OpenStack Superuser

 

May 12, 2014

Today, we’re announcing the beginning of something new and exciting for OpenStack.

Superuser is a new online publication dedicated to the experiences of individuals who are running OpenStack clouds of all sizes, across all industries.

Topics will range from very actionable how-tos, case studies and architecture profiles to tackling less-tangible, strategic initiatives such as culture change, dev/ops, cost and vendor management.

Why are we launching a new publication?

One of the biggest benefits of the OpenStack community is the opportunity for knowledge sharing and collaborative problem solving among peers. There is a growing community of systems administrators, engineers and cloud architects and who are now running OpenStack in production and are eager to share their stories, compare notes, and have frank conversations about the problems they’re encountering and how to solve them.

Because the community is so large, distributed and fast-moving, it’s easy to duplicate efforts, and valuable information doesn’t always make it from one user group meetup conversation to the next design summit session. Based on feedback from the user community, we think there’s an opportunity for the Foundation to help aggregate content and create a destination specifically for OpenStack operators.

Our goals are to:

1) engage and help create a forum for the operator community

2) aggregate the vast amount of content being created and shared in various locations

3) promote and recruit participation for our community resources like documentation, the operations and security guides, training, and ask.openstack.org.

How will the publication be delivered?

Superuser will be an online publication that lives at superuser.openstack.org.

We aim to produce approximately three unique pieces of content per week — including news stories, topical feature stories, case studies, video interviews, and Q&As with operators — supported by a breadth of curated content that will be syndicated from the blogs/channels and our user community, ecosystem and analyst community.

How can you get involved?

We’re seeking the involvement of community members like you to help us shape the editorial direction, identify leads, make connections and contribute content. Your job will be to help us listen, and to make sure we’re giving a platform to the right voices.

Send us an idea for a story, a link to something the community should know, provide feedback to [email protected].

Subscribe to our newsletter, where we’ll periodically send you a digest of the latest Superuser happenings.

We’ve enlisted the help of volunteers in the community who have experience running OpenStack clouds to serve as members of our Editorial Advisory Board.

If you’re interested in helping shape the content, please subscribe to our editorial team mailing list[link]. This is where we will discuss story ideas, review editorial calendars, and solicit feedback from our editorial advisors and the user community.

The road ahead

“This publication was built to chronicle the work of superusers, and their many accomplishments personally, professionally, and organizationally. Our goal is to amplify their impact. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll bring superusers together to share their stories, and in so doing help shape this new economy in a way that benefits us all.”

Check out Jonathan’s inaugural Superuser post, where he talks more about why Superuser was started, and what’s in store for the community and the publication.

And above all, we’re proud to introduce Superuser!

OpenStack Upstream Training in Atlanta A Big Success

 

May 11, 2014

The first edition of OpenStack Upstream Training completed today in Atlanta: the class made of software developers from around the world, started learning technical and social convention of one of the largest open source collaboration project. During the first day, twenty people picked a real bug or feature to work on, got their development environment setup, signed the CLAs and made the first attempts at committing and reviewing patches. After getting the ‘hard’ technical skills sharpened, the second day of training was all about learning the ‘soft’, social skills necessary to collaborate with a massive amount of people across the continents.

If you saw pictures of legos on twitter tagged #openstack, you have seen images of the OpenStack City role playing game. The students were split in three groups and starts with a city partially built, with a rough master plan for expansion. One group of students acts as the rulers of the city, another group acts as new contributor and the third group acts as the Product Manager of the new contributors. The role game is a nice way to practice the suggestions of the morning. on how to communicate intentions, execute on ideas, interact with other people working on OpenStack components.

With many years of practise contributing to many free software projects, Loic Dachary kindly donated his time to the OpenStack Foundation to lead the training, adapting the content of Upstream University to the specific needs of OpenStack. The class gives strong emphasis on the soft skills necessary to speed up acceptance of contributions. We noticed that over the years, a lot of new contributors, especially occasional ones, don’t have enough exposure to the big picture of OpenStack and these are more likely to be frustrated by the complex set of tools, processes, people between a bug fixed on a local branch and code accepted upstream. Based on the feedback gathered, this first set of graduates from OpenStack Upstream Training will surely get a pleasant experience. Hopefully they’ll keep growing inside OpenStack community and help future first time contributors.

