Over the next few weeks, we'll be introducing some of our speakers - beginning with a local Canberran open source developer, Michael Still!

If you're interested in speaking at CompCon, our Call for Proposals is still open - submit now!

Michael Still is a Nova and Oslo core reviewer at Rackspace, where he works on the Open Source OpenStack project as part of the Private Cloud team. He spends most of his time hacking on the libvirt virtualization layer in OpenStack Nova.

Before joining Rackspace in 2012, Michael spent six years as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google and one year as an Operations Engineer at Canonical. In both roles, he was responsible for maintaining and improving web systems with millions of users. He was also the director for linux.conf.au 2013, the largest Open Source conference in Australia.

Michael holds a Bachelor of Engineering with first class honours from the University of Canberra in Australia, where he lives with his wife, three kids and a ludicrous number of pets. In his spare time, he enjoys reading bad science fiction and working on OpenStack development.

Michael will be talking about OpenStack Nova.

OpenStack Nova is the compute portion of the OpenStack open cloud project. That means that Nova is responsible for booting your virtual machines and then managing them once they're booted. Nova supports a variety of hypervisors, as well as pluggable software defined networking. This talk will cover a quick over view of Nova, and then deep dive into how the libvirt hypervisor driver works.

Due to its openness and popularity, Nova makes a good choice for cloud and cluster computing research. There are around 800 active developers on OpenStack, and a community which is helpful and friendly.