Armed to the teeth with coffee, Danishes and laptops, a band of merry men, led by Sir Duncan McGreggor*, set out yesterday morning to rob the royal Essex release of any and all bugs.  The gathering of this crack dev team marked the inaugural Meetup of OpenStack Atlanta, a new local chapter in the rapidly growing community.

DreamHost’s team in Atlanta facilitated the Hack-In event and hosted it in a cozy cottage.  Rakish beards aside, these happy hackers made great strides in testing Essex.  In order to maximize their impact, the Atlanta-based group reached across the country and coordinated their efforts with fellow coders at Canonical in Colorado and DreamHost in San Francisco.

Tech highlights include:

• Testing out development deployments of OpenStack using Vagrant (some successes, some blockers)
• Testing out dev deployments of OpenStack using VirtualBox directly
• Filed some bugs for issues in Horizon regarding error feedback to users and how the documentation is generated
• Dug into issues with logging and inconsistencies in datestamps
• Uncovered some weirdness with the usage of gnu screen and hanging services/partial DevStack installs due to sudo assumptions (DevStack assumes a passwordless sudo, and will label an install as failed if it gets hung up on the apache log tail, waiting for a password, even if the install was successful and all the services started correctly)
• Doug Hellmann made his first commit upstream to OpenStack

Bug banishment:  A bug in Horizon was uncovered and was confirmed later that day.  It’s currently marked as high priority and is slated to be fixed in the first Essex release candidate.

Special thanks to Lloyd Dewolf and Tristan Goode for facilitating the Essex OpenStack Global Hack-In.

*Knighthood could not be confirmed at the time of this posting.

Essex is a release focused on improving the integrity of OpenStack, so our first Global Hack-In is right at the start of the release candidate cycle, the start of March, 2012. The event brings together physically developers that spend their days or their nights making OpenStack.

http://wiki.openstack.org/OpenStackUsersGroup/EssexGlobalHackIn

The event is focused on testing and getting familiar with the release and exploring areas outside of your expertise. Collaborators will be working on resolving high priority bugs, and exploring, reviewing and testing OpenStack Essex.

Thanks in advance to DreamHost, Gold Coast Techspace, Piston Cloud, MercadoLibre, Yahoo, Mirantis, Citrix, Ubuntu, and Rackspace for sponsoring these events. Special thanks to my co-conspirator Tristan Goode of Aptira and the OzStackers for representing with 3 local events in Australia!

It’s not too late to have a Hack-In at your location, just add the information to the wiki. Even if it’s just you and a friend opening your door to fellow stackers, it’s a great way to start a local community.

Last Friday February 24 at the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney the Australian OpenStack User Group had a special meetup with James Williams, CIO of NASA AMES Research Centre. For those not in the know James and AMES had a key role in the establishment of Nebula and OpenStack.

Last week we heard James was in the country for a conference and was passing through Sydney, so an invitation to meet the User Group was extended and James graciously accepted at very short notice. James’ enthusiastic evangelism for OpenStack was very inspiring and everyone attending managed to get a chat in. On behalf of the Australian OpenStack User Group and the evening’s sponsor Aptira, thanks to James for fitting us into his hectic schedule.

More pictures are available over at TechWorld.

Head to our Australian Meetup group to get involved, or join the AU Google group.

On February 2^nd, a league of extraordinary gentlemen gathered inside a crowded chamber for the “Ceph Lords” OpenStack SF Meetup.  About 75 Stackers were in attendance making this event a smashing success!

If you missed this Meetup, then you should watch the recorded presentations in order to experience the lively discourse.  Also, check out the photos that were taken by the Piston Cloud crew.  They did a good job capturing the fun, relaxed ambiance of the gathering.

The Meetup was facilitated by Piston Cloud and hosted by DreamHost.  Scrumptious tacos were catered by Tacolicious, and Magnolia Brewery provided a keg of ice-cold California Kolsh beer.

Ceph was in the spotlight throughout the Meetup.  For those few who are still unfamiliar with Ceph, it’s a massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system.  The presenters focused primarily on how Ceph works with the cloud software stack, and how it’s currently being implemented in production.

The DreamHost team kicked off the event.  Ben Cherian provided a brief overview on the reasons why DreamHost chose to use Ceph as the storage foundation for their current hosting products and upcoming cloud services.

Tommi Virtanen dived into the Ceph platform from a technical perpective.  He described the major components of Ceph, its storage architecture, and how it distributes data.