The group is the first set of graduates of OpenStack Upstream Training: David Bingham, Bob Bennett, Daneyon Hansen, Jacki Bauer, Gangadhar Singh, Om Kumar, Tim Freund, Richard Coleman, Jerry Xinyu Zhao, Sam Su, Shuichiro Makigaki, Junichi Matayoshi, Derek Anderson, Dave Fogelson, Ryo Kurahashi, Rajeev Grover, Srinivasa Acharya, Vishal Thapar, Rashmi, Rohit, Jack Mac. When you meet them this week, please thank them for the time they dedicated to the project and consider them a beautiful present. I, Loic and other mentors will keep meeting online with them in the next weeks, until their chosen contribution will be merged.Thanks to all participants, Loic and Sahid Orentino Ferdjaoui, Édouard Thuleau, Chris Ricker for assisting.

We hope to replicate the training in Paris: stay tuned for the details soon.

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Countdown to the May 2014 OpenStack Summit

 

May 9, 2014

The May 2014 OpenStack Summit in Atlanta Kicks Off in 3 Days!

Continue to check OpenStack.org/Summit for updated information.

Summit Schedule
The main conference will run Monday through Thursday, and the Design Summit (developer working sessions) will run Tuesday through Friday. Arrive early on Monday to make sure you don’t miss any of the keynote action!

Registration Check-In Information

Skip the lines & pick up your badge early – registration begins on Sunday, May 11th at 3pm on Level 4 of the Georgia World Congress Center. Registration check-in will also be available throughout the week during the following times:

  • Sunday, May 11, 3pm – 7pm
  • Monday, May 12, 7am – 8pm
  • Tuesday, May 13, 7am – 6:30pm
  • Wednesday, May 14,  7:15am – 6pm
Not yet Registered? It’s not too Late!
  • Online Registration is now CLOSED but you can still register to attend the Summit onsite in Atlanta during the above listed registration hours.
New Summit Mobile App!
Plan ahead & streamline your Summit experience by downloading the official mobile app! Within the app, you can:
  • View the main conference & design summit schedules
  • Navigate maps of the GWCC, including breakout sessions and the expo hall
  • Chat with other Summit attendees
  • Participate in our expo hall booth crawl gamification & more!
  • Apple users download here & Android users download here
Local Train Transportation from Airport (MARTA)
MARTA’s airport station is attached to the airport, right off baggage claim. One-way fares are only $2.50 and within 20 minutes, you can be downtown.

  • Arriving passengers should follow the Ground Transportation signs to MARTA. The entrance to MARTA’s Airport Station is located inside the western end of the airport’s main terminal. Faregates are just a few feet from the baggage claim areas, just follow the signs.
  • To travel to the Omni Hotel and the GWCC: Take the train north to the Five Points Station. Take a westbound train 1 stop to CNN/GWCC Station. Take the escalator or elevator up and walk through the CNN building to hotel entrance.
  • To travel to the Westin: Take the train north to the Peachtree Center Station. Follow the signs to the Harris Street exit. Once exiting the fare gate, follow the signs pointing to Peachtree Street West. This exit will put you on the same side of the street as the hotel.
  • To travel to the Hyatt: Take the train north to the Peachtree Center Station. Follow the signs to the Harris Street exit. After exiting the fare gate, follow the signs to the Peachtree Street East. At street level, turn right to walk along Peachtree Street and walk a block to reach the Hyatt.
Summit Venue & Walking Directions
The Summit will take place at the GWCC. You can find a helpful map to navigate the venue here.
  • It is a short walking distance from the Omni, Westin and Hyatt hotels in downtown Atlanta.
  • From the Omni: Head southeast on Marietta St and turn right on Andrew Young International Blvd. The GWCC will be on your right (Estimated walking time: 5 minutes)
  • From the Westin: Head west on Andrew Young International Blvd. Walk half a mile and the GWCC will be on your right (Estimated walking time: 10 minutes)
  • From the Hyatt: Head south on Peachtree St and turn right on Andrew Young International Blvd. Walk half a mile and the GWCC will be on your right (Estimated walking time: 15 minutes)
Play to Win in the New OpenStack Booth Crawl QR Code Challenge!
New this year, we are hosting a challenge during the Booth Crawl Happy Hour on Monday, May 12. The grand prize winner will receive a Full Access Pass to the next OpenStack Summit in Paris (Nov 3-8, 2014) and a complimentary hotel room in Paris for 4 nights during the Summit.

