Join the OpenStack Foundation mailing list

Last week, we got together for the OpenStack Conference in Boston and started things off talking about plans to create an OpenStack Foundation. Thursday afternoon, we had a great session as a community talking about initial goals for the foundation and how to keep the discussion going after the conference. Ryan Lane had a nice post on the session, and we’ll also be posting the video of the session to vimeo soon. Scott Sanchez was also kind enough to take notes.

The first action we all agreed on was to create a mailing list to continue the conversation, which is now live and you can subscribe here.

Based on last week’s discussion, I think it makes sense to start at a high level by talking about the Mission of the foundation as well as the Scope of OpenStack for the foreseeable future before getting too bogged down in potential structures and funding etc. We should also talk about the need for any additional communication tools beyond the list itself.

Community Weekly Review (September 30-7)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 7
Wrap-up edition

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 [email protected].

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (9/30-10/7)

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace day, October 7th, is a day for bloggers to write a story about an inspirational influence in their life in technology.

For me, there were two influential woman in my life as an undergraduate chemistry student in the early 90s at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. One was my first college chemistry professor, Anne McCowan, and the other was Butler’s scientific librarian, Mrs. Howes. Both influenced me through words, and bringing the importance of words to my attention. Professor McCowan stated on the first day of class:

“Chemistry is a study of nomenclature. Once you understand the naming and vocabulary, the world of chemistry is opened to you.”

It was such a simplification of an intimidating subject that it crystallized the learning process for me. If I studied the vocabulary, the rest would follow. And here I am, combining the wonder of worlds and technology every day.

So on today, Ada Lovelace day, I want to ask, how can OpenStack be a welcoming community for women in technology? I have ideas and want to share them with the community. These are both small ideas and large ideas.

  • Inspire girls when they’re young. I have volunteered with an organization called GirlStart here in Austin, Texas, and I think they’ve got the right idea, influence girls to enter technology in middle school and elementary and encourage them to go to college. A few years ago I went to lunch once a month with middle school girls where we talked about simple ideas such as “what does it mean to be smart?” That group of girls will be in high school now, and I hope they find technology a good path for them.
  • Invite women specifically. I spoke with Noirin Plunkett at OSCon this summer, and she said that women don’t necessarily have the confidence (or is it ego) to understand they are being specifically invited to participate in a tech initiative or open source project. You can specifically say to a group of female collage students for example, by saying “our project needs you specifically, not just your male colleagues.”
  • Start in your neighborhood, at your company. Since Rackspace is a huge supporter and founder of OpenStack, we want to ensure that we bring our women to the project and make them feel like Stackers are their kind of people. Stackers are professional, mature, and respectful of each other. We certainly have heated discussions but all input is valuable. I want to start locally by inviting women to Austin Cloud User Group meetings, by recruiting women for Rackspace jobs, and putting myself out there constantly, which is not always comfortable but it is rewarding.

How about your perspective here? Where will you start and when? Let’s take these first steps towards inviting more women to join our open source cloud computing efforts.

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OpenStack Foundation

Tomorrow at the OpenStack Conference in Boston, Lew Moorman will discuss Rackspace’s intention to form an OpenStack Foundation in 2012, which will be responsible for Project Governance and ownership of the OpenStack trademark.  This marks a major milestone in the evolution of OpenStack as a movement to establish the industry standard for cloud software.

Rackspace, NASA, and over 20 other companies launched OpenStack in July of 2010 with the goal of building the ubiquitous open source cloud operating system.  In just over a year, the community has grown to over 100 organizations all over the globe, producing 4 software releases in a short period of time.  A founding goal was to grow the community well beyond Rackspace, both in terms of code contributions, and users.  As we approach 2012, those goals are within reach. Some recent highlights:

  • Code contributions are coming from a broad group.  For example, in a recent Diablo milestone 12 features were contributed by developers from 8 different companies.
  • The number of companies and organizations backing OpenStack is now well over 110, including industry giants such as Cisco, HP, and Dell.
  • OpenStack start ups are also being funded at an amazing rate, including Piston and Nebula, both founded by ex-NASA folks who helped create OpenStack and are now leading companies around it, and Techstars recently announced an incubator program for Cloud start ups focused on OpenStack.
  • User adoption is really taking off, and we’ll be hearing from MercardoLibre, CERN, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Fidelity, Disney, and NeCTAR tomorrow during the OpenStack Conference in Boston.

Rackspace will be gathering feedback from others in the community on the best structure and processes to adopt as the OpenStack Foundation is established in 2012, starting with a Town Hall session tomorrow during the OpenStack Conference in Boston.  You can also share your thoughts by sending an email to [email protected]

OpenStack is poised for an even bigger year in 2012, with so much passion from an amazing group of people across the globe and an independent OpenStack foundation.  The promise of a vendor-neutral, truly open cloud standard is within reach.  By doing this important work together, as a community, we can achieve something much bigger with a lasting impact on the future of computing.

Community Weekly Review (September 23-30)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – September 30, 2011
“Have you packed yet?” Edition

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 [email protected].

HIGHLIGHTS

Assume that the schedules will change. Hint: subscribe to the web calendars to keep up with any last minute changes.

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (9/16-9/23)

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OpenStack Announces Diablo Release

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!

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Documentation Contributors Styling Ts

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.

CSS Corp OSS Team led by Murthyraju Manthena

 

 

 

 

 

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!

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Preparing For Essex Unconference And Lightning Talks

Unconference

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.

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Community Weekly Review (September 17-23)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – September 23, 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 [email protected].

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (9/16-9/23)

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Community Weekly Review (September 10-16)

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 [email protected].

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

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
  • 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%