Rather than write a long report about what was new and exciting at OSCON this year, I will keep the event report short. Just one word: OSCON is mainly a conference for charities, companies, government and any organization that want to get an overview of what happened in open source to stay informed. This means its content covers a broad spectrum: from overviews to in-depth talks.
From my perspective, a few things were exciting at OSCON this year: Xen.org finally has a proper booth that we can re-use at events, we had a 3.5 hour Xen and XCP tutorial and we had community members involved in preparing and running our event presence.
At this point, it is really time to thank them in alphabetical order: George Dunlap (Citrix), Josh West (One.com), Steven Maresca (Zentific LLC) and Patrick F. Wilbur (PFW Research LLC) who helped man the booth and promote our project and community. I also wanted to thank their parent organizations or employers who either allowed them to take time out to visit and a special thank you where vacation days had to be used.
The guys also organized our Xen tutorial: you can find the slides on our slideshare channel and the Xen Vimeo channel (Oscon 2012 : From Datacenter to the Cloud – Featuring Xen and XCP – part 1, 2, 3 & 4). The tutorial covered a wide range of topics from Xen with PXE boot, the Xen API in detail, how to build High Availability with XCP, DRDB and Pacemaker as a step-by-step tutorial and other cool topics.
What was interesting is how many people actually use Xen: we had so many people coming to the booth saying that they have used Xen for years and never had a problem with it, had VMs that have been running without break for years and Xen just does what it says on the tin. This means that we are on the right path: we need to continue adding great new features to Xen and XCP, talk about them, improve documentation and work with distros and upstream projects to make Xen more easily usable.
Xen @ OSCON 2012
