Shine your keyboards, hackers of OpenStack: on February 2nd 2012 you will be called to fight the ever growing number of bugs that keep creeping in our beloved code.  On Bug Squashing Day all the OpenStack developer community will focus mainly on Nova to:

• Close old fixed bugs. Old bugs are nasty. Even when they are long dead, they clog bug views and render the lists unusable. Just look at old bugs and check if they still apply ! If they don’t, close them as FixReleased (if you can pinpoint when they were fixed) or Invalid (if you can’t).
• Fix bugs. The best thing you can do on a bug squashing day is to kill a live one. Just look at the list of Confirmed or Triaged and pick your target. Submit a change that fixes it. Ask for review help on the channel.
• Triage incoming bugs. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish fresh bugs from false alarms. You can help by using your expertise or reproduction skills on New bugs. If you can confirm the issue, set the bug to Confirmed. If you can fix it, read the previous chapter. If you need more info from the reporter, set it to Incomplete. And if it happens to not really be valid, set it to Invalid.

You don’t have to be an experienced Nova developer to participate, and we believe that February 2nd will be a great way to get started with the OpenStack community. You can get started by looking at Devstack to build your complete OpenStack development environment. The other projects are welcome to focus on quality that day but Nova is the one that will get more attention.

The event will happen mostly online, in a dedicated #openstack-bugsquash IRC channel on Freenode (that all participants are encouraged to join for the duration of the event). There will also be live meetings in Austin and San Francisco, hosted by Rackspace with food, drinks and games.

Do you want to host a Bug Squash Day on Feb 2nd? Let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

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.

Figure 1 Diablo Software Architecture. Source Dell/OpenStack (cc w/ attribution)

Even with the depth of the discussion (notes below), we did not go into details on how individual OpenStack components are connected together.  The image my team at Dell uses is included below.  I also recommend reviewing Rackspace’s published reference architecture.

Notes

Our deployment discussion was a round table so it is difficult to link statements back to individuals, but I was able to track companies (mostly).

• HP
• picked Ubuntu & KVM because they were the most vetted. They are also using Chef for deployment.
• running Diablo 2, moving to Diablo Final & a flat network model. The network controller is a bottleneck. Their biggest scale issue is RabbitMQ.
• is creating their own Nova Volume plugin for their block storage.
• At this point, scale limits are due to simultaneous loading rather than total number of nodes.
• The Nova node image cache can get corrupted without any notification or way to force a refresh – this defect is being addressed in Essex.
• has setup availability zones are completely independent (500 node) systems. Expecting to converge them in the future.
• Rackspace
  • is using the latest Ubuntu. Always stays current.
  • using Puppet to setup their cloud.
  • They are expecting to go live on Essex and are keeping their deployment on the Essex trunk. This is causing some extra work but they expect it to pay back by allowing them to get to production on Essex faster.
  • Deploying on XenServer
  • “Devs move fast, Ops not so much.”  Trying to not get behind.
• Rackspace Cloud Builders (RCB) is running major releases being run through an automated test suite. The verified releases are being published to https://github.com/cloudbuilders (note: Crowbar is pulling our OpenStack bits from this repo).
• Dell commented that our customers are using Crowbar primarily pilots – they are learning how to use OpenStack
  • Said they have >10 customer deployments pending
  • ATT is using OpenSource version of Crowbar
  • Need for Keystone and Dashboard were considered essential additions to Diablo
• Hypervisors
  • KVM is considered the top one for now
  • Libvirt (which uses KVM) also supports LXE which people found to be interesting
  • XenServer via XAPI are also popular
  • No so much activity on ESX & HyperV
  • We talked about why some hypervisors are more popular – it’s about the node agent architecture of OpenStack.
• Storage
  • NetApp via Nova Volume appears to be a popular block storage
• Keystone / Dashboard
  • Customers want both together
  • Including keystone/dashboard was considered essential in Diablo. It was part of the reason why Diablo Final was delayed.
  • HP is not using dashboard
• OpenStack API
• Members of the Audience made comments that we need to deprecate the EC2 APIs (because it does not help OpenStack long term to maintain EC2 APIs over its own).  [1/5 Note: THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL POLICY, it is a reflection of what was discussed]
• HP started on EC2 API but is moving to the OpenStack API

Austin Meetup Housekeeping

• Next meeting is Tuesday 1/10 and sponsored by SUSE (note: Tuesday is just for this January).  Topic TBD.
• We’ve got sponsors for the next SIX meetups! Thanks for Dell (my employeer), Rackspace, HP, SUSE, Canonical and PuppetLabs for sponsoring.
• We discussed topics for the next meetings.  We’re going to throw it to a vote for guidance.

