Audience Level

All audiences

Synopsis

OpenStack Keynote

Speaker Bio’s

Jonathan Bryce: Executive Director, OpenStack Foundation: Jonathan Bryce, who has spent his career building the cloud, is Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. Previously he was a founder of The Rackspace Cloud. He started his career working as a web developer for Rackspace, and during his tenure, he and co-worker Todd Morey had a vision to build a sophisticated web hosting environment where users and businesses alike could turn to design, develop and deploy their ideal web site – all without being responsible for procuring the technology, installing it or making sure it is built to be always available. This vision became The Rackspace Cloud. Since then he has been a major driver of OpenStack, the open source cloud software initiative.

Heidi Joy Tretheway, OpenStack Foundation: At the OpenStack Foundation, Heidi Joy spearheads the User Survey, branding, and content marketing. Previously, Heidi Joy led marketing communications for a mobile software company and global communications for a commercial real estate firm. She is an author, former journalist, and frequent speaker on marketing, writing and publishing.

Tristan Goode, Aptira: Over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry has given Tristan a solid reputation as an innovative architect in systems infrastructure and enterprise solutions. Forward-thinking with strong attention to detail, Tristan has been responsible for designing, implementing and maintaining solutions for the likes of BTR Nylex, NEC, OzEmail, Intel, and iPrimus. Tristan has an unwavering commitment to exceed expectations for both the business and the customer, and is driven by his personal desire to create unique, effective solutions for any requirements Aptira’s customers may present. Tristan is a founding and 4 times elected Board Director of the OpenStack Foundation, an OpenStack Ambassador, and the founder of the Australian OpenStack User Group.

Jessica Field, Aptira: Jessica is the Marketing Director for the leading provider of OpenStack services in the APAC region – Aptira, and also sits on the Board of Directors for OpenStack. For the past decade, Jessica has been an active contributor to the Open Source community in Australia. This includes running multiple Open Source and technology meetups in Sydney, and have previously held positions on two industry Boards: the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA), and the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA). Jessica co-organises the Sydney OpenStack User Group, and OpenStack Australia Day. She has also organised a range of other industry events in Sydney, including Port80, Magento and the Australian Web Awards. Jessica also manages the creative design agency – Onefishsea. Having completed her MBA in 2014, Jessica currently lives in sunny Port Macquarie and loves the beach.

David F. Flanders, OpenStack: David F. Flanders is a wrangler of communities for the OpenStack Foundation, specifically growing the application developer community and University sector engagements. Previously having worked in University datacentres and Entrepreneurial investment funds, Flanders loves the challenge of understanding how brilliant people come together as a community to shape the future of the information sector.

Sonia Ramza, OpenStack: Sonia joined the OpenStack Foundation in 2017 in the community management division, taking on tasks such as the user group process and managing the Ambassador program. She is also working to increase student engagement through new initiatives like “OpenStack comes to Campus”.

Audience Level

All levels

Synopsis

OpenStack offers many advantages for organisations building out their cloud environments, including flexibility and community-driven innovation. However, enterprises looking to deploy OpenStack in production typically find its storage management capabilities wanting from the perspective of management complexity and business resiliency. Enterprises are also challenged when it comes to ensuring protection of their data and providing the necessary performance – especially for their tier one applications. Meeting these fundamental needs is critical for enterprises to proceed confidently with their OpenStack deployments.

Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack is a software-defined storage management solution uniquely developed for OpenStack based clouds. It leverages direct attached storage (DAS) and provides enterprise-strength capabilities that enable robust, production-scale deployment while meeting performance and data protection needs. Learn how this innovative solution, coupled with other relevant Veritas offerings, solve the remaining issues around implementing OpenStack within the enterprise.

Speaker Bio:

Tarso dos Santos works as a Technical Account Manager at Veritas, directly engaging with customers to develop strategies, architectures and solutions with focus on Cloud –  Openstack, Containers, Data Protection, High Availability and Compliance.

