Six winters ago, I was still in college and preparing for my upcoming Summer Internship. This was the year I had to make it “big” so the plan was elaborate. My primary target was a CERN project in GSoC the decision for which was still pending, otherwise I’d go to Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC, Mumbai) which was all set.
Sometimes, things don’t go as planned. It’s called Life. And Life got me with that rejection mail. Although I don’t remember how I felt, It was intense enough to make me forego all my plans for the summer including Mumbai. It was sad. I did spend the summer at my house, working on IoT firmware for ESP32 devices by day and slaying on Counter Strike by night.
Cut to present
I started writing this post on my way back from Geneve. For the past few days I was visiting Cern for my first Cephalocon. And while the Talks, Boothkeeping, and podcast (keep reading) were a bit overwheling, I did manage to nerd out in between strolling through the CERN campus (in Switzerland and France!). CERN had also arranged for some technical tours to the LINAC, Antimatter Factory (picture above) and Data centre.
Other than letting loose the geek, Me and rest of the Ceph team at Canonical (consisting of resilient Engineers, a meticulous Technical Author and a dynamic Product Manager) spent 3 days in Geneve listening and talking to Ceph community members about Ceph in general and what we are trying to achieve with MicroCeph.
My Talk: MicroCeph Remote Replication
I presented what we were cooking for the past cycle to the Ceph community. The talk had a brief overview of MicroCeph RBD replication and a demonstration of how an operator can take advantage of it to set up and configure remote replication for MicroCeph clusters. I could sense some of the viewers catching the MicroCeph vibes as they shared my excitement while watching MicroCeph replication UX on the huge screen above my head.
Since my talk was on the first day of cephalocon, I continued to meet folks from the Ceph community who looked at me and said “MicroCeph ?” weirdly assuming that is my first name. Jokes apart, the feedback we received from the community was mostly positive and we are already drafting action items some of which I can already see myself writing about in near future.
Other talks I loved
The complete schedule and presentations for Cephalocon24 are available online.
There was an interesting talk about how CERN consumes Ceph and Openstack for their data centres. Talks by Adam Kupczyk (IBM), Marcel Lauhoff (Clyso GmbH), Wido den Hollander (your.online) were about past and current performances of Ceph. Trent delivered an amazing talk about benchmarking storage. Phil demonstrated QAT compression and how that can deliver a better bang for your buck in data centres. Friends from IBM and Clyso demonstrated Lua scripting based conditional tracing. While I could not attend all the talks, I did hear the term “Crimson” a lot. I guess, we’ll hear more about it in the future.
Podcast with Radio Tux
When I was on my way out of the Auditorium, I met Ingo Ebel who mentioned Radio Tux and that he has been doing such podcasts for about 20 years! We had an amazing conversation about MicroCeph and its philosophy. He certainly is a professional because all his questions were on point. The episode is still not up on their website but I am eagerly waiting for it.
We also discussed what benefits MicroCeph can bring to Developers, Operators and Consumers of Ceph. I also shared comments from some of the community members i met at Cephalocon.
Boothkeeping adventures
Back L2R: Kellen Renshaw, Dan Hill, Phil Williams, Maksym Medvied, Luciano Lo Giudice, Sharon Koech
Front L2R: Trent LLoyd, Me: Utkarsh Bhatt
Major Missing: Peter Sabaini sorry my photoshop skills are not good enough.
Special Thanks
Thanks to all who were involved in the organisation of
Cephalocon at CERN. It was an amazing experience both as an attendee and as a speaker. Special mentions to Phil Williams and the Canonical Events team for their efforts in the administration and organisation for us.
I also have this warm feeling of gratitude which can be best expressed as The old poet Drake did
I can’t do this on my own, someone watching this shiz close.
Thanks for reading!