Carl Perry talked about how DreamHost is currently deploying Ceph.  He touched on specifics such as the hardware and tools involved, the level of automation, and things learned along the way.

Christopher MacGown, Co-Founder and CTO of Piston Cloud, was the final presenter.  He opened with how storage should work in a cloud environment and why Piston Cloud chose Ceph as the backend storage solution.  He finished by describing how his company is using Ceph with the Piston Enterprise OS™ software.

For those attending CloudConnect 2012 in Santa Clara –   Join stackers from all over the world at the OpenStack CloudConnect 2012 party at Fahrenheit Lounge, hosted by Mirantis, Rackspace and Cloudscaling.

Open bar, Hors D’oeuvres and music all night long. This is the place to be at CloudConnect on a Wednesday night.

We’ll have shuttle buses available every 30 minutes, traveling between Santa Clara Convention center parking lot and Fahrenheit Lounge starting at 8pm, immediately after the Cloudscaling cocktail reception.

Registration is first come, first serve and the space is limited. Visit openstackparty.eventbrite.com to register.

This is a guest post from Devdatta Kulkarni. Thanks Dev for sharing!

The Computer Society of India (CSI) Pune chapter organized an OpenStack talk with me, Racker Devdatta Kulkarni, on Saturday January 21, 2012 from 5.00 pm – 6.30 pm.

Approximately 35 people attended. The audience primarily consisted of people with a technical background. Technology professionals were the most represented category followed by college students, followed by researchers.

I divided my talk into two parts. In the first part, I touched upon the need for OpenStack, the project’s history and mission, and the current projects. In the second part I delved deeper into design and architectures of Nova, Swift, Glance, and Keystone, and concluded with information about how to participate in the community.

At the end of the talk I did a quick show of hands to find out how many attendees knew about OpenStack prior to the talk. Given that I saw only three hands in response, I think the talk certainly helped in raising the awareness of OpenStack within the technical community in Pune.

Here are some of the questions that came up at the talk. Anne Gentle wrote the answers for the questions and I want to share with the attendees as well as OpenStack blog readers.
Question 1) Performance benchmarks of OpenStack deployments. They have experimented with deployment of about 200 VMs and were seeing average VM creation time of about 20 minutes. They wanted to know if this was something expected. Also, they were wondering if there are any OpenStack performance benchmark results that can be shared with the community.
Anne: A 20 minute wait sounds like a long time to me for a single VM but a short time for 200 Vms. We haven’t found a good way to share performance benchmarks yet but a post to the mailing list would probably elicit responses. I’ve also seen John Dickinson talk to folks on IRC about their Object Storage benchmarks.

Question 2) Guidelines on topology. They wanted to know if there are any published guidelines regarding the optimal topology, such as number of glance servers, number of compute, volume, and network nodes in Nova deployments?
Anne: I’d recommend they take a look at http://referencearchitecture.org for both physical and logical architecture diagrams that show the number of servers and how to scale out a deployment.

Question 3) Active Directory support in Keystone. Is this being discussed within the Keystone working group?
Anne: It’s often discussed but no one has stepped up to write an AD plugin for Keystone yet that I know of.

Question 4) Is there a QEMU-based development environment for OpenStack?
Anne: Try out http://devstack.org and if you run it in a VM, it’ll use QEMU.

Question 5) Can you give pointers to learning material?
Anne: Each of the projects has a development docs site (nova.openstack.org, glance.openstack.org, swift.openstack.org, and so on). You’ll find API and admin docs at docs.openstack.org.

We’re making progress on the next OpenStack Design Summit (April 16-18) & Conference (April 19-20) at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco — one week, two events.

Hotel Rooms
We have a discounted hotel room block at the Hyatt under OpenStack, which is now available to book. Please make sure to designate yourself with the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference when booking.

Sponsorship Prospectus
Sponsorships are going fast, and the prospectus is available to download at the Conference website. There are a limited number of opportunities at the top levels, which are first come, first serve, with a signed agreement. If you have any questions about the prospectus, please contact sponsors@openstack.org.

Speakers & OpenStack Demo Session
We’ve also opened the OpenStack Conference call for speakers. We need your help to build out an informative and compelling agenda, including user stories, technical advancements, best practices and visions on the future of OpenStack. New to this Conference, we are also planning an OpenStack demo session, a chance for companies building products around OpenStack to present in front of the community and a panel of judges. The deadline to submit speaking sessions is February 15, and more details and deadlines for the OpenStack demo session will be announced shortly.