He has over 21 years in the IT industry architecting, delivering and positioning solutions such as private clouds, distributed systems, hpc, storage, and  high available platforms.

Tarso has a great interest in distributed systems performance, and scientific organizations that push the boundaries of existing technologies, but also need to link these into the Enterprise.

Tarso in his life has enjoyed working in some of the most amazing projects ranging from mission critical systems protecting Australian lives, to IT infrastructure projects that are looking at the sky and discovering new planets out in the space.

Audience Level

All levels

Synopsis

JR Rivers, CTO and Co-founder of Cumulus Networks, discusses how the Gartner-coined term “web scale IT” has become an architectural approach that is shaking up existing enterprise IT. Deploying a web scale IT approach increases control of IT environments and reduces costs. With large cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google and Facebook reinventing the way in which IT services can be delivered, what are other companies looking at to emulate the architectures, processes and practices of these cloud behemoths? This session will cover:

• How the open approach of web-scale IT frees enterprises to “best of breed” approach to suit their unique requirements, regardless of vendor or hardware, having a profound impact on the way they purchase and consume IT.
• Why, because of this transition, companies are able to reduce their time to market for IT services, enable freedom of choice of infrastructure, and lower infrastructure costs.
• How commoditization and standardization are reducing costs, while maximizing value. Using such architecture means lower CapEx/OpEx expenses and higher operational efficiency.
• How the proliferation of web scale IT is challenging today’s cloud admins and architects to possess a different skillset than traditionally seen.

Speaker Bio:

JR is a co-founder and CTO of the company where he works on company, technology, and product direction. JR has been involved with networking since Ethernet only ran on coaxial cables. He’s worked on some of the most foundational networking products of their time, from early Network Interface Cards at 3Com through switching and routing products at Cisco. JR’s early involvement in home-grown networking at Google and as the VP of System Architecture for Cisco’s Unified Computing System both helped fine tune his perspective on networking for the modern datacenter.

Audience Level

All levels

Synopsis

Our journey towards solving our Application and Infrastructure Problems using Immutability, Codification, Mesos, Docker and Ironic.

Audience Level

All levels

Synopsis

Speaker Bio:

Peter Jung is a Senior Business Development Manager at Red Hat where he leads the practice in the areas of Cloud, SDN/NFV and IoT across Australia and New Zealand. He is passionate about open innovation and open source software development model as the foundation for next generation society and ICT systems. Prior to Red Hat, he had various roles at Cisco and Dell for 15 years. He holds a BSEE and an MBA.

Audience Level

All levels

Synopsis

Often times, prospects and existing OpenStack users wonder if there is indeed strong business and technical value proposition for cloud platforms serving a specific industry vertical.

In this session, EasyStack would like to share with the participants our experience engaging with an industry leader to build a credible solution platform catering to their current and future business and technology roadmap.

Speaker Bio:

Audience Level

Beginner

Synopsis

Migrating is never simple, but migrating from a traditional infrastructure to a private cloud infrastructure adds a whole new layer of complexity and raises a number of questions for IT decision makers. Come learn first hand how to begin to migrate your traditional infrastructure management tools and processes to OpenStack.

This session will provide details on common questions and answers to help administrators avoid costly mistakes. Learn what to look out for, what to avoid, how to identify risks and how to mitigate them.

Speaker Bio:

Avi is an accomplished technical product manager with extensive experience across the operating system, virtualisation and application stacks.

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

The data we create, publish and archive is only increasing. There are more and more offerings for scalable and cost effective storage for our cloud solutions. This talk aims to cover some of the business and operational advantages of object storage as opposed to file system solutions. There will often be a cost to this change with your existing legacy application suites.

Speaker Bio:

Andrew Boag is the Managing Director of Catalyst IT Australia and has worked in a range of technology roles. Including Media, Telecommunications, Web Application development and Solutions Architecture. Andrew is passionate about free and open source technology.

