Dear OGF community,

Please take note of the following Cloud Plugfest testing event. This is a nearly all-week informal set of testing and prototyping sessions at which new code, techniques and methods are demonstrated and used for all types of cloud interoperability and standards implementation testing.

The event is open to all and requires only a free registration and agreement to a participation agreement. (Nearly everything presented there is actually open source or completely free of restrictions, and I have never seen a case in any of these events in which the NDA was actually enforced. It is there only to protect you if you want to bring something to the event, or someone else who might want to do so, that is not yet ready for public release, and these days almost everyone works in an open-source way, so use of that clause is a vanishingly small probability.) 

This is a great event for students, new and experienced researchers  and code developers on shared infrastructure projects to attend. It is the 24th event in this series, and this series has produced some great software that is integrated into a wide variety of production-quality projects. The purpose is not to impress or market, but to give developers and cloud researchers a chance to learn and use emerging technology before it is ready for production.

OGF supports this event and is one of the long-standing co-organizers. We have held Cloud Plugfest events at many OGF meetings and at meetings of related collaborating and affiliated organizations.

Please register at http://cloudplugfest.org and let the organizers know at planners@cloudplugfest.org if you have any questions.

Alan Sill, President, OGF
On behalf of the Cloud Plugfest organizers

----- Event information below -----

CloudWATCH2 & SNIA Cloud Interoperability Plugfest 24 Sept. 19-21 2016

The CloudWatch2 project is pleased to announce its cooperation with SNIA to host and organise a Cloud Interoperability Plugfest colocated with SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2016 in Santa Clara, CA, USA from 19 - 22 September 2016.

While the F2F part of the plugfest is provided by the organisers of SDC2016 targeting show visitors, it is also open for remote participation by other members of the standards community. 

Also, as it is tradition with Cloud Interoperability Plugfests, participation is *not* limited to testing against standards originating from the organising standards development body (in this case, SNIA) - the network of SDOs is closely knit, and support each other through liaison and interop events. So, you are just as welcome if you would like to test interoperability on standards stewarded not only by SNIA, but also (in no particular order) OGF, OASIS, DMTF, ETSI, IEEE, and many, many more. The common goal here is interoperability, not competition among SDOs!

Participation is open to anyone and free of charge, either as an SDC2016 visitor or from remote, with the only requirement being to register at the website http://www.cloudplugfest.org/.

Prepare your participation with a safe test environment (so as to not impede the production environment if things go wrong), hang out in the main chatroom to get started and take it from there! Connection and comms details will be provided to participants in due time.

What is a "plugfest", and what does it have to do with interoperability?

In a nutshell, a plugfest is an event where developers of independently written software come together to find out whether and how well their code works with other developers' code - they plug their software into each other and see what will happen.

Figuratively speaking, if the test environment doesn't go up in flames, then the two software components are close enough to interoperate with each other, and more formalised testing can commence. 

If the test results are what was intended, then these two software packages interoperate - often, this is governed and measured against publicly defined specifications (or in short, standards) such as HTML, HTTP, SOAP, OCCI, CDMI, and many other examples.

As this is a Cloud Interoperability Plugfest, we are going to focus on open standards in that area, such as OCCI, CDMI, CIMI, TOSCA, CAMP, XACML, SAML, X.509 profiles.

Why should I participate?

In essence, these events are shared quality assurance activities:

Cloud Interoperability Plugfests are a safe environment to test your code's degree of conformance with the respective standard, and how well it interoperates with other implementations of the same standard.

Ideally, standards would be interpreted identically by all implementers, and hence all implementations would interoperate, but often enough that is utopia (though standards authors work very hard to minimise this). Such situations, where tests fail, the analysis of the failures can discover shortcomings in the standard document itself, illustrate discrepancies in interpretation, or in formal testing settings, errors in the test suite used.

I don't want to get embarrassed by e.g. failing on interoperability, or don't even want my participation known for a number of reasons, is that possible?

Yes. Plugfests have a long history of commercial participation, which would not have been possible hadn't every participant accepted the NDA protecting the event. In short, the NDA forbids any participant to use any information or insight gathered at these events for any other activity but improving their own software's standards conformance and interoperability.

However, without going too much into legal details, it is possible for participants to agree on public release of bespoke information gathered at plugfests for as long as the publication does not compromise confidentiality towards other participants.