OpenStack Announces Cactus Release

 

April 15, 2011

With the availability of the Cactus release of OpenStack today the momentum and progress of the project continues to grow. A tremendous amount of effort and contribution from the large, and growing, community has added significant features, fixed a lot of bugs, and debated and discussed many technical issues. I am impressed with the progress that has been made since the Bexar release just 10 weeks ago and believe the projects and code are tracking to fill the promise of being the ubiquitous, open source cloud solution.

New features in Nova (OpenStack Compute) include:

  • Two additional virtualization technologies: LXC containers and VMWare/vSphere ESX / ESXi 4.1, Update 1. Driven by a common compute control infrastructure (Nova) this brings the options for OpenStack host virtualization to 8 (adding to Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, QEMU, UML, Xen, and Citrix XenServer).
  • Live Migration support for KVM-based systems landed in the Cactus release; it is now possible to move running VMs from one physical host to another without a shut down.
  • Lots of new features were added to XenServer support: network and file injection, IPv6 support, instance resize and rescue, network QoS, and VM instance parameters.
  • The OpenStack Compute API version 1.0 is available, with the OpenStack Compute API version 1.1 marked as “experimental” for Cactus. The intent is to finalize the 1.1 API at the Diablo design summit and have it complete and stable in the Diablo release. Multi-tenant accounting support was added to OpenStack API, allowing multiple accounts (projects) and admin API access to create accounts & users.
  • The OpenStack Compute API version 1.1 supports a standardized extension mechanism, this allow developers to innovate more quickly by adding extensions to their local OpenStack installations ahead of the code being accepted by the OpenStack community as a whole;
  • Nova can now start instances from VHD images that include customer data and kernel in one unified image.
  • Volume backend support has been enhanced; Nova now supports volumes residing on HP SANs and Solaris iSCSI devices.
  • Continued work on feature uniformity and parity across network types and hypervisors; IPv6 is now supported in all network modes, including FlatManager and VlanNetworkManager. Basic network injection is now supported under XenAPI.
  • Multi-cluster region support, which allows administrators to manage servers in clusters, and create fault zones and availability zones.

New features in Glance (OpenStack Image Registry and Delivery) include:

  • New command line interface tool (aptly-named “glance”) that allows direct access to Glance services through the API.
  • Support for multiple image formats through a new disk_format and container_format metadata definition.
  • Uploaded images can now be verified against a client-provided checksum, to ensure the integrity of the transfer.

New features in Swift (OpenStack Object Storage) include:

  • The option to serve static website content directly from a Swift installation using container listings in index.html displays. Swift will automatically translate requests to possible /index.html resolutions, where the index.html display is configurable per container.
  • To more quickly detect errors for often-served files, Swift now performs content checksum validation during object GET actions.
  • Performance of many request types has been improved through a refactoring of the Swift Proxy Server.
  • To avoid slowdowns for common operations when deleted items build up over time, Swift now has improved indexing of the SQLite databases for account and container listing and tracking.
  • An enhanced authentication system (SWauth) is available.
  • The ability to collect and serve data that enables integration of service provider billing solutions or internal chargebacks.

In addition to the work done on the project code, there have been several other things happening to improve the state of OpenStack. Primary amongst these was the election of Project Team Leaders for the three current OpenStack projects… Congratulations to Vish Ishaya (vishy) [Nova], John Dickinson (notmyname) [Swift], and Jay Pipes (jaypipes) [Glance] as new PTL’s, they also join the OpenStack Project Policy Board.

The OpenStack Project Policy Board also had elections, with 5 board members holding elected seats. These are Thierry Carrez (ttx), Rick Clark (dendrobates), Eric Day (eday), Soren Hansen (soren), and Ewan Mellor (ewanmellor). Congratulations folks!

OpenStack has defined a process for bringing in new projects, both as core projects and those that are being incubated.  (See http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Approved/NewProjectProcess). The initial incubation project is “Burrow”, a simple queuing service for OpenStack being led by Eric Day (eday). At the upcoming Diablo Design Summit I expect several more projects to be proposed for incubation; including Load Balancing and Database Services.