OpenStack Photo Booth
Come capture your OpenStack Summit moment at our new photo booth in the hallway on Level 2. Write a message, snap a photo, take a piece of the Summit, share it with your Twitter and Facebook communities and print a copy to display in the OpenStack Marketplace Expo Hall.

Blogger Lounge
Are You a Blogger?  New this year we’ve created a Blogger Lounge – a quiet space for bloggers and media to write and share posts covering the Summit.  Look for it on Level 2 (Room B208).

Evening Events
Round out your Summit Experience & Have Fun at the Official Evening Events!
Stay Connected
Follow @OpenStack on Twitter for more updates, and join the conversation by using #OpenStack

 

OpenStack Summit Code of Conduct
The OpenStack Foundation is dedicated to providing an inclusive and safe Summit experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of Summit participants in any form.  Summit exhibitors in the expo hall, evening party hosts and organizers of related Summit activities should be aware they are also subject to the code of conduct. Please make sure you review the Code of Conduct, which provides contact information for Foundation staff should you have any questions or need to report an issue.

Open Mic Spotlight: Masayuki Igawa

 

May 8, 2014

MasayukiThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. If you’re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form and submit!

Masayuki Igawa is a software engineer at NEC Solution Innovators, Ltd. He has worked there for 15 years on a wide range of software projects, and developing open source software related to Linux kernel and virtualization. He’s been an active technical contributor to OpenStack since the Grizzly release. He is an OpenStack Tempest core member. You can follow him on Twitter at @masayukig.

1. How would you explain your job to your grandmother?

I’d like to say, “I’m contributing code to OpenStack!”
Because my grandmother really knows computer/internet/cloud/open source!

Sorry, it’s a joke… 😛

2. Get creative — create an original OpenStack gif or haiku!

OpenStack has unlimited possibilities
Beautiful and elegant UI/UX is
Coming soon

3. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you lear in college? On-the-job?

I’m self-taught, but also have on-the-job training about code. I started coding when I was 12 years old. I copied many BASIC codes from magazines by my hands. I studied bio-chemistry at university. So I spent some time cutting and pasting DNA of e.coli, actually. And on-the-job, I learned languages such as assembly, C, Java, Ruby, and Python.

4. Where is your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop, in bed?

Starbucks is my favorite place. And, my office is good but there are a lot of harmful noises for coding. So, holidays are good for the office.

5. What is your favorite example of OpenStack in production (besides yours, of course!)

My favorite is ConoHa VPS (https://www.conoha.jp/). This is not “cloud”, though. But this is one interesting OpenStack deployment because it’s very different from Amazon web services.

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Apr 25 – May 2)

 

May 2, 2014

DefCore Core Capabilities Selection Criteria SIMPLIFIED -> how we are picking Core

Rob Hirschfeld summarizes the status of discussions within OpenStack community of what is ‘Openstack’. The effort is now summarized in a diagram showing the 12 criterias grouped in 4 main categories. Better go read Rob’s post, it’ll all make sense.

Announcing the O’Reilly OpenStack Operations Guide

O’Reilly has completed the production of the OpenStack Operations Guide: Set Up and Manage Your OpenStack Cloud. You can get your bits-n-bytes copy at http://docs.openstack.org/ops/ or order a dead-tree version on the O’Reilly site.

What It Means To Be In The OpenStack Community (One Member’s Take)

What is Kenneth Hui, Rackspace Technology Evangelist, deeply committed member of OpenStack, doing at a CloudStack conference? Read his blog post to find out what it means to be a good citizen of a community.

Results of the TC Election

Please join me in congratulating the 7 newly elected members of the TC: Thierry Carrez, Jay Pipes, Vishvananda Ishaya, Michael Still, Jim Blair, Mark McClain, Devananda van der Veen. Full results: Full results.

The road to Juno Summit – Atlanta 2014

Tips ‘n Tricks

Reports from Previous Events

Upcoming Events

Other News

Got Answers?

Ask OpenStack is the go-to destination for OpenStack users. Interesting questions waiting for answers:

Welcome New Reviewers and Developers

Christina Darretta Abhinav Agrawal
Sam Hague Gabriel Assis Bezerra
Obulapathi Michael Tupitsyn
yummy.bian Laurel Michaels
Tushar Gohad Karin Levenstein
Karin Levenstein Baohua Yang
Andrew James
Tushar Gohad

Latest Activity In Projects

Do you want to see at a glance the bugs filed and solved this week? Latest patches submitted for review? Check out the individual project pages on OpenStack Activity Board – Insights.