As a reminder, the OpenStack Design Summit is made up of working sessions for developers contributing to OpenStack. The OpenStack Conference reaches a broader audience, including users and the business ecosystem, in addition to the OpenStack technical community. Because the events are co-located, the sponsorship prospectus and hotel room block cover both events, but the call for papers is strictly for the OpenStack Conference. The Design Summit sessions and schedule will be determined by blueprint submissions, the Project Technical Leads and Release Manager.

We encourage you to make travel arrangements for the April events, and registration will open shortly. Look forward to seeing everyone in San Francisco!

On Tuesday January 17 at the Exchange Hotel in Melbourne the inaugural Australian OpenStack Users Group meetup Part 2 took place. This followed up on the Sydney event last month and took the same format, being a casual informal get together for some drinks and conversation focused on OpenStack. We kicked off around 6pm and had an attendance of around 45 OzStackers. Many many thanks to everyone that came along!

Once again we had our attending vendors present a short overview of their company’s involvement in the project. The speakers were Mark Randall, Rackspace Country Manager for AU/NZ, Daniel Pendlebury, Citrix Lead Systems Engineer for Datacenter and Cloud, Gavin Coulthard, Manager – Field Systems Engineering A/NZ at F5, Peter Jung, Cloud Solutions Architect at Dell, and Andrew White, Data Centre Architect from Cisco. Following the vendors, an awesome contribution to the evening came from Dr Steven Manos, ITS Research Director from the University of Melbourne, who presented an overview of the NeCTAR project. Rounding out the talks again was Phil Rogers from Aptira.

Again as in Sydney, there was a great sense of community, lots of smiles and laughter and much conversation and enthusiasm to share information and experiences. As social events go, both this and the Sydney events have been very successful, the next round of meetups scheduled for early March will see us presenting a more structured meetup schedule with a focus on technical, with demos and the like.

Head to our Australian Meetup group to get involved, or join the AU Google group.

We are excited to announce that the Spring 2012 OpenStack Design Summit & OpenStack Conference are planned for April 16-20, 2012 in San Francisco, California. Please start making plans to join us!

Learn more about the events on The Official Event Page.

Please note: Registration has not yet opened. More details, including accommodations, call for papers and the sponsorship prospectus will be available shortly.

Note that two events take place the same week: The Design Summit and the Conference. So, which should you attend?

Everyone: If you are an OpenStack user, provider, researcher, developer, or enthusiast, you’ll want to attend the OpenStack Conference held Thursday and Friday, April 19 & 20th. This is the main event and it includes keynotes, panel sessions, and vendor exhibitors who can help you get the most out of OpenStack.

Developers: If you are an active developer in the OpenStack community, you’ll also want to attend the Design Summit, happening right before the conference (April 16-18th). The Design Summit is kept intentionally small so that we can have productive working sessions as we discuss and plan for development on the next release of OpenStack.

We hope you’ll make the trip and join us at what’s shaping up to be a fantastic and informative event.

We are working on the 2012 event calendar, and are actively seeking feedback and sponsorship support for OpenStack to be well-represented at industry events.  There is a public etherpad where you can suggest an event to attend (or pass up!), and we would love to get  your input.  Right now, we are hoping to have OpenStack represented at the following industry events the first half of the year:

- SCALE10x, January 20-22, Los Angeles
- FOSDEM, February 4-5, Bruxelles, BE
- PYCON, March 7-15, Santa Clara, CA
- Ubuntu Developer Summit, May TBD
- EuroPython, June TBD, Florence, Italy
- OSCON, July 16-20, Portland, OR

We’ve had a lot of success with OpenStack having a community-sponsored presence at industry tradeshows. In this case, companies in the community may choose to pitch in and split costs for the OpenStack booth and marketing activities. In return, their brand is featured on promotional materials (signs, t-shirts, etc.), they are co-sponsors of the evening event (if applicable) and they have the opportunity to help staff the booth. Please contact Lauren Sell and Dee Rosales at events@openstack.org if you are interested in sponsoring OpenStack at upcoming events, the first of which is SCALE10x in January.

We are making headway on next OpenStack Design Summit & Conference, targeting the week of April 16 depending on venue availability.  We plan to finalize the venue and dates by the end of December, and will post a sponsorship prospectus and call for papers shortly thereafter. If you have a venue recommendation or your company might have the facilities to accommodate 800+ people, please contact events@openstack.org (note: we are moving very quickly on this with a goal to lock it down by Dec 31).

Also, if you are hosting a local meetup or OpenStack event, please contact events@openstack.org to have it listed and promoted on OpenStack.org/community/events.

Thanks for your continued support.