Audience Level

Beginner – Intermediate

Synopsis

As we are moving towards smaller units of applications or microservices containers are the most popular method to wrap and deploy the applications. The applications will need to be distributed and highly available, but what options do we have to solve this issue?
In this talk, we will look at how to distribute our containerised applications. Not only on the orchestration layer, we will also look at secure communications on the networking layer and persistent data stores.

Speaker Bio:

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

Hostworks is a part of the Inabox group and an Australian based Managed Hosting and Services Provider with a strong background in management of infrastructure, servers, and applications following Traditional Enterprise management practices. 2 years ago, we began our transition to adopt and deploy cloud technologies and mindsets with an on On-Premises OpenStack platform as part of a larger hybrid cloud offering. This presentation details how we did it, what went wrong, and what went right, important lessons and recommendations for other businesses who wish to follow the same path.

Speaker Bio:

Audience Level

All levels

Speaker Bios:

Roland Chan: Roland has been in the Internet industry for almost twenty years, running business critical technology delivery organisations to build some of Australia’s largest telco, ISP and digital media solutions at OzEmail, WorldCom and Telstra.
Roland’s focus on engaging with customers and understanding their needs combined with a cutting edge technology delivery method makes Aptira a flexible delivery partner for any organisation.
In 2015, Roland assumed Aptira’s seat on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors.

Tom Fifield: Since gaining experience working to support an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider – the largest scientific endeavour in the world – Tom has been passionate about large-scale distributed computing. Tom has worked alongside collaborators from dozens of countries to facilitate distributed computing design, reliable operations in minimal staff environments and interoperability between different technologies. After working as a cloud architecture consultant and team lead to create clouds for several years, Tom is now tackling the most important part of distributed systems – people, as a community manager.

Talia Sela: Tali Sela is a Product Manager for Cloudify – meaning she dedicates virtually all of her waking time to bettering the world through open source code. Tali brings extensive experience in coding, product management and diverse cloud and enterprise IT technologies to help deliver an excellent user experience for Cloudify. Prior to Cloudify, Tali was a Technical Account Manager at Microsoft, Planning Cloud solutions for a variety of technical customers. During the little personal time she has left, she likes to hike, jog and collect rubber duckies. Come say hi, she’s friendly.

Sara Ogston: Experienced Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Strong professional skilled in Project Management, Operations, Analytical Skills, and Risk Management. Passionate about increasing diversity in the IT industry. Board member of Vic ICT for Women a, non profit organization which increases the entry, retention and progression of women in IT. Steering Committee member of Go Girl, Go for IT and lead of Grad Girls program offering of Vic ICT for Women.

Quinton Anderson: Head of Engineering and Platform Products, Commonwealth Bank. I am a delivery focussed IT Leader. I believe in building a team with the right people and then enabling them to succeed. I believe that a highly motivated and skilled team is vital to success and that my role in a management position is to create an environment in which this exists and then combine it with the appropriate processes, domain expertise and technology to create success. I find delivering IT projects extremely challenging and exciting. I believe that software systems should be engineered through quantitative and disciplined processes and that quality should be an absolute focus.

Audience Level

All levels

Audience Level

Beginner

Synopsis

The Nectar Research Cloud provides an OpenStack cloud for Australia’s academic researchers. Since its inception in 2012 it has grown steadily to over 30,000 CPUs, with over 10,000 registered users from more than 50 research institutions. It is different to many clouds in being a federation across eight organisations, each of which runs cloud infrastructure in one or more data centres and contributes to a distributed help desk and user support. A Nectar core services team runs centralised cloud services. This presentation will give an overview of the experiences, challenges and benefits of running a federated OpenStack cloud and a short demonstration on using the Nectar cloud. We will also describe some current approaches that are looking to extend this federation to encompass other institutions including some in New Zealand, to extend the infrastructure using commercial cloud providers, and to move towards interoperability with the growing number of international science and research clouds through the new Open Research Cloud initiative.