OpenStack Reactions

1396717999811

When doing a recheck and falling on an another bug

The 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 leave a comment.

Open Mic Spotlight: Lucas Gomes

 

May 1, 2014

lucasgomes_headshotThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. If you’re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form and submit!

Lucas works for Red Hat on the OpenStack Ironic project as a core developer. He was born in Brazil, but currently lives in Dublin, Ireland. When not playing with computers he likes traveling, hiking and reading fantasy books.

1. How would you explain your job to your grandmother?

Well… I can definitely try.

Grandma, let’s think for a moment that you’re a computer, a special type of computer… you’re a computer that make cakes and today you’re going to try a new cake recipe written by me.

My job is to write that cake recipe, and for that I start by listing out all the ingredients that my cake needs. Then, below that, I write a step-by-step guide that tells you what to do with those ingredients: mix, mash, stir, bake, etc…when I’m finished, I’m going to hand my new recipe to you (the computer) and you’re going to follow the instructions to make me a cake.

I think that might work.

2. What new OpenStack projects do you think will have a significant impact on the cloud market in the next year?

I would say TripleO. In my opinion, one of the biggest hurdles to OpenStack adoption is how difficult it is to install and configure it. TripleO is here to solve that problem, but it goes beyond. It’s also about upgrades, continuous integration, deployment and a reference architecture. I think that having a fully integrated, upstream way to install, upgrade and operate OpenStack will make a big impact.

3. What does “open source” mean to you?

For me, open source is the right thing to do. It gives you access to a community that is working towards a common goal and not wasting time reinventing the wheel. So, the open source methodology just works, and works better.

4. Where is your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop, in bed?

I quite enjoy working from home and I think I’m more productive because of the lack of interruptions. But I also like the fact that once per week I can get to meet with other Red Hat folks in the Dublin office to socialize and to learn a tad more about what everyone is currently working on.

5. What publications, blogs, mailing lists, etc do you read every day?

The openstack-dev mail-list. For the rest I mostly use Google Plus. It’s nicely integrated with my email interface, so I pretty much rely on following the right people that are relevant to the areas I care about.

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Announcing the O’Reilly OpenStack Operations Guide

 

April 25, 2014

Er, what’s this? An O’Reilly OpenStack Operations Guide offered side-by-side with the continuously-published OpenStack Operations Guide? Yes, your eyes do not deceive you, O’Reilly has completed the production of the OpenStack Operations Guide: Set Up and Manage Your OpenStack Cloud. You can get your bits-n-bytes copy at http://docs.openstack.org/ops/ or order a dead-tree version on the O’Reilly site.

oreilly-openstack-ops-guide

This book was a complete community effort with a bit of a twist: we held a five-day book sprint back in February 2013 with the seven original authors and one book sprint facilitator, Adam Hyde. We wrote and wrote and wrote some more, then edited and glued it all together so that we had a 240 page book by Friday afternoon. The book got quite a bit of love and attention for the next year or so, and in February 2014 we held a mini-sprint with the original authors to update the book for the Havana release and to address developmental edits from our O’Reilly editors, led by Brian Anderson and first introduced by Andy Oram. In the developmental edit, we added a new architecture with RedHat using OpenStack Networking (neutron) as an alternative to Ubuntu with legacy networking, nova-network. We tested a process for upgrading from Grizzly to Havana in a new upgrades chapter. We also added a lot of network troubleshooting information. There’s a new “Havana Haunted by the Dead” tale from the crypt/cloud. We included an expanded glossary as well. Also an exciting addition to a book nerd like myself is the index.

As mentioned in the book itself, we appreciate the 50-plus contributors who support this book and the tool chains around it. Reviews, continuous builds, output, and translations are all an important part of this book’s surrounding systems.

The following people are contributors in the many methods it takes to create a book in the community: Akihiro Motoki, Alejandro Avella, Alexandra Settle, Andreas Jaeger, Andy McCallum, Benjamin Stassart, Beth Cohen, Chandan Kumar, Chris Ricker, David Cramer, David Wittman, Denny Zhang, Emilien Macchi, Gauvain Pocentek, Ignacio Barrio, James E. Blair, Jay Clark, Jeff White, Jeremy Stanley, K Jonathan Harker, KATO Tomoyuki, Lana Brindley, Laura Alves, Lee Li, Lukasz Jernas, Mario B. Codeniera, Matthew Kassawara, Michael Still, Monty Taylor, Nermina Miller, Nigel Williams, Phil Hopkins, Russell Bryant, Sahid Orentino Ferdjaoui, Sandy Walsh, Sascha Peilicke, Sean M. Collins, Sergey Lukjanov, Shilla Saebi, Stephen Gordon, Steven Deaton, Summer Long, Uwe Stuehler, Vaibhav Bhatkar, Veronica Musso, Ying Chun “Daisy” Guo, Zhengguang Ou, and ZhiQiang Fan.

