Monday 1st , 2017 … the alarm is ringing … it’s 3:00 AM … the time is arrived … let’s wake up … finally the Red Hat Summit is going to start !
After submitting my proposal and being accepted for a session with Christian Posta about JBoss AMQ and Apache Kafka … a few months have passed and one of the most thrilling experience in my work life is about less then 7000 kms far from me.
It’s 7:00 AM … the plane takes off and my mind starts to think about last year when, as a new hired, I was reading a lot of emails related to the Red Hat Summit materials and demo preparation from other “veteran” employees … I couldn’t imagine that after just one year I would have been one of the guys for the next summit !
Naples … Frankfurt … and finally Boston. I start to breath the summit just outside the airport with a lot of Red Hat advertising boards; the company has invested a lot of money and time for giving the best experience to employees, partners and customers in order to engage each other finding the way to collaborate and doing business but starting from something completely free … the freedom to think, to develop and to share ideas and projects with the community.
Yes ! … because this is the Red Hat … no NDAs … no restrictions … no limits … it’s all up to you … you are completely free … free to propose, to design, to collaborate and … finally having an “impact as an individual” (cit.)
Yes ! … every person as an individual has his freedom and more individuals make a community developing ideas … becoming the biggest “company” in the world with million of developers. This is the way for innovation, no other way is the way to go. In such a model, every single person with a different experience and a different background can give his contribution to any open source project improving and enriching it. Every single person has an “impact as an individual” but for doing that he needs to be in the right context and Red Hat is the leading company on doing that.
After landing to the Logan airport I set my compass to the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center with my new friend Bolek; I have never seen him, it’s the first time we meet in person even because he doesn’t come from my messaging team but from the Keycloak one. This is one of the great things of this kind of big conferences; you’ll meet a lot of colleagues, customers, partners or community members from all around the world sometimes for the first time even if you chat with them almost every day. During this summit I’ll be in a shared accommodation with other two guys from the Keycloak team, Sebastien and Bruno, other than one of the “gurus” of my team, Ted.
The venue is huge, people are coming for the checkin or the onsite registration and the staff is building the partners pavilion; it must be ready for the coming day … and it will be !
Let’s the summit begin ! A lot of speakers, from Red Hat and other companies, are bringing their knowledge and experience here with a common denominator … sharing what they are doing in the “open” way. Two keynotes every day and each one packed; all the rooms for the breakout sessions will be packed as well.
Announcements on JBoss AMQ 7, OpenShift, RHEL, Microservices and all the other projects and related products make the attendees so enthusiastic because there are a lot of things to do. New projects will come so let’s “start something” (cit) in the right way … “try, learn & modify” (cit.).
New announcements with “old” partners like Amazon, consolidation with other partners like Microsoft and experiences from big customers like Deutsche Bank. They trust us … they trust the way how Red Hat is the only company able to make an open source project reliable and usable at the enterprise level.
Attending the David Ingham and Ted Ross sessions around JBoss AMQ 7 make me so proud to be part of this team. They have been working so hard in the last years for bringing customers a new powerful experience doing messaging : the new broker, the new router component and the new clients. If you need to do messaging in your business there is no choice : from the hybrid to the cloud, AMQ 7 is the answer. And let me say that it will be even the pillar for the coming “baby” that is on its way : trust me … “incredible” guys are working on that, EnMasse is its name … the “messaging as a service” platform of the future.
The IoT business is something that a lot of customers are exploring too and the “IoT Codestarter” evening event organized together with the Eclipse Foundation and Eurotech (our partner) is a great opportunity for hacking from the field with sensors and gateways to the Cloud : Kura and Kapua are the involved projects but I can say … pay attention to Hono as well (not only just because I’m working on that ;)).
On my side, the last day, when it seems that all the people are tired and want just to come back home, the room is packed. Why to use JBoss AMQ 7 ? When to use Apache Kafka ? Can I use them together ? I and Christian give the answers to these questions to the attendees. Even in this case, a lot of interest around that … “playing” around Kafka is on our radar (while I’m writing, this session has raised a lot of discussion on Twitter as well).
Last but not least during these days I’m falling in love with Boston day by day; it seems to be ten or more cities into only one. Walking through the city and longside the river is a great experience.
Three days have passed, all the Red Hatters and the other attendees are leaving Boston with a new freshness and the certainty that more great things are coming. What does it mean ? The countdown to the next summit is already started, San Francisco will wait for us, let’s see how every person will have his “impact as an individual” during this year.
This is the open source, this is Red Hat, this is the summit … something that you can breath every day which makes you part of a big community where the power, as I like to say, is always in the “collaboration” !
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