We are pleased to announce Diablo, the fourth release of OpenStack.  In the 6 months since the Cactus release, we have seen the OpenStack community grow to over 1500 people and 110 member companies, and a great increase in the number of production deployments across the globe.  OpenStack continues to mature and build upon the momentum of the previous Cactus release.

This release marks the first 6 month release cycle of OpenStack.  The next release, Essex, will also be a 6 month release cycle and development is now officially underway. While Diablo includes over 70 new features, the theme is scalability, availability, and stability.

Feature Highlights

We’ll discuss briefly some of the new features among the core OpenStack projects.  For a complete list, please see the official release notes.

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

• Distributed scheduling across zones, allowing larger compute clusters
• A multi-host networking mode providing higher availability in DHCP and VLAN networks
• Ability to snapshot, clone and boot from volumes
• Ability to pause and suspend KVM instances
• Automated instance migration during host maintenance
• Support for Virtual Storage Arrays

OpenStack Storage (Swift)

• Multi cluster synchronization, allowing replication to multiple geographical locations on a container by container basis.
• Initial release of Swift Recon, middleware that allows monitoring of storage nodes and processes
• Ability to report statistics at the container level

OpenStack Image Service (Glance)

• New filtering and searching capabilities, simplifying management of large image stores
• Ability to share images between tenants
• Delayed deletion of images for increased performance

New Projects Overview

During the course of the Diablo release, there was quite about of activity around new and existing projects in the OpenStack eco-system that are poised to take on more prominent roles as of the Diablo release.  Two such projects, Identity and Dashboard, were promoted to core status during the Diablo cycle, meaning they will be officially supported projects as of Essex.  Quantum, OpenStack’s network as a service project, is in incubation status for Essex.  To learn more about the project incubation and core status promotion polices, please see The New Project Process.

OpenStack Identity (Core)

OpenStack Identity (code-named Keystone) provides identity management services across all OpenStack projects via a simple token based authentication system.  This will enable those running OpenStack in their environments to authenticate against their existing identity management systems.  Keystone will provide an abstract interface to a number of identity systems and support is planned for LDAP, ActiveDirectory, SAML, and OAuth.

OpenStack Dashboard (Core)

The Dashboard project provides a modular web based user interface to OpenStack.  This project highlights the functionality within OpenStack while providing a pluggable architecture that makes it easy for companies building products and services that extend OpenStack’s core functionality to integrate with the platform.  Today it provides both end users and administrators way to visualize and manage virtual infrastructure, quotas, object storage, network and security resources, and more.

OpenStack Quantum (Incubation)

Quantum is OpenStack’s network as a service solution, enabling advanced network topologies beyond what is possible today in Nova’s existing networking models.  Quantum will provide support for layer 2 over layer 3 tunneling to avoid the limitations of VLANs, as well as rate limiting and quality of service guarantees.  It will also provide support for monitoring protocols like NetFlow.

Upcoming for the Essex Release

Congratulations to everyone that helped Diablo come together!  Up next is the OpenStack Design Summit in Boston.  We will be planning the features and progress made during the last 6 months, and looking forward to the next 6 months of the Essex release.  Join us October 3rd through 7th at the Boston Intercontinental Hotel!

Why give your time and efforts to an online community? Researchers like Peter Kollock have identified and studied reasons for people to contribute to online communities. I try to keep the basic principles of online participation in mind for documentation contributors all the time, and find ways to recognize the people making a difference with the docs. The motivating reasons for contributing to technical doc or offering technical support in a community include:

1. Reciprocity – Help out others who will help you later or already did help you out.
2. Reputation – Build your reputation as an expert in a given area.
3. Efficiency – Write it down so you save time later, either your own time or others’ time.
4. Attachment – Feel like you’re part of a bigger mission and vision.

It’s within these motivating reasons to find a place where you belong that prompted me to send some t-shirts out last month. I also want to recognize their efforts here on the blog! Here is the CSS Corp Open Source Service Team sporting their OpenStack t-shirts in a team photo, led by Murthyraju Manthena (far left). This team contributed the OpenStack Compute Starter Guide, which quickly jumped to the top ten list in the web stats. They’re working hard on revisions for Diablo, and this manual was a great addition to the OpenStack technical library for the Cactus release.

There’s also the sense of reciprocity – giving back your info since you got Volumes working in your environment. Here’s Razique Mahroua sporting his shiny new ringer T as well, after re-vising the entire Volume Management section of the Compute Administration Manual.