Speaker Bio

Dr Paul Coddington is a Deputy Director of Nectar, responsible for the Nectar national Research Cloud, and also Deputy Director of eResearch SA. He has over 30 years experience in eResearch including computational science, high performance and distributed computing, cloud computing, software development, and research data management.

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Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

The traditional user experience for High Performance Computing (HPC) centers around the command line, and the intricacies of the underlying hardware. At the same time, scientific software is moving towards the cloud, leveraging modern web-based frameworks, allowing rapid iteration, and a renewed focus on portability and reproducibility. This software still has need for the huge scale and specialist capabilities of HPC, but leveraging these resources is hampered by variation in implementation between facilities. Differences in software stack, scheduling systems and authentication all get in the way of developers who would rather focus on the research problem at hand. This presentation reviews efforts to overcome these barriers. We will cover container technologies, frameworks for programmatic HPC access, and RESTful APIs that can deliver this as a hosted solution.

Speaker Bio

Dr. David Perry is Compute Integration Specialist at The University of Melbourne, working to increase research productivity using cloud and HPC. David chairs Australia’s first community-owned wind farm, Hepburn Wind, and is co-founder/CTO of BoomPower, delivering simpler solar and battery purchasing decisions for consumers and NGOs.

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

OpenStack has received a bad reputation from Operators, who claim it is difficult to get it running and keep it up to date. But the containerization revolution that has been sweeping application development is changing that for the better. We’ll investigate some of the issues with OpenStack deployment, and investigate how placing OpenStack services into containers dramatically simplifies the manageability of the platform. We’ll also cover how containers and virtual infrastructure can work hand in hand in a modern Datacenter architecture.

Speaker Bio

With 20+ years in the automation space I find all things cloud interesting. By focusing on the latest models for operations and application automation, I help enable value from OpenStack, Containers, CAPS tools, and Dev/Ops CI/CD pipelines. I am the CTO and Founder at Kumulus Technologies, a San Francisco Bay area infrastructure focused Dev/Ops consultancy. I am also a Certified OpenStack Administrator.

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

High performance computing and cloud computing have traditionally been seen as separate solutions to separate problems, dealing with issues of performance and flexibility respectively. In a diverse research environment however, both sets of compute requirements can occur. In addition to the administrative benefits in combining both requirements into a single unified system, opportunities are provided for incremental expansion.

The deployment of the Spartan cloud-HPC hybrid system at the University of Melbourne last year is an example of such a design. Despite its small size, it has attracted international attention due to its design features. This presentation, in addition to providing a grounding on why one would wish to build an HPC-cloud hybrid system and the results of the deployment, provides a complete technical overview of the design from the ground up, as well as problems encountered and planned future developments.

Speaker Bio

Lev Lafayette is the HPC and Training Officer at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that he worked at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing for several years in a similar role.

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

The latest SDN revolution is centered on creating efficient virtualized data center networks using VXLAN & EVPN. We will talk about the scale, performance, and cost advantages of using a modern controller-free virtualized network solution built on 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches with hardware based VXLAN Routing. We will explore the ease of automating such a network in an OpenStack environment and take you through a real world use case of using OpenStack Network Node bridging between a bare metal cloud (EVPN) and a fully virtualized cloud environments (orchestrated by Neutron).

Speaker Bio:

David has held leadership roles at 3COM, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and IBM where he promoted advanced network technologies including High Speed Ethernet, Layer 4-7 switching, Virtual Machine-aware networking, and Software Defined Networking.

David’s current focus is on the evolving landscape of data center networking, scale out storage, Open Networking, and cloud computing.

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

Today’s fast-paced development environment has changed the compliance landscape. Many software projects consist of more than 50% Open Source Software (OSS) components, but as much as 99% are undocumented, increasing the complexities of managing your company’s software compliance process.

Of particular concern is “Zombie software”, or software that is outdated and contains vulnerable versions of certain components. Zombies can live in your code forever if you’re not aware of them. The acceleration of modern development lifecycles and the breakdown of an undocumented software supply chain have opened up new pathways for zombies to enter your software – leaving you exposed to security threats.

