The OpenStack community is once again in full preparation for our twice annual community events, this time in Boston, Ma in October.  There are two different (but related) events during the week of October 3rd-7th:  At the beginning of the week, we have the OpenStack Design Summit which is a set of small, focused developer working sessions where the roadmap will be set by active contributors on the project.  Later in the week, the broader community of Users, Developers, and Business folk will gather for the OpenStack Conference.  Those of you who attended the events in April may notice that, this time, we’ve reversed the order.  This will allow the broader community to hear and discuss the output of the Design Summit.

To better understand which event is right for you, here are some additional details:

OpenStack Design Summit – Held October 3 – 5, 2011, this event is targeted at OpenStack developers and architects to collaborate on the features, designs, and development methodology for the Essex product release. Developers submit their feature ideas for Essex via the Launchpad blueprint process and the three Project Technical Leads work with the Release Manager to create the final agenda. It is highly recommended that only OpenStack developers or architects attend as the sessions are extremely technical and focused on individual features for Essex. Registration for this group of attendees will be handled via launchpad accounts. The developer registration process will also offer you the option to indicate that you intend to stay for the Conference portion of the week, so you will NOT need to go to two places to register if you are attending both events.  In fact:  Please don’t!

OpenStack Conference -  Held October 5 – 7, 2011, this event is targeted at the broader OpenStack community including ecosystem companies, system administrators, users, and business executives interested in the OpenStack open source project. Senior executive leaders in the cloud computing marketplace present their ideas on the future of the industry and OpenStack’s influence in the general sessions along with a business track and technical track containing information for attendees on how OpenStack works and why OpenStack matters. The OpenStack community welcomes all attendees interested in cloud computing and open source to this event to learn about the OpenStack project and become an active part of the community. Click here to register for the Conference.

Click here to book your room at the Boston Intercontinental hotel (where the events are located) at a discount rate.  We have a block of rooms, so please use the link to ensure they are tracked appropriately.  The special rate is substantially cheaper than the normal rate, and is only guaranteed if you book by September 9th.

If you have any further questions on these two events, please contact Stephen Spector for more information.

We are excited to announce the first EMEA OpenStack Day for anyone interested in using, developing for or building products around the open source cloud project. EMEA OpenStack Day will take place Wednesday, July 13, in London.  We expect the one-day event will cover a variety of topics, including:

• Getting started with OpenStack
• Capabilities and use cases
• Ecosystem of participating organizations
• Technical deep-dive into the three core projects

The event is free and open to all, but registration is limited to 125 based on the size of the venue. We encourage you to reserve your spot quickly. Please visit the event page to register and find more details.

We welcome feedback and recommendations for the agenda as we confirm speakers. Contact lauren@openstack.org with any feedback, and stay tuned for updates!

http://emeaopenstackday.eventbrite.com/

OpenStack Community Newsletter – May 27, 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 stephen.spector@openstack.org.

OS Event Recap Spring 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.

HIGHLIGHTS

• OpenStack at Citrix Synergy – http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/05/openstacks-big-day-at-citrix-synergy/
  • Project Olympus –  http://deliver.citrix.com/projectolympus
• OpenStack Community Forums -  http://forums.openstack.org/
• Q&A: Pual Carmody of Internap on its OpenStack-Based IaaS Cloud – http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/052711_QA_Paul_Carmody_of_Internap_on_its_OpenStack_Based_IaaS_Cloud

EVENTS

• OpenHelp – June 3-5 in Cincinnati, OH http://openhelpconference.com/
• Cloud Expo East – Jun 6-9 – New York, NY http://cloudexpo2011east.sys-con.com/
• Interop Tokyo – June 7-10 in Tokyo, Japan http://www.interop.jp/2011/english/index.html
• SouthEast LinuxFest – June 10-12 in Spartanburg, SC http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/
• O’Reilly Velocity – June 14-16 in Santa Clara, CA – http://velocityconf.com/velocity2011
• Open Source Bridge – June 21-24 in Portland, OR http://opensourcebridge.org/
• Structure – June 22-23 in San Francisco, CA http://event.gigaom.com/structure/

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

• Diablo Release Schedule – http://wiki.openstack.org/DiabloReleaseSchedule
• Meeting Minutes – May 24
  • Summary: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack-meeting/2011/openstack-meeting.2011-05-24-21.01.html
  • Meeting Log: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack-meeting/2011/openstack-meeting.2011-05-24-21.01.log.html