As a matter of tradition at this point, we offer a photo report, covering OpenStack event series that Mirantis hosts. Our December 14th event focused on sharing experience around running OpenStack in production. I moderated a panel consisting of Ken Pepple – director of cloud development at Internap, Ray O’Brian – CTO of IT at NASA and Rodrigo Benzaquen – R&D director at MercadoLibre.

This time we went all out and even recorded the video of the event: http://vimeo.com/33982906

For those that are not in the mood to watch this 50 minute panel video, here is a quick photo report:

We served wine and beer with pizza, salad and deserts…

…While people ate, drank, and mingled…

…and then they drank some more…

We started the panel with myself saying smart stuff about OpenStack. After the intro we kicked off with questions to the panel.

The panelists talked…

…and talked…

…and then talked some more.

Meanwhile, the audience listened…

…and listened.

Everyone in our US team was sporting these OpenStack shirts.

At the end we gave out 5 signed copies of “Deploying OpenStack” books, written by one of our panelists – Ken Pepple. Roman (pictured above) did not get a copy.

Tuesday night December 13 saw the inaugural meetup of the Australian OpenStack Users Group at the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

There was obvious enthusiasm right from the start because even though we weren’t meant to start until 6.30pm there were already about 30 people there at 6.00pm. By 7.30pm we peaked at about 55 people and we filled the venue! What started in October as 5 of us going for a beer had become something awesome.

The purpose of the night was to be an in formal get together to stimulate the community and get interested “OzStackers” talking to each other, and it was clear that we got people talking. I got to meet almost everyone and we had many attendees with purely a personal interest, but we also had folks from our telcos and service providers, universities, manufacturers, retail and finance industries.

When it first became apparent we might do something more than just a few beers we thought we might get one OpenStack involved vendor to come along. What we ended up with was an overwhelming response. Each of our attending vendors were given the chance to give a talk about their involvement with the project.

Mark Randall, Rackspace Country Manager for AU/NZ, led the talks with a background and overview. Next up was Daniel Pendlebury, Citrix Lead Systems Engineer for Datacenter and Cloud giving an insight into their Project Olympus. APAC Solution Architect at F5, Adrian Noblett, talked about F5′s involvement, followed by Peter Jung, Cloud Solutions Architect at Dell with some in depth technical news on Crowbar. Nic Rouhotas from Cisco went next overviewing Cisco’s involvement and then Declan Conlon talked about Riverbed joining the community and their purchase of Zeus. Last up was Phil Rogers from Aptira with experiences of his development contributions towards several Swift client applications.

It was pretty clear that everyone had a great time and there was lots of enthusiasm to get together again as soon as possible, and many made it clear they want to see and share config and install demos and real world deployment experiences, so we’ll focus on that for follow-up meetups in the next coming months.

At the moment we have a single Australian Meetup group, the rationale being that whilst we’re still a small community down under we thought it was best to create a single nationwide group. The not necessarily bad trade off of this is that because we do recognise a significant portion of the Australian OpenStack community is not in Sydney we have an obligation to have the inaugural meetup continue in cities where the community resides! So far Melbourne is next on the list, but if there’s more of you interstate please don’t hesitate to join the meetup group at http://aosug.openstack.org.au. The listed location will change for upcoming meetup locations.

Reminder January 17 Meetup in Melbourne!

Next up is the inaugural meetup “part 2″ in Melbourne on January 17. We’re hoping to get the same vendors along, there’ll be beer and food, I look forward to seeing you there.

We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.

This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg Althaus and Rob Hirschfeld), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya from Rackspace, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.

We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build.  Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!).  We need Keystone support.  Anyone up for that?

Highlights

There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.

• After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
• The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
• There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
• Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level.  The Quantual Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.  
• HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
• We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
• Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).

Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!

Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.  Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts!

.

Last Thursday, a number of us Austin OpenStack fans decided to get together and talk OpenStack, Diablo, Crowbar, and more.

We had a fantastic turnout of almost SEVENTY people who came out that night – almost at near capacity for our venue, Tech Ranch Austin.  A number of startups where represented, as well as a number of notable OpenStack partners like Rackspace, Canonical, and Dell (the company I work for), who sponsored this first OpenStack meet up in Austin.

This meetup coincided with the Rackspace Cloud Builders OpenStack training, being held at the Dell campus that entire week, so a number of OpenStack students from that class, many who had flown in for class from out of town / state, were able to make it as well.

It was a great pleasure for us here at Dell to sponsor the first Austin meetup for OpenStack, and I look forward to our community growing as other partners help us sponsor future meet ups.

You can get more details on what was discussed at the meetup at Rob’s blog – www.RobHirschfeld.com.

If you’re in the Austin area, and are interested in joining the OpenStack Austin meetup group, join us at www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin.

The OpenStack community has two confirmed events next month to book on your calendars (and a third in final confirmation)…

Paris, France

OpenStack in Action!
September 21, 2011 from 8:30 am – 5:30 pm
Current Sponsors: Enovance, UShareSoft, Canonical, Rackspace, and OW2
Event Registration: https://openstackinaction.eventbrite.com/

Boston, MA

Boston OpenStack User Group
September 21 from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Sponsor: Fidelity
Event Registration: http://bostonopenstack.eventbrite.com

Here are a few shots of the OpenStack booth at OSCON being supported by our amazing ecosystem partners during a slow time when I could get away from the crowds to take a shot. I also took a picture of the great OpenStack cake from our birthday with the tasty cupcakes.

On Wednesday we held an OpenStack Day in London — the first for our community in Europe.  It’s very obvious we should have done this much sooner.  We never know how many people to expect at these events, and had planned for 125 or so.  In the end, about 350 people attended.  The catering held up well to the surge in attendees, but the wifi didn’t fare so well.  We will adjust going forward.  Here are some of my observations from the day:

1.  Not only was a substantial portion of the audience very familiar with OpenStack, many had already deployed it.  I met individuals and companies from around Europe who have already deployed OpenStack clouds.  Because we don’t track software installations, we have little idea how many of the 35,000+ downloads from Launchpad are actually running.  However, identifying yourself in the community is very critical as it allows us to help tell your story, helps other users get information, and in general helps move OpenStack forward.  So if you have deployed OpenStack, please let us know by contacting Stephen Spector (stephen.spector@openstack.org).  We are putting togther case studies and if you participate we will get you some free OpenStack schwag!

2.  Many of the attendees had traveled from other parts of Europe to attend including the France, Hungary, Norway, Finland and Spain.  We are working hard to establish user groups around the world so that anyone wanting to learn about OpenStack or chat about the project with peers will have the chance to do so.  If you are interested in running one, please also contact Stephen.

3.  The ecosystem is rapidly maturing with existing members increasing their investments, new ones continuing to join, and new businesses getting funded around OpenStack.  In particular, the discussion about OpenStack distributions from companies such as Citrix, Canonical and StackOps indicates how companies are investing in this technology as the right cloud solution for their customers.  Citrix highlighted how their acquisition of Cloud.com was a doubling down of their commitment to the project.  All of this activity bodes well for the creation of a broad range of OpenStack solutions for customers.

4.  We have some smart developers, system administrators and operators working on this project.  Vish Ishaya, Jonathan Bryce, Josh McKenty and Chmouel Boudjnah all gave excellent overviews of the technology.  The audience questions and hallway conversation also indicated that our flock of community members is well above average.

An installfest was held over pints right after the event.  We filled up the one room we booked and had to take a second.  There was some good community bonding going on for hours.  Lots of discussion was also had about a future event in Europe, so we have become looking at Paris for September.  Stay tuned for more details.

I want to thank Canonical, Equinix, Dell, Citrix, Rightscale and Rackspace for their sponsorship of the event.  If you have feedback for us, don’t hesitate to drop me a line at jim@openstack.org or @jimcurry on Twitter.