Kata, Kata, Kata!

I swear that was all I heard during the week of the very recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. I was not in attendance this time (nor the previous time), but I'm an OpenStack enthusiast, I make an effort to stay current on what's happening with it, and I had never even heard a whisper about Kata. Yet suddenly, it was the absolute star of the show. There were almost non-stop mentions of it on social media and in the press. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if the Summit was Coachella, Kata was Beyonce.

So naturally, I was curious. Why was everyone so excited about Kata? Was Kata the name of the latest OpenStack release? No, couldn't be. They still go in alphabetical order. Should have been on Q or R by now and way past K. Was it a new OpenStack project? If so, why hadn't I heard of it before? Who was working on it? Where did it come from? And what did it do?

I could have read one of the many, many posts that featured Kata in the headline to acquire this information, but I was hoping I could get someone from the OpenStack Foundation on the show to tell me about it instead. So I DM'd Anne Bertucio and happily, she agreed to sit down and repeat everything she'd already explained 800 times the week before at the event. If you also missed the Summit and are also the kind of person who is too busy to read beyond the headlines, this episode is for you. In it, Anne explains:

• Where Kata originated
• Why the OpenStack Foundation took Kata on
• How two different camps of potential users are reacting to Kata
• Which verticals are going to benefit most from Kata
• The role that integration will play in the future of OpenStack
• How to get started with OpenStack
• What we can expect in the Rocky release

To hear all of this in a much more detailed and interesting format, check out the full episode below and hear it from Anne herself. If you prefer audio-only, it's also available on iTunes and SoundCloud.

And if you'd like to check out past episodes of this podcast (we've got almost 50 of them!), just pop on over to the archive at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cloud/podcasts.html. Really. Do it. There's some great stuff in there.