We want to be sure you read this book and log bugs and perhaps even fix some yourself if you’re so inclined! You can read how to on the OpenStack wiki. We also have the OpenStack Security Guide, written in a five day book sprint in June 2013. And we won’t stop there! Plans are underway for a third book to be written with a five day book sprint to help people design OpenStack clouds for many use cases.

We’ll continue to update these books using our community tool chain. We greatly appreciate the support from the OpenStack Foundation and O’Reilly to give the OpenStack Operations Guide that professional polish it deserves.

OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Apr 18 – 25)

 

Gerrit downtime and upgrade on 2014-04-28

The OpenStack infra team has been working to put everything in place so that we can upgrade review.o.o from Gerrit version 2.4.4 to version 2.8.4 We are happy to announce that we are finally ready to make it happen! We will begin the upgrade on Monday, April 28th at 1600 UTC (the OpenStack recommended ‘off’ week).

OpenStack gets lots of students this summer

The selection’s results are in and OpenStack is adding 10 new people working on our awesome project. Please join me and welcome students from Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women.

The road to Juno Summit – Atlanta 2014

Security Advisories and Notices

Tips ‘n Tricks

Reports from Previous Events

Upcoming Events

Other News

Got Answers?

Ask OpenStack is the go-to destination for OpenStack users. Interesting questions waiting for answers:

Welcome New Reviewers and Developers

Karin Levenstein William C. Arnold
Aleksandra Fedorova Rajeev Grover
Rajeev Grover Graham Hayes
Megan Rossetti Erik Colnick
Robert Nettleton
Megan Rossetti

Latest Activity In Projects

Do you want to see at a glance the bugs filed and solved this week? Latest patches submitted for review? Check out the individual project pages on OpenStack Activity Board – Insights.

OpenStack Reactions

It's magick

When looking over sqlalchemy migration code to see how it works

The 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 leave a comment.

Tags:

OpenStack gets lots of students this summer

 

The selection’s results are in and OpenStack is adding 10 new people working on our awesome project. Please join me and welcome students from Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women:

  • Artem Shepelev
  • Kumar Rishabh
  • Manishanker Talusani
  • Masaru Nomura
  • Prashanth Raghu
  • Tzanetos Balitsaris
  • Victoria Martínez de la Cruz
  • Virginia Gresham
  • Ana Malagon
  • Nataliia Uvarova

and their awesome mentors Debojyoti Dutta, Yathiraj Udupi, Boris Pavlovic, Hugh Saunders, Sriram, Joshua Hesketh, Arnaud Legendre, Fei Long Wang, Alejandro Cabrera, Mikhail Dubov, Flavio Percoco, Liz Blanchard, Ju Lim, Eoghan Glynn. Mentors do an important job for the community: if you recognize any of their names in Atlanta, show them your appreciation for helping young students get accustomed to the “OpenStack way”.

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Open Mic Spotlight: Simon Pasquier

 

April 24, 2014

simonpasquier_headshotThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. If you’re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form and submit!

Simon has been an OpenStack Active Technical Contributor since early 2013 when I joined the XLcloud project. XLcloud is a collaborative project (funded by the French government) that involves academics and companies. It aims at demonstrating the feasibility of High Performance Cloud Computing platform based on OpenStack. More specifically, we’re looking at remote rendering, autoscaling, capacity planning and plenty of other cool stuff. Prior to this, my background was with Linux systems and networking. It proved to be a perfect fit for OpenStack where, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to make it work. 🙂 

1. What new OpenStack projects do you think will have a significant impact on the cloud market in the next year?

For me, Heat is going to get a lot of attention because orchestration is a no-brainer when you deploy complex infrastructures in the cloud (like XLcloud does for virtual clusters). The Heat team is definitely committed to building a great service, and also very careful to integrate with other initiatives such as TOSCA.

Most of all, the guys are very responsive and friendly with newcomers.

