LISA '14: Our Talks, BoFs, a CentOS Dojo, and in the Expo & Lab

"Did you go to LISA last year? It was awesome/interesting/informative!"

No. No, I did not go to LISA last year, nor any other year, thank you very much for asking me or telling me about it for the umpteenth time.

My reasons for never going were mostly professional: with the event's laser-like focus on deep technology, this is not necessarily an exciting show for media. And last year at this time I was also contracting with a certain other Linux company and getting ready for their annual corporate event. So, as I approach the first anniversary of my Red Hat tenure, LISA is the last big event that I will be cycling through for the year.

And, I have to say, I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

Red Hat's attendance at the event will be significant, given our involvement in computer science and technology. Besides an active booth presence at the LISA '14 Expo, several Red Hat speakers and a co-located dojo will be part of the overall LISA '14 event.

Talks and BoFs

• Sunday, November 9: Jean-Charles Lopez will kick off the Red Hat speaker line-up with his Introduction to Ceph. Learn about the history of Ceph and get to know how Ceph, as Software Defined Storage, uses its different components to offer Object access (S3 and Swift compatible), Block Level access, and File Level access.

• Wednesday, November 12: In his talk, Finding a Good Home: Choosing the Right Data Store, Jeff Darcy will deliver an overview of key factors that should drive purchase and design decisions, and he'll compare block stores, object stores, file systems, and even databases to use in a high-scale storage system.

• Wednesday, November 12 BoF: Docker and Kubernetes Containerized Applications BoF led by Mark Lamourine

• Wednesday, November 12 BoF: "Fedora Server: Returning to Our Roots " BoF led by Stephen Gallagher

• Thursday, November 13: Identity management is a tricky bit of business, especially in the open source world, where solutions abound. Brian Atkisson will highlight these systems and discuss how Red Hat integrates them all in his talk, Open Source Identity Management in the Enterprise.

• Thursday, November 13: One thing that must go hand in hand with any discussion on cloud computing is security. Cloud computing rocks, but not if it isn't locked down. Dan Lambright will examine Penetration Testing in the Cloud, and highlight how even tools like Docker can play a role in testing and securing cloud systems.

• Friday, November 14: Containers are at the peak of hype, led by the excitement surrounding Docker. But is this hype justified? Or can innovation be tempered and improved by better management and control? This is the problem Project Atomic hopes to solve, and one that I will examine in my discussion, Getting a Hold of the Hype: Making Containers Useful with Project Atomic.

• Friday, November 14: Managing hundreds of Linux systems is usually done by an experienced system administrator using a patchwork of stand-alone tools and custom scripts running on each system. But according to Russell Doty, there is a better way to work – to manage more systems in less time with less work – and without learning an entirely new way of working. In his presentation, Simplified Remote Management of Linux Servers, Doty will outline just how this kind of workload can be eased.

CentOS Dojo

CentOS Dojo at LISA '14 will kick things off with its one-day program in Redwood AB on November 10 at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel. This free-of-charge event will focus on getting things done with CentOS, including topics such at continuous integration scaling, DevOps, and Docker. Like all other dojos, the event will feature tutorials, case studies, and in-depth discussions of technologies in the CentOS sphere of influence.

LISA Lab

Meanwhile, starting at 9:00AM on November 12, and running 24-hours a day until 5:00 p.m. November 14 will be the LISA Lab, an interactive workspace where visitors can download and try out the latest in cool and interesting technology, including a live lab version of oVirt 3.5, the open source virtual datacenter management platform.

Greg Sheremeta will hold lab office hours on Thursday from 2PM-3:30PM. Greg is mostly a front-end developer at Red Hat with about 15 years experience in full-stack web development. Currently focusing on UI infrastructure on the oVirt project, Greg was responsible for implementing the PatternFly look-and-feel project in oVirt. Meet him in the lab to work on your oVirt setups, or swing by the oVirt shared booth space in the expo hall.

Whatever your interests may be, there's sure to be a lot of events and discussions at LISA '14 that will interest you. This is one event where I think the reality will surpass the hype.

(Thanks to Greg Sheremeta for contributing to this article.)