GENERAL COMMUNITY

• Simon Crosby, CTO Citrix Video on OpenStack, Citrix, and Project Olympus – http://www.ngn.nl/ngn/weblogs/citrix-blog/citrix-synergy-interview-met-simon-crosby/?waxtrapp=lelzanBsHyoOtvOXEGJE
• Rob Hirschfeld, Dell – Virtualizing OpenStack Nova: looking at the many ways to skin the CAcTus (KVM v XenServer v ESX) – http://robhirschfeld.com/2011/05/27/virtualizing-openstack-nova/
• Billy Cox, Intel – Let’s just leave the barn door open… (http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server/blog/2011/05/25/let-s-just-leave-the-barn-door-open)
• Diego Parrilla, StackOps – Using collectd to gather performance statistics of StackOps OpenStack Nova Distro –(http://blog.stackops.com/2011/05/26/using-collectd-to-gather-performance-statistics-of-stackops-openstack-nova-distro/)
• Joseph George, Dell – One Giant Leap for Cloud: Citrix, Dell, and Rackspace Step Up with OpenStack – http://jbgeorge.net/2011/05/25/one-giant-leap-for-cloud-citrix-dell-and-rackspace-step-up-with-openstack/
• OpenStack Wiki Recent Changes – http://wiki.openstack.org/RecentChanges
  • Atlas-LB – http://wiki.openstack.org/Atlas-LB
  • Keystone R1 – http://wiki.openstack.org/KeystoneR1
  • Boot from ISO – http://wiki.openstack.org/bootFromISO
  • Network Use Cases – http://wiki.openstack.org/NetworkUsecases
  • 3 Month Release Cycle – http://wiki.openstack.org/3MonthReleaseCycle

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (5/20– 5/26)

• Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
• OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
  • 39 Active Reviews
  • 270 Active Branches – owned by 74 people & 15 teams
  • 1214 commits by 69 people in last month
• OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
  • 1 Active Reviews
  • 68 Active Branches – owned by 23 people & 6 teams
  • 134 commits by 16 people in last month
• OpenStack Image Registry (GLANCE) Data
  • 5 Active Reviews
  • 25 Active Branches – owned by 7 people & 5 teams
  • 75 commits by 8 people in last month
• Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 326 total tweets; OpenStack 1381 total tweets  (does not include RT)
• Bugs Stats for Week: 380 Tracked Bugs; 69 New Bugs; 40 In-process Bugs; 0 Critical Bugs; 23 High Importance Bugs; 248 Bugs (Fix Committed)
• Blueprints Stats for Week:  208 Blueprints; 13 Essential, 19 High, 18 Medium, 25 Low, 132 Undefined
• OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  14,537 Visits, 34,442 Pageviews, 54.71% New Visits
  • Top 5 Pages: Home 39.93%; /projects 10.64%; /projects/compute 16.09%; /projects/storage 11.65%; /community 6.29%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

• Citrix Adopts OpenStack for Project Olympus by Sean Michael Kerner; ServerWatch; http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/3934616/Citrix-Adopts-OpenStack-for-Project-Olympus.htm
• KT Puts Commodity Spin on Cloud by Carol Wilson; LightReadingAsia; http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=208330&f_src=lightreading_gnews
• The Future of the OpenStack Open Source Cloud by Sean Michael Kerner; Internetnews.com; http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3934221/The+Future+of+the+OpenStack+Open+Source+Cloud.htm
• Using the Cloud To Manage the Cloud by Kurt Marko; Information Week; http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/management/229700064
• Epic voyage to true automation: the world according to VMware CEO Paul Maritz by Stuart Kennedy; AustralianIT; http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/epic-voyage-to-true-automation-the-world-according-to-vmware-ceo-paul-maritzer/story-e6frgakx-1226061381834

The Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group is hosting a 1 day cloud computing event this Saturday, April 30 at 1:30 pm. Register at http://www.meetup.com/cloudcomputing/events/16701362/.

The agenda is at http://talkcloudy2011.sched.org/list/descriptions/ with 2 OpenStack sessions from Citrix and Piston.

Thanks to Sebastian Stadil  from Scalr for the information.

The OpenStack Conference agenda for the first two days of the 4 day event is now finalized and ready for attendee consumption. The Design Summit agenda for the final 3 days of the event is still in active development following a process detailed here.

All attendees will receive a program guide with the agenda at the event and we have also published the agenda via an online tool with options to download the agenda to your smart phone. The published online agenda is at http://openstack-spring2011.sched.org/.