This presentation discusses best practices for implementing an Open Source Software management strategy that covers common pitfalls and commercial licence issues as well as the optimal way to track and eliminate the risks associated with Zombies!

Speaker Bio:

Involved in and around IT development for over 20 years, starting as a web developer using NotePad in 1995 when the most exciting thing online was Sun’s animated Java coffee cup, through Numega Pre-Sales selling BoundsChecker and now into the brave, new World of Open Source and software composition analysis.

Audience Level

Intermediate

Synopsis

We will discuss how we do monitoring on the Nectar research cloud, utilising tools like OpenStack tempest, Nagios and translating this into a user facing dashboard.

Speaker Bio:

Andy is a DevOps engineer working at the University of Melbourne in the Core Services team for the Nectar Research Cloud.

Audience Level

Beginner

Synopsis

This talk will review the Open Compute Project, where it came from, where things are now and where things are headed. We will cover benefits that Open Compute Project provide over the typical server hardware that we’re used to.

We will discuss how it works for the large scale operators, and the issues that affect the small scale operators from the perspective of a small scale operator.

Speaker Bio:

Audience Level

All levels

Synopsis

Digital data and digital methods are turning our old notions of research upside down. They’re the new language of research, and cloud is one of the many tools we can apply to the art of discovery. Big questions and big research will need to speak this new language, a language which connects minds and platforms globally. What are we doing right now in aid of this vision? And what’s coming?

Speaker Bios: 

Dr Steve Quenette: Steve has been Deputy Director of Monash University’s eResearch Centre since 2010. The centre’s mandate is to greatly accelerate use and access to world-class computational, data-oriented and multi-modal research infrastructure and scientific methodologies. The centre services almost 5000 researchers across Monash University, the Monash precincts and Australia. He is responsible for driving high-performance computing on the cloud, data-analysis driven computing infrastructure and safe environments for medical research, all leading to world-first announcements. Steve is an applied mathematician and computer scientist, with a primary research area of programming language theory, and application to parallel programming, computational problems in the sciences, and inversion. He has long applied this expertise to geodynamics and geophysical problems, previously holding a position at Caltech and being co-author to software underpinning numerous a Nature papers.

Sarah Nisbet: Sarah Nisbet is eRSA’s Marketing and Communications Manager. Sarah began her career delivering communications solutions in the health care sector where she mastered the art of working across institutions, departments and organisational silos. Sarah has a Bachelor of Media from the University of Adelaide and an Industry Certificate (Festival & Event Design & Management), she is also a member of the Australian Science Communicators and the Public Relations Institute of Australia. She specialises in delivering creative and innovative marketing and communication solutions and has managed local and national projects for eRSA, NeCTAR, NeAT, AeRO and the State Government of South Australia. Having successfully deployed a new tier 0 user documentation system at eRSA, Sarah was the project lead for the tier 0 development for core NeCTAR services, supporting a national initiative to provide world class user support for the Nectar Cloud. Sarah is currently the Project Manager of the Australian National Cultures and Community Project, which is looking to enable better data sharing and discoverability between researchers and archives. Alongside stakeholders, such as National Library of Australia, National Australian Archives, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office (TAHO) and Queensland State Archives, we’re developing an Open API to test the concept that if a research adds value (transcription, metadata, annotation) to a dataset from a cultural institution, how can that be shared back to the source institution (API, catalogue record, linked records, machine to machine capabilities)? This pilot project aims to operationalise a national, sustainable and scalable API standard that will allow data (and metadata) sharing and transfer between the Prosecution Project, TAHO and QSA.

Paul David Coddington: Dr Paul Coddington is a Deputy Director of NeCTAR, responsible for the Nectar national Research Cloud, and also Deputy Director of eResearch SA. He has over 30 years experience in eResearch including computational science, high performance and distributed computing, cloud computing, software development, and research data management.