The Diablo Design Summit is setting up to be the most dynamic and content-filled summit to date! The entire week is completely filled with attendees and items for discussion. While ttx and the PTL’s are busy scheduling all the sessions here are a few of the highlights:

  • Network as a Service. In order to fulfill the vision of OpenStack as a secure cloud infrastructure with the ability to federate across clouds it is imperative that the underlying network support isolation, federation, and the ability to manage these topologies. The NaaS discussion has many important participants working hard to collaborate on this very technical set of issues.
  • Volume services. Extending the initial Nova volume management for richer block storage solutions.
  • Additional machine types (GPU accelerators, larger multi-core processor systems).
  • Consistent authentication and authorization across OpenStack projects.
  • Multi-zone support, intra-data center and federation across data centers.
  • Project management discussions.
  • Stability and QA automation. A key theme of the Diablo release will be to automate the build and test infrastructure for OpenStack to ensure that trunk is always runnable. With the proliferation of virtualization architectures, machine architectures, and service options this will be a key element to success of the project.
  • Complete and stable OpenStack version 1.1 API.
  • Target large scale service provider deployments, with proof of concepts happening in large OpenStack contributor sites.

A job well done to all of the folks that contributed and made the Cactus release come together and get released. I will see all of you at the Design Summit in Santa Clara and look forward to the discussions around the Diablo release and the future of OpenStack!

Lastly, the OpenStack Project Team Leaders are hosting a Webinar on Tuesday April 19th at 3:00 pm CST. More information at http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/04/openstack-cactus-webinar/.

John
Director, OpenStack@Rackspace

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What to expect from the Conference and Design Summit

 

April 13, 2011

In less than two weeks now, the community around OpenStack will gather in Santa Clara for two co-hosted events: the OpenStack conference and the Diablo Design Summit. In this post I’ll explain what attendees should expect from both, and give some precisions on how the Design Summit will be run.

OpenStack Conference

The OpenStack conference will run on two days, from Tuesday April 26 to Wednesday April 27. This is a classic conference, with speakers making presentations on various OpenStack-related topics. We’ll have keynote sessions on Tuesday morning, then parallel technical and community tracks will run during Tuesday afternoon. The day will end with a reception sponsored by Cisco. On the Wednesday, the “User track” will run during the morning and the “Service provider” track will run on the afternoon.

Diablo Design Summit

The Diablo Design Summit will run on three days, starting Wednesday morning to end on Friday evening. It’s a gathering of OpenStack developers to discuss how the next releases of OpenStack should be made and brainstorm the design of the key features we’ll add. Developers submit blueprints, those are turned into session topics and scheduled in the available session slots.

Since developers are currently busy getting the “Cactus” release out, we expect the schedule to start to take shape during next week. You should expect sessions on release management to occur on the Wednesday morning, and once the expectations are set, various sessions on Nova, Swift, Glance and other OpenStack projects spread throughout the 3 days of the event. Sessions will be categorized so that it’s easy to tell what the topic is by looking at the schedule.

The sessions are held in fishbowl-style room layout, with a session lead (usually the submitter of the blueprint) moderating the discussion. You can look up the whole process in more details at http://wiki.openstack.org/Summit

During the three days, after lunch, we’ll also have Lightning talks to let attendees have a forum to quickly talk about their crazy idea, present their product or do a quick demo. Every subject is OK as long as it’s OpenStack-related ! Those will be openly-scheduled on a whiteboard, everyone is free to book available 5min slots.

On the social side, Wednesday evening there will be an OpenStack Developer Gathering in the developer lounge, sponsored by Niciria. On the Thursday evening we’ll have our traditional Developer party, sponsored by Cloudscaling.

I hope this clarifies what the events are all about, and I’m excited to see you all in less than two weeks now !