Finally, we have three parties set for the event to allow for time to relax and get to know your fellow OpenStack community members:

• Welcome Reception Sponsored by Cisco – April 26th from 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
• OpenStack Developer Gathering Sponsored by Niciria – April 27th from 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
• Developer Party at Dave and Buster’s Sponsored by Cloudscaling – April 28th from 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm

The time has finally come to reveal the agenda for the conference portion of next month’s OpenStack Conference / Design Summit 2011 sponsored by Citrix. The Design Summit agenda is still in active development and will be finalized once the Project Team Leader elections are complete and the new team members are able to offer input into the schedule. Please remember that I reserve the right to make any changes to this agenda; however I am confident that we are past the 95% complete mark. Register for this event here.

Thanks to the program committee for their great work in helping to create this agenda.

Finally, we have three parties set for the event to allow for time to relax and get to know your fellow OpenStack community members:

• Welcome Reception Sponsored by Cisco – April 26th from 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
• OpenStack Developer Gathering Sponsored by Niciria – April 27th from 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
• Developer Party at Dave and Buster’s Sponsored by Cloudscaling – April 28th from 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm

*Upcoming Elections:  As noted above, a total of 5 seats are up for election later this month, March 2011, prior to the Spring 2011 Design Summit.  3 of these will be Project Technical Leads for the respective projects, and will also sit on the Project Policy Board representing those respective communities, and 2 will be General Board Members.  More details soon regarding the nomination and election process.

It has been an intense and productive three months since OpenStack unveiled the initial “Austin” release to the world. We have had code contributions from 130 developers and have added over 30 new features to the project for the “Bexar” release. The project has matured in the processes for managing and tracking milestone targets, with the Bexar release coming together smoothly and without hiccups with our new release manager.

For Bexar here is what you can expect to see:

OpenStack Object Storage (Swift)

• Large objects (greater than 5 GB) can now be stored using OpenStack Object Storage. Introducing the concepts of client-side chunking and segmentation now allows virtually unlimited object sizes, limited only by the size of the cluster it is being stored into.
• An experimental S3 compatibility middleware has been added to OpenStack Object Storage.
• Swauth is a Swift compatible authentication and authorization service implemented on top of Swift. This allows the authorization system to scale as well as the underlying storage system and will replace the existing dev_auth service in a future release.

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

• Support for raw disk images for hypervisors that are libvirt compatible (such as KVM) and XenAPI hypervisors.
• IPv6 support in all network modes but FlatManager. Support for the remaining network mode will come in the “Cactus” release.
• Support for a lot of new virtual volume backends to provide highly available block volumes for virtual machines: Sheepdog, CEPH/RADOS, and iSCSI (XenAPI only).
• Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor is supported.
• Lots of new features have been added around the Openstack API, for example admin features to pause, suspend, lock, and password reset instances.
• New “rescue” mode allows an instance to mount affected disks and fix problems.
• Web-based serial console to access instances where networking fails is available through the OpenStack API.
• Database versioning and migration support, for painless migration from one version to another.
• Instances now use copy-on-write by default for better performance.
• Support for availability zones, through the introduction of a new scheduler: ZoneScheduler.

OpenStack Image Registry and Delivery service (Glance)

• Glance APIs (for registry and delivery) were unified, and a specific client class created.
• Support for uploading disk images directly through the Glance REST-ful API.
• Addition of the glance-upload tool which can register new AMI-like images or raw disk images.
• Glance can now fetch image data on a S3-like backend as well as from Swift.
• Documentation for Glance is now available at http://glance.openstack.org.

Looking forward to the “Cactus” release.

The “Bexar” release introduced and completed a lot of features in the project. For the next release, Cactus, we will focus even more on stability and deployability, better preparing OpenStack for really large, carrier-grade installations.

This is not to say there will not be exciting features also being completed in this milestone. Current blueprints include:

• Support for VMware ESX & ESXi hypervisors.
• Support for Linux container virtualization through support for OpenVZ and LXC (Linux Containers).
• Additional disk and appliance formats supported in Glance.
• Disk and appliance format conversion support in Glance.
• Live migration of instances (just missed the Bexar release!)
• Features and operational elements availability via XenAPI by Rackspace in preparation for large scale deployment.
• Performance and scaling improvements in Swift.
• Internationalization and localization in Swift.

And these are just the highlights!

There has also been a lot of discussion on IRC and the mailing list about extending the Nova Volume and Network controllers and providing public API’s to these services. We should expect to see more discussion and specific blueprints coming in shortly.

In addition to the direct planning for “Cactus” and follow-on “Diablo” releases there has been a handful of submissions to the Project Oversight Committee (POC); these include considering the process for adding core developers to projects, image format support, and overall charter for the near term (2011) of the OpenStack project. We have gotten our feet wet with our governance process, made some adjustments, and expect to see more activity by the POC as we continue to guide and define the OpenStack project.

