First off, Red Hat Summit last week in Boston was awesome. The level of excitement around OpenStack and in particular on what Red Hat has been doing upstream and with our soon to be released products was tangible.

There were a lot of great sessions at Summit, but I’ve picked a handful here that I think are an excellent primer for both OpenStack, elastic cloud and what we’re doing with RDO (and Red Hat OpenStack too). These are all worth watching, especially Keith Basil’s elastic cloud explanation and his fish video (it was mesmerizing) :)

http://www.redhat.com/summit/2013/presentations/
http://www.redhat.com/summit/2013/gallery/

Paul Cormier’s Keynote:
http://videos.cdn.redhat.com/2013-summit-keynotes-cormier.mp4

Brian Stevens’ Keynote:
http://videos.cdn.redhat.com/2013-summit-keynotes-stevens.mp4

Chuck Dubuque and Gerry Riveros: Introduction to Red Hat OpenStack
http://videos.cdn.redhat.com/2013-summit-cloud-1.mp4

Gerry and Chuck are both part of the marketing team at Red Hat. This presentation is a great way to get an understanding of where RDO/RHOS is applicable vs. existing datacenter virtualization (RHEV).

Keith Basil: Introduction & Overview of OpenStack for IaaS Clouds
http://videos.cdn.redhat.com/2013-summit-cloud-3.mp4

Basil is a product manager at Red Hat on OpenStack. This presentation is a good overview of OpenStack components, but I think the better part is the explanation of elastic cloud and what makes applications elastic vs. not.

Russell Bryant: OpenStack Architecture
http://videos.cdn.redhat.com/2013-summit-cloud-9.mp4

Russell is the upstream Nova project technical lead (PTL). This presentation is a deeper dive into OpenStack components than what Keith provides, specifically, Russell focuses in on how you can provide high availability and scaling for each of the core services.