back at that travel insanity and Learn The Lessons.

As an aside, I started to write up ALL of the travel reports at once and got completely overwhelmed, so this is ONLY THE FIRST TWO.

Bite sized chunks are bite sized.

Open Compute Project Regional Summit : 01-02 October : Amsterdam The Netherlands

I attended this particular conference on behalf of my boss’ boss who was invited and is the contact person for Red Hat’s membership of the Open Compute Project.

However, she couldn’t attend and I live in the Netherlands, so No Worries.

I attended the keynotes which included an absolutely stunning live demo – OCP/OPNFV Running a Central Office on OCP Gear and checked out Archna Haylock’s OCP Primer.

The hallway track was absolutely invaluable as well as I ran into one of the organizers of OpenStack Days UK and discussed why so many European OpenStack Days were not happening this year (because OpenStack Summit was in Berlin).

A colleague and I attended to determine if Red Hat should remain a member of OCP and frankly within three hours, I had my answer – YESSSSS!

The benefits were overwhelmingly positive – opportunities for marketing, partnership, research, and sales – and very much worth the modest community membership cost.

I’m absolutely ecstatic that Red Hat is going to renew their membership and look forward to all the collaboration opportunities!

OpenPower Summit EU : 03-04 October : Amsterdam The Netherlands

If I hadn’t attended the previous conference, I wouldn’t have received an invite to attend this one and OMG SO HAPPY I DID.

I have been working for almost a year to enable OpenStack on Power – it’s something that Red Hat enabled on RHOSP but that isnt’ enabled by default within RDO.

You can find instructions for making it work, but if we’re already doing it in our product, why not get it upstream as well?

To that end, I started the process of borrowing Power systems from IBM and thought it would be a MOST EXCELLENT idea to attend OpenPOWER.

I walk in to set up Red Hat’s booth and right next to it are these blinking lights and so OF COURSE I struck up a conversation and within about ten minutes we figured out that not only did we know the same people, but this was the guy who approved whether or not people could borrow Power systems.

“Well, now that I know you.”

Holy …!

And then, of course, I took a group on an escape room and attended an amazing talk about Proteus – a Custom Platform for Hybrid Memory Research and ended up in the Sights and Sounds From OpenPOWER Summit Europe 2018 video.

No big deal.