Wearing your OpenStack t-shirt is a great way to show you are a Stacker. I realize that sending t-shirts to contributors can seem like a small token of appreciation for the sweat poured into docs, but I like to send them any way when I’m especially impressed with the dedication. These guys are also building a great reputation as OpenStack knowledge experts. They are also a huge reason why the number of doc contributors has jumped from six to nearly twenty in six months’ time!

The Essex Design Summit is less than a week away and we want to use every moment to make the most out of it. Having the whole OpenStack community in the same timezone, sharing the same rooms is a precious event. Therefore we’re having the room Salon C reserved all three days dedicated to the Unconference,  a freely-scheduled, first-come first-serve set of 25-min slots, separated by 5-min context switches (it’s possible to grab 2 consecutive slots to do a 55min session).

The Essex Unconference runs: Monday 9:30-10:25, 11:00-12:25, 14:00-15:55, 16:30-17:55 and Tuesday, Wednesday: 9:00-10:25, 11:00-12:25, 14:00-15:55, 16:30-17:55.

We’ll have a big paperboard and post-it ready to allow all community members there to propose discussion topics, schedule and tools to keep notes.

Every day after lunch breaks we’ll have Lightning talks, fast-paced 5-min slots between 13:30 and 13:55. Any subject is ok, as long as it fits in exactly 5 minutes. Make sure to practice your speech or performance as there won’t be any mercy if you go overtime.

OpenStack Community Newsletter – September 16, 2011

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please email stefano@openstack.org.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Diablo release is approaching: focusing on bug fixing and documentation
• Documentation blitz on Monday, Sep 19th: http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/09/openstack-documentation-blitz/
• If you haven’t already, register to the OpenStack Conference – http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/09/openstack-conference-registration-are-you-coming/

EVENTS

• OpenStack in action – September 21, Paris, France https://openstackinaction.eventbrite.com/
• Boston OpenStack User Group Meeting -  September 21, Boston, MA http://bostonopenstack.eventbrite.com
• OpenStack Conference – October 5-7, Boston, MA
• OpenStack Meetup -  October 13, New York City -  http://www.doodle.com/m9cki3wt3sdqhwk8
• OpenStack Hackaton, Wikimedia Foundation – October 14-16, New Orleans, LA  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

• Swift project moved its code to Github https://github.com/openstack/swift
• Diablo Release Schedule – http://wiki.openstack.org/DiabloReleaseSchedule
• Developer Team Meeting Minutes – September 13
  • http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack-meeting/2011/openstack-meeting.2011-09-13-21.01.html

GENERAL COMMUNITY

• OpenStack Wiki Recent Changes – http://wiki.openstack.org/RecentChanges
  • Documentation Meeting Logs http://wiki.openstack.org/Documentation/MeetingLogs
  • Nova Review Days http://wiki.openstack.org/Nova/ReviewDays
  • Draft proposal for Dynamic Cloud Network Services http://wiki.openstack.org/DynamicCloudNetworkService

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (8/12– 8/18)

• OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
  • 38 Active Reviews
  • 413 Active Branches – owned by 102 people & 18 teams
  • 1,658 commits by 76 people in last month
• OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
  • https://github.com/openstack/swift/graphs/impact
• OpenStack Image Registry (GLANCE) Data
  • https://github.com/openstack/glance/graphs/impact
• Bugs Stats for Week: 948 Tracked Bugs; 136 New Bugs; 67 In-progress Bugs; 17 Critical Bugs; 133 High Importance Bugs;
• Blueprints Stats for Week:  245 Blueprints; 4 Essential, 13 High, 24 Medium, 20 Low, 157 Undefined
• OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  16,421 Visits, 39,697 Pageviews, 56 % New Visits
  • Top 5 Pages: Home 41.32%; Compute 16.15%; /projects 13.39%; Storage 10.35%; Community 5.60%

I had a great idea come across my radar this week – a Documentation Blitz! I’ve been working on case studies for a second edition of my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, and in one of the case studies from Sarah Maddox at Atlassian, I uncovered a gem of an idea. From Sarah:

We have also held a couple of documentation blitz tests. This is a very successful way of involving the development and support teams in testing the documentation just before the release date. The technical writers set up a plan, including a list of the documents to focus on and a couple of ways people can give us feedback. We usually include an IRC channel, as well as wiki pages and comments, so that the engineers can choose the way that suits them best. We allocate a time period, usually just an hour, and everyone dives into the documentation. The chat session goes wild, comments fly, and we end up with a lot of useful feedback.

