Last Thursday, 16th of February, a Cloud Computing and OpenNebula workshop took place in Timisoara, Romania. The event was organized by a team of passionate people as an initiative to spread the word about Cloud Computing in Romania. This was the first of a series of events that are going to take place around the country, especially in the cities with internationally recognized technical Universities.

The Workshop consisted of two parts. The first part was a presentation about Cloud Computing as a concept and how Cloud Computing revolutionizes the use and deployment of IT services. The pay-as-you-grow billing model was emphasized because it helps new startups and individuals.

In the second part of the event I talked about the open source ecosystem and OpenNebula. I presented the OpenNebula architecture with emphasis on Sunstone. I haven’t presented OpenNebula in greater detail because I wanted to show the participants how easy it is to use a Cloud after it’s set up. In the next events I am planning to do a live installation together with the participants, along with a thorough explanation and presentation of OpenNebula’s internal architecture.

A small use case was shown, the implementation of an email Cloud using OpenNebula, Postfix and Cyrus-IMAP. I started with stock Debian Squeeze (6.0.4) images and with the help of the contextualization mechanism from OpenNebula I built the VM to deliver the service. The Cyrus-IMAP mailboxes, and VM files are stored on MooseFS.  I will post details about the system on this blog in the near future. I am also building a git online repo with the contextualization scripts I have used in case anybody needs them.

Taking into account the number of participants, around 35 people, and the positive feedback I have received after the event I can say that the event was a success. You can find more details about the workshop on our Facebook page. Thank you OpenNebula community for this wonderful software you are all working on!