A UDS restrospective

The Ubuntu Developer Summit  last week was an incredible event. The energy, excitement and passion around Ubuntu was palpable in the sessions, hallways and the neighbouring streets and restaurants. (The riot police were there for the Occupy protest, not UDS!) Over 650 attendees came from all over the world, the local environs, and we even had a few Ubuntu fans who were simply staying in the same hotel who were thrilled to see the community behind their favourite technology product in action.

I’d like to thank once again the sponsors of the event: HP, Google, Intel, Linaro, Qt, Oracle and Rackspace. Their support is critical to health of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community, and also demonstrates the importance of Ubuntu to their businesses.

An incredible amount of work gets done at each UDS. To see the breadth and depth of the topics addressed at this one, take a look at the schedule or the list of 272 blueprints registered for UDS. If you just want an overview of some of the outcomes of UDS, here is a video of the track leads summarising the highlights each track. And as usual we will publicly track the development progress throughout the cycle, allowing you to see how key features are progressing or to find areas in which you can contribute to the goals. You can see that Ubuntu 12.10 is starting to take shape already!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2hYVxK1_RY

Several times throughout the event I was asked what stood out about this UDS. The most striking thing for me in this UDS is the involvement of companies who are building their business and products around Ubuntu. Ubuntu and UDS have long had strong industry support, with OEMs and corporate customers hosting, sponsoring and speaking at previous UDS’s. But in addition to the sponsors mentioned above, at the UDS we saw:

– the worldwide debut of a Calxeda cluster using their EnergyCore ARM-based server chip. Later in the week Calxeda also demonstrated a scaling website deployment on this hardware using Juju and OpenStack
– the first  Ubuntu Cloud Day, with an impressive line up of speakers from HP, Cloudscaling, Rackspace, VMWare, Scality, 10gen, EngineYard, Iron IO, Scalr, enStratus, RedMonk and Canonical. Presentations and discussions focused on the importance of the open cloud and lessons from real cloud deployments, and it was clear how central Ubuntu is to majority of real world cloud use.
– an insightful talk from Thomas Bushnell from Google about their Ubuntu use

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3pT_9nb8o

This has also inspired a number of other companies to blog about their use – e.g., iAcquire recently blogged about their use of Ubuntu and associated cost-savings. If you have a similar post, leave a link in the comments.

I am also often asked about the history of UDS, how many we’ve had, where they were, etc. So for the history buffs, here’s a list of the events that have now become the Ubuntu Developer Summit (it took a couple years to settle into the current name and rhythm). I feel privileged to have been at all of them, and to have seen how they have matured into a best practice which projects from OpenStack to Linaro now adopt and help improve. I also have treasured memories from each – what do you remember most about each of them?

• Aug 2004 Oxford, England – aka Warthogs Conference. Working on 4.10 (Warty)
• Dec 2004 Mataro, Spain – aka The Mataro Sessions. Working on 5.04 (Hoary)
• Apr 2005 Sydney, Australia – aka Ubuntu Down Under. Planning for 5.10 (Breezy), co-located with an Ubuntu Love Day.
• Oct 2005 Montreal, Canada – aka Ubuntu Below Zero. Planning for 6.06 LTS (Dapper), co-located with an Ubuntu Love Day.
• June 2006 Paris, France – first event called Ubuntu Developer Summit. Planning for 6.10 (Edgy)
• Nov 2006 Mountain View, California. Planning for 7.04 (Feisty)
• May 2007 Sevilla, Spain. Planning for 7.10 (Gutsy)
• Nov 2007 Cambridge, Massachusetts. Planning for 8.04 LTS (Hardy)
• May 2008 Prague, Czech Republic. Planning for 8.10 (Intrepid)
• Oct 2008 Mountain View, California. Planning for 9.04 (Jaunty), co-located with a FOSSCamp
• May 2009 Barcelona, Spain. Planning for 9.10 (Karmic)
• Nov 2009 Dallas, Texas. Planning for 10.04 LTS (Lucid)
• May 2010 La Hulpe, Belgium. Planning for 10.10 (Maverick)
• Oct 2010 Orlando, Florida. Planning for 11.04 (Natty). Co-located with LinaroConnect.
• May 2011 Budapest, Hungary. Planning for 11.10 (Oneiric). Co-located with LinaroConnect.
• Nov 2011 Orlando, Florida. Planning for 12.04 LTS (Precise). Co-located with LinaroConnect.
• May 2012 Oakland, California. Planning for 12.10 (Quantal). Co-located with the Ubuntu Cloud Summit
• And coming up on 29 Oct – 2 Nov 2012 …  mark your calendar now and stay tuned for details about location, sponsorship and participation!