Riding the clouds to Tokyo

A quick succession of late year conferences is starting this week as I head to Tokyo for the bi-annual OpenStack Summit. While I am not involved in the OpenStack community directly, my Open Technologies group here in the IBM Cloud division has a large (and growing!) contingent of OpenStack contributors, PTLs, and other community members, including our OpenStack Foundation board representative, Todd Moore. Outside of our IBM Cloud division, many IBMers across the company are involved in OpenStack-based product development or systems enablement—for example, PureApp, POWER or System z—on top of OpenStack. Given that, it’s not unusual for IBM to have over 100 people at any given OpenStack conference. With our Bluebox acquisition since the last conference in Vancouver, we’ve only grown in size in the past six months—not to mention our “acquiring” of Monty Taylor, Kyle Mestery, and other key community members.

So, why would a Docker developer and maintainer go to the OpenStack conference? To talk about Docker of course! I’m excited to have three opportunities this week to speak on the integration of Docker with OpenStack and other open cloud technologies. If you’re in Tokyo I’d love to meet you, and better yet, have you visit any of the following sessions with my colleagues from around IBM. For a great summary of all the IBM sessions you can check out Nate Ziemman‘s overview of IBM sessions blog.

On Tuesday, I’ll be talking about the new libnetwork plugin model in Docker with SDN expert and IBM researcher (and Neutron contributor) Mohammad Banikazemi. We’ll talk about the activity in recently-announced Project Kuryr and demonstrate a unified network model between VMs and containers using Kuryr’s libnetwork plugin, features from the soon-to-arrive Docker 1.9, and Neutron.

On Wednesday, during IBM Client Day, I’ll share the stage with IBM Fellow—and brains behind our Bluemix Container Service—Jason McGee. Jason and I will share our activity in the open Docker community as well as recent foundations around containers—the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Beyond our activity in these open communities we are a strong partner of Docker, and utilize many pieces of the Docker ecosystem in our Bluemix Container Cloud offering.

On Thursday, I’ll join up with IBM security researcher, Salman Baset, to discuss our experiences with running a production public cloud container service on Docker. We’ll start with the basics about the attack surface differences between VMs and containers and walk through lessons learned in isolating and protecting containers in a multi-tenant environment, built on an OpenStack-based cloud. We regret that others from the security team weren’t able to make the trip, but I especially want to thank Stefan Berger, also from IBM Watson Research, who has been doing good work in the upstream Docker community and provided key information we will be sharing during this talk.

It’s going to be a busy week, but I’ll pretend this is a warm up for two conferences coming up in just a few weeks—Devoxx Belgium and Dockercon EU in Barcelona! Hope to see many of you from around the open source and cloud communities at one or more of these events!