Virtualization & Cloud devroom at FOSDEM

The Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, or FOSDEM, is an institution that happens every year in Brussels. A busy, free and open event that gets a lot of developers together for two days of presentations and cross-pollination. There are typically the FOSDEM main tracks (a set of presentations chosen by the FOSDEM organization) and a set of devrooms, which are topic-oriented or project-oriented and can organize their own schedule freely.

This year, FOSDEM will host an unusual devroom, the Virtualization and Cloud devroom. It will happen in the Chavanne room, a 550-seat auditorium that was traditionally used for main tracks. And it will last for two whole days, while other devrooms typically last for a day or a half-day.

The Virtualization and Cloud devroom is the result of the merging of three separate devroom requests: Virtualization, Xen and OpenStack devrooms. It gives us a larger space and a lot of potential for cross-pollination across projects ! We had a lot of talks proposed, and here is an overview of what you'll be able to see there.

Saturday, February 4

Saturday will  be the "cloud" day. We will start with a set of talks about OpenStack, past, present and future. I will do an introduction and retrospective of what happened last year in the project, Soren Hansen will guide new developers to Nova, and Debo Dutta will look into future work on application scheduling and Donabe. Next we'll have a session on variouscloud-related technologies: libguestfs, pacemaker-cloud and OpenNebula. The afternoon will start with a nice session on cloud interoperability, including presentations on the Aeolus, CompatibleOne and Deltacloud efforts. We'll continue with a session on cloud deployment, with a strong OpenStack focus: Ryan Lane will talk about how Wikimedia maintains infrastructure like an open source project, Mike McClurg will look into Ubuntu+XCP+OpenStack deployments, and Dave Walker will introduce the Orchestra project. The day will end with a town hall meeting for all OpenStack developers, including a panel of distribution packagers: I will blog more about that one in the next weeks.

Sunday, February 5

Sunday is more "virtualization" day ! The day will start early with two presentations by Hans de Goede about Spice and USB redirection over the network. Then we'll have a session on virtualization management, with Guido Trotter giving more Ganeti news and three talks about oVirt. In the afternoon we'll have a more technical session around virtualization in development: Antti Kantee will introduce ultralightweight kernel service virtualization with rump kernels, Renzo Davoli will lead a workshop on tracing and virtualization, and Dan Berrange will show how to build application sandboxes on top of LXC and KVM with libvirt. The day will end with another developers meeting, this time the Xen developers will meet around Ian Campbell and his Xen deployment troubleshooting workshop.

All in all, that's two days packed with very interesting presentations, in a devroom large enough to accomodate a good crowd, so we hope to see you there !