I love this idea and want to experiment with it for OpenStack. Fortunately the timing is just right, with the Diablo release ready for a September 22nd release. So, here’s the plan.

On Monday September 19th, from 2:00-3:00 CST (Monday, September 19, 2011 at 17:00:00):

• Add comments to the documentation pages at http://docs.openstack.org/docblitz (I’ll open these pages up on Monday).
• Chat about your findings in the #openstack IRC channel.
• Send out a tweet using #docblitz hashtag.
• Log a documentation bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-manuals.

To get coverage on the other side of the globe, we’ll run the Doc Blitz for a second hour at 11:00 pm – 12:00 midnight CST (Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 04:00:00).

Let’s go find some doc bugs!

OpenStack Community Newsletter – September 9, 2011

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please email stefano@openstack.org.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Registration Open for OpenStack Conference is open – http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/09/openstack-conference-registration-are-you-coming/
• OpenStack Governance Elections Completed – http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/09/openstack-governance-elections-fall-2011-results/
• Successful Launch of OpenStack China – http://www.openstack-china.org/en/

EVENTS

• Ohio LinuxFest 2011 – September 9-11, 2011 in Columbus, OH – http://www.ohiolinux.org/
• PyTexas 2011 – September 10-11, 2011 in College Station, Texas http://pytexas.org/PyTexas2011
• OpenStack in action – September 21, Paris, France https://openstackinaction.eventbrite.com/
• Boston OpenStack User Group Meeting -  September 21, Boston, http://bostonopenstack.eventbrite.com
• OpenStack Conference – Boston, MA – October 5-7, 2011

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

• Diablo Release Schedule – http://wiki.openstack.org/DiabloReleaseSchedule
• Developer Team Meeting Minutes – September 09
  • http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack-meeting/2011/openstack-meeting.2011-09-06-22.01.html

GENERAL COMMUNITY

• OpenStack Wiki Recent Changes – http://wiki.openstack.org/RecentChanges
  • Getting The Code http://wiki.openstack.org/GettingTheCode
  • Keystone – http://wiki.openstack.org/keystone

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (8/12– 8/18)

• Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
• OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
  • 38 Active Reviews
  • 389 Active Branches – owned by 100 people & 18 teams
  • 1,671 commits by 79 people in last month
• OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
  • 1 Active Reviews
  • 78 Active Branches – owned by 25 people & 6 teams
  • 67 commits by 14 people in last month
• OpenStack Image Registry (GLANCE) Data
  • https://github.com/openstack/glance/graphs/impact
• Bugs Stats for Week: 898 Tracked Bugs; 118 New Bugs; 63 In-progress Bugs; 16 Critical Bugs; 123 High Importance Bugs;
• Blueprints Stats for Week:  241 Blueprints; 4 Essential, 12 High, 18 Medium, 20 Low, 157 Undefined
• OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  15,533 Visits, 37,558 Pageviews, 54.43 % New Visits
  • Top 5 Pages: Home 41.80%; Compute 15.8%; /projects 13.11%; Storage 9.86%; Community 5.52%

The OpenStack community is once again meeting in less than a month in Boston, MA to educate, discuss, and plan for the future of cloud computing. The community is asking for cloud computing enthusiasts, open source gurus, IT leaders, and technologists to take part in our open discussion. The event is held at the Boston Intercontinental Hotel from October 5 – 7, 2011 with industry leaders from Dell, HP, Nebula, NetApp, Canonical, NTT, Rackspace, DreamHost, CloudScaling, RightScale, MPStor, SolidFire, and Piston to name just a few. Registration is now open with discounted hotel rooms available until September 16.

The OpenStack Design Summit, held three days prior to the OpenStack Conference is the community gathering of developers putting together the features and architecture for the next community release, Essex. This event is now sold out and the waiting list on Launchpad is being closed on Tuesday, September 13 at Noon GMT.

Lew Moorman, President of the Rackspace Cloud, recently discussed the state of Rackspace’s OpenStack plans in a blog post.

In addition to running OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) for over a year to power their cloud, Rackspace is now running OpenStack Compute (code named Nova) for select customers. Head over to the Rackspace Cloud blog to learn more.

They also recently announced dates for training classes on OpenStack, and will be in full attendance at the OpenStack Conference in Boston next month.