It's Spring and that means the IT events season is in full bloom.  The calendar at that time of the year is packed and we are looking forward toONUG (Open Networking User Group) Spring 2016.  The event will be at held at Intuit's headquarter in Mountain View, CA fromMay 9-11, 2016.

It's going to be a great event to learn and exchange the latest developments in open networking and open storage. While ONUG was created in 2012, and has steadily grown since then, I want to share its Mission statement as a quick reminder:

The ONUG Mission is to enable greater choice and options for IT business leaders by advocating for open interoperable hardware and software-defined infrastructure solutions that span across the entire IT stack, all in an effort to create business value.  

This year's Spring event agenda is packed again with topics on Software-defined networking, orchestration, network automation, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Containers and much more. It features exclusive keynotes and panels with IT executives from the largest enterprises and government agencies, financial and industry analysts, foremost academics, and more. For a full agenda overview, go here.

I want to highlight one topic that is to drive business value and Cisco will be focused on in particular, that ofLinux Containers.

A few months ago, SDX Central -a Media partner of ONUG- released its "Inside the Linux Container Ecosystem Report", and I encourage you to check out the online version. An overview of Cisco's open source solutions is listed in chapter 7.

With Container solutions (and news) sprouting at a rapid pace while equally getting more and more mature delivering business value, I think Cisco's Mike Cohen put it best when he recently wrote on ONUG's Blog site that "few question that Linux containers signal a tectonic shift in how applications are built, deployed, and operated and their composition into microservices will likely become a best practice in application design".

My colleague Harry Petty wrote in his recent blog: Bring Application Intent to Networking Containers about how Cisco's Project Contiv compliments application intent to enable operational intent to specify infrastructure and policies for network, storage and compute.

We will be talking a lot about Containers at this year's event and both blogs are a great source to familiarize yourself with Cisco's Project Contiv before heading to ONUG's Acadamy next week. In case you still want to register for it -sign up for a 3 hour tutorial on May 9. To learn more about Cisco innovations in networking come join us: 

ONUG Academy

Monday May 9th 9:00AM-12:00PM

HANDS ON CONTAINER NETWORKING WITH CONTIV

ONUG Conference

Wednesday May 11th

Townhall Meeting and After Party 4:00PM-9:00PM:

NETWORKING IS FAST BECOMING THE BOTTLENECK FOR STORAGE AND COMPUTE, HOW DO WE FIX IT?

Hope to see you there!

Additional sources:

Cisco DevNet

www.contiv.io

www.mantl.io

www.ciscoshipped.io