In my keynote address a year ago at the OpenStack Summit Austin, I offered the OpenStack community an ultimatum. First, I described how our world was exploding with connected devices (50 billion by 2020) and that 400 million new servers would be needed to process and store that data, which creates a massive challenge for those of us in the infrastructure business. How will we meet the needs of users at that scale?

The answer is simple: collaborate or die.

Already we’re seeing a shift in the perspective of enterprises: they are demanding open source over proprietary tools. One of the reasons is that they want the power to combine open source technologies to get more done. Whether a container orchestration engine like Kubernetes, Mesos, or Docker Swarm, or a full-fledged platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, or Cloudify, users are finding the right combinations to meet their needs.

Just as the LAMP stack—the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP—gave rise to Facebook, WordPress, Drupal and millions of other web applications, I believe we’re seeing the LAMP stack of the data center emerge that will provide equally massive benefits, if we all collaborate.

Certainly, OpenStack, in its role as an integration engine, has a key role to play in the LAMP stack of cloud, but OpenStack can’t do it alone and we don’t need to waste time and effort reinventing the wheel. We as a community need to think bigger, reach beyond ourselves and make way for synergy.

New at OpenStack Summit Boston: Open Source Days

At the OpenStack Summit Boston, May 8-11, we will unveil a new program called “Open Source Days.”

Community members from Ansible, Ceph, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, Open vSwitch, OpenContrail, OpenSwitch, and OPNFV will each host their own dedicated content track featuring software roadmaps, user stories and important cross-community roundtables that highlight how each project is working with others to deliver open, agile and secure infrastructure options.

To be sure, we can learn much from each other about making open source initiatives thrive. We can share our insights on leadership, project management, teamwork, balancing the priorities of corporate and community, and more. But the goal of Open Source Days is loftier than that: we want to improve collaboration and technical integration throughout the diverse ecosystem of open source projects that OpenStack users rely upon.

We can start by taking a closer look at how our broad universe of users is innovating and pushing the envelope by combining open source technologies to get things done. I hope you will join us at OpenStack Summit Boston and make an extra effort to attend one or more Open Source Days sessions, with a mind open to the possibilities.

Demo or die

One of the most exciting aspects of each summit are the live demos, where we tempt fate by trying new and interesting combinations of open source services in front of thousands of people. The Boston Summit will be no exception: this time I’ll be showing off the power of Composable Open Infrastructure like Kubernetes attaching to Cinder for block storage while relying on Ironic for bare metal. Jakub Pavlick will also show the power of running Big Data applications like Spark and Kafka on one platform for bare metal, virtual machines, and containers, all attached to a common network via OpenContrail. Last, but not least, we’ll once again execute the Interop Challenge, pushing the envelope further by bringing in the CEOs of Cockroach Labs and CoreOS to demo a distributed database across OpenStack clouds running Kubernetes.

None of that would be possible without bringing together the best composable open infrastructure in new and creative ways, live from the stage.

We’re in this together, and together we can blow some minds with the power of collaboration.