Getting to this point with Swift and Nova has been a tremendous amount of effort, everyone involved is to be commended. Looking forward we will continue to execute on delivering project milestones but at the same time start to introduce and discuss longer term visions and roadmaps for this project. There is consistent community feedback that in addition to understanding the current project as scoped a longer term view needs to be communicated. This will introduce new projects, new opportunities for the community to contribute, and greater value and impact of the OpenStack project in the cloud industry. I am looking forward to the discussions, debates, and projects this will spark.

John

By now, most of you have heard that yesterday we released the inaugural version of the OpenStack Cloud Computing Platform. The OpenStack project is comprised of two major subprojects, OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage.

Where is it?

OpenStack Compute:
Nova Cloud Computing Fabric
Glance Image Registry and Delivery Service

OpenStack Object Storage:
Swift

What’s new?

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

Multi-hypervisor support: Compute now supports KVM, QEMU, User-Mode Linux and Xen, are supported through libvirt and XenServer is supported by a nifty abstraction and plug-in contributed by Citrix.

API changes: In addition to the EC2, Compute has added a native OpenStack API that is based on the Rackspace Cloud Servers API. We are excited to have an API that we can extend. We also added support for EC2 Security Groups.

Image registry and delivery service: We have added the Glance project, which is an image registration and discovery service (Parallax) and an image delivery service (Teller). These services are used in conjunction by Open Stack Compute to deliver images from object stores, such as OpenStack’s Object Storage service, to Nova’s compute nodes. Glance can be used to serve images for Compute, but is not enabled by default in this release.

Networking Model: OpenStack Compute now supports two network models on compute nodes; VLANs with DHCP, and flat with either static IP pools or DHCP.

Scheduler: We added a base scheduling service to Openstack Compute that we will extend in future releases.

WSGI: In an effort to reduce the number of dependencies in OpenStack Compute and create a standard API layer with reusable components, we’ve decided to use WSGI. As a part of this we ported our current EC2 API code from Tornado to WSGI.

Rename server support: We added support for rackspace style user-friendly names, and renaming if running instances compute.

Code refactoring: OpenStack Compute completely refactored the ORM. The result is a much simpler code that is easier to understand. We also refactored the networking code for simplicity.

SQL support: A big part of the ORM refactor was the addition of support for SQLAlchemy Database toolkit. This will allow people to make use of existing SQL infrastructure when deploying OpenStack Compute. The refactor also removed support for redis. This should not be seen as a judgement about redis. We will visit re-adding support for nosql data stores during the next two release cycles.

OpenStack Object Storage (Swift)

Stats system: OpenStack Object Storage add a stats system that processes the logs generated by the system to produce per-account hourly summaries of system usage.

ACL’s and public containers: Object Storage added the ability for users to set ACL’s and grant public access to containers.

Metadata access: Object Storage now supports API access to account and container metadata.

Rate limiting: Rate limiting was extending from just supporting errors returned, to allowing requests to be slowed down and supporting stair stepped rate limits based on container size.

WSGI refactor: WSGI support was improved and pulled into middleware.

Shared improvements

Documentation: We started the release with almost no documentation and our wonderful technical writer, Anne, managed to create documentation from a constantly moving code base. Please visit the [wiki.openstack.org] and have a look.

I want to offer a special thanks to everyone who helped us reach this exciting stage in the future of OpenStack. Whether you wrote code, tested, wrote docs, tweeted, designed t-shirts, defended us in blog posts, or just attend IRC meetings and gave us your opinion, all of you were instrumental in getting this release out the door. I hope to work with all of you for many more.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

Rick Clark Chief Architect, OpenStack

Stackers,

When we published the Governance Doc recently, I mentioned that we had some deadlines coming up fast.  Namely, the deadline for nominating someone for a seat on the Architecture Board.  To give the community some additional time, we’ve extended the nomination deadline to October 15th, 2010.

Additionally, this pushes out all of the other dates by 2 weeks:

• Date we’ll publish the candidates is now:  October 20th, 2010
• Date of the vote is now:  November 1st, 2010

The official doc is now updated to reflect the new dates.

Please send your nominations to Jonathan Bryce: jonathan@openstack.org

In other news, we have passed feature freeze for the “Austin” release of OpenStack Compute, and are rapidly approaching the release date of October 21st.  After that, we look forward to seeing everyone at the next Design Summit on November 9th-12th, 2010 in San Antonio Texas.

Mark Collier

@sparkycollier