The European edition of the OpenStack Summit concluded in Barcelona, Spain,October 28. Back in 2010, the first OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, had only 75 attendees. Six years later, the Barcelona event welcomed more than 5,000 attendees from all around the globe.

OpenStack is often compared with the Linux kernel: What Linux has been to servers, OpenStack has been to infrastructure and cloud. Giants like AT&T are building their future networks on top of OpenStack, and companies like Volkswagen are using OpenStack to build their infrastructure. Anni Lai of China Mobile drew a direct comparison between OpenStack and Linux. She said, “OpenStack is a little bit over 6 years old compared to Linux [at] 25 years old. We are still a youngster; however, our speed of innovation and our presence in data centers are not less than Linux, which is mostly due to our open collaborative platform and culture.”

During the event, Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, announced four new gold members, including City Network and Deutsche Telekom in Europe and 99Cloud and China Mobile in China.

The Foundation also announced the winner of the OpenStack Superuser Award, China Mobile, which did some massive deployments of OpenStack. In a later interview, a China Mobile representative told us they are building a public cloud on OpenStack that competes with AWS.

Some of the major highlights of the event included keynote speeches from members of the scientific community. Tim Bell from CERN gave a talk about how the organization is using OpenStack to handle massive amounts of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider. Dr. Rosie Bolton of SKA (the Square Kilometre Array project) also gave a keynote talk around the possible use of OpenStack in the radio telescope project.