Hiring a Community Manager Summer Intern

 

Good news to all you community manager types still in college looking for real-world, hands-on experience,  I am looking for a summer intern to assist me in various aspects of the open source OpenStack community. The position is in Austin, TX and I don’t have funding for housing so the candidate must either live in Austin or be capable of supporting themselves; however there is a salary involved but it most likely will not cover your living expenses in Austin this summer.

Here is the information on the position:

Job Description:

This position will support the various day-to-day activities of managing a large, global open source community. An emphasis on social network data collection and analysis is an integral part of the position while also supporting the various other community activities including web content development, community member communication, event planning, and other tasks.

It is expected that a presentation will be presented to various community members at the end of the summer to educate the community on the social networking aspects of OpenStack and how the community can better leverage those tools.

Job Requirements:

Applicants for this position must have the following skills:

  • Technology Competence – ability to use modern computing tools including Internet, Email, Office, and other standard Enterprise Computing technologies
  • Written Communication – ability to clearly express ideas in a written form via email or formal reports
  • Public Speaking – ability to create presentations using standard computing tools and present to groups of various size
  • Social Networking Applications – experience with common social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter
  • Analysis Skills – ability to process various amounts of data to provide insight into trends within the data

If you are interested in this position, please send your resume to [email protected] by April 30, 2011.

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OpenStack Participating Company Midokura Raises 1.3 Million US

 

As many of the participating companies in the OpenStack ecosystem are startups, it is great to see important milestones reached. As of today, Midokura, a pioneer in the network virtualization space providing cloud-enabling technologies for both public and private clouds, has announced the raising of 1.3 million USD in seed-funding. The complete announcement is at http://www.midokura.com/pr/pr04132011.html. Congratulations to Midokura and we look forward to a successful relationship with the OpenStack community.

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OpenStack Cactus Webinar

 

April 12, 2011

UPDATE: This webinar has been rescheduled to Thursday April 21st at 4pm EST. Please register at https://cc.readytalk.com/r/kdi85356wy

As part of a new community project, the OpenStack Webinar Series, I am pleased to announce the OpenStack Cactus Webinar for April 19th from 3:00 – 4:00 pm CST. This Webinar will cover the new features implemented in the OpenStack Cactus release. Presenting these features will be the new Project Team Leads for Glance, Swift, and Nova.

To join the webinar, simply click http://connect33143669.adobeconnect.com/cactus/.

As OpenStack is a truly global community, I will record this event and make it publicly available as there is no best time to hold a global Webinar.

Finally, this Webinar is the first in a series of twice a month Webinars on various OpenStack topics. If you are interested in presenting a topic, please contact [email protected] for scheduling information.

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Nati Shalom – GigaSpaces OpenStack Explained

 

Nati Shalom from GigaSpaces posted a blog today, “GigaSpaces OpenStack Explained.”

From the post,

One of the major concerns of many IT organizations is cloud vendor lock-in. This concern was expressed recently in “Banks fear cloud vendor lock-in,” from IT Wire:

The onset of cloud computing gives vendors the chance to lock customers in to their infrastructure, using proprietary protocols to ensure they’re on the monthly billing cycle as long as possible.

The OpenStack project emerged with a mission to address this concern by creating a community-led open source project enabling any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

GigaSpaces joined the OpenStack project with the mission to enable any organization to build its own Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), with its own choice of language and best-of-breed middleware stack.

In this post, I’ll try to provide more insight into our current and future plans around OpenStack, and more specifically our joint collaboration with the Citrix OpenCloud initiative.

Rest of Post

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OpenStack Developer Activity Weekly Review (April 1- 8)

 

April 8, 2011

Many people have asked for more insight into the developer activities for OpenStack as the large number of code changes and proposals make it difficult to monitor everything happening. In hopes of exposing more of the developer activities, I plan to post a weekly or biweekly blog post on the latest development activities. If you have any ideas for this blog post, please email me at [email protected]. I am always ready to listen to the community for new ideas.

Activities

Developer Mailing List (archive: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/)

This is select list of topics discussed this week in the developer mailing list and is not a complete list.  Please visit the archive to see all the topics.

  • Cactus Gamma Freeze now in effect – Thierry Carrez has announced a Gamma freeze.
  • Design Summit – call for sessions – Thierry Carrez reminded the community that the Diablo Design Summit starts April 27 – April 29. Session topics submissions are following a detailed process at http://wiki.openstack.org/Summit.  Accepted sessions for the event are at https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/ods-d.
  • Dotnet cloud file access – Jon Slenk asked about getting https://github.com/rackspace/csharp-cloudfiles to work with a local Swift install and is looking for assistance. Chuck Thier responded with some items to consider for C# bindings.
  • Logging, 500, Debugging – Zed Shaw asks about debugging settings for the Swift product.   Mike Barton responded that there is not a log of debug-level logging in the Swift proxy server. Zed indicated that he plans to write up some details about the discrepancies b/w LOG_LEVEL0 as the “default” in the docs.

Statistics

  • Number of OpenStack Developers on Contributors List – 165 (+3 for week)
  • Cactus Release Status – Blueprints (http://wiki.openstack.org/releasestatus/)
    • Essential – 5 Design Approved; 5 Implemented
    • High – 12 Blueprints; 9 Implemented – 3 Deferred
    • Medium – 20 Blueprints; 17 Implemented – 3 Deferred
    • Low – 15 Blueprints; 8 Implemented – 7 Deferred

For the latest on development activities on OpenStack please check these sites for more details:

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Community Weekly Newsletter (April 2 – 8)

 

OpenStack Community Newsletter – April 8, 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 (4/1– 4/7)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 37 Active Reviews
    • 220 Active Branches – owned by 54 people & 13 teams
    • 2,231 commits by 67 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 2 Active Reviews
    • 52 Active Branches – owned by 22 people & 5 teams
    • 184 commits by 15 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 87 total tweets; OpenStack 233 total tweets  (does not include RT)
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 510 Tracked Bugs; 55 New Bugs; 48 In-process Bugs; 9 Critical Bugs; 70 High Importance Bugs; 293 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  182 Blueprints; 3 Essential, 11 High, 12 Medium, 21 Low, 135 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  10,904 Visits, 23,496 Pageviews, 57.72% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 44.83%; /projects 11.27%; /projects/compute 15.84%; /projects/storage 11.19%; /Community 7.09%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Welcomes Facebook Open Compute Project

 

April 7, 2011

Today, Facebook announced a very exciting initiative called the Open Compute Project. It promises to open a vast amount of expertise to the market including the technology used in their servers, power supplies, server racks, battery backup systems and building design, and to do it as efficiently and as “green” as possible. And through collaboration with partners like Rackspace, Dell and Intel and the broader community overall — all of whom have substantial expertise in the underlying infrastructure of cloud — it promises to accelerate the overall industry knowledge base substantially. This is “open source” at its best. Open Compute is commoditizing and standardizing a layer that has traditionally been proprietary and secret, accessible only to a few. In opening this up to the world, we are not only able to consume it, but also collaborate and contribute to advance the project, so we all benefit from the best possible technology, processes and design.

We think this is huge news for the promise of open cloud. OpenStack is building the operating system upon which an open cloud can be built. But building and operating a cloud obviously requires more that just software. There are many other variables you must get right in order for OpenStack or any cloud operating system to be successful. I think everyone would agree that Facebook and their Open Compute partners have been successful at this. And now they are bringing us, the OpenStack community, in as collaborators.

OpenStack is proud to be collaborating with Open Compute to deliver something that is truly powerful for our communities. We are working with Facebook to assure OpenStack can run on top of their reference architectures. We are working with other community partners such as Dell to ensure organizations wanting to consume both projects can do so. And we are looking at how we can do more things together to deliver a truly open cloud to the world. There will be lots of opportunities for our two communities to work together, and we look forward to engaging with them going forward.

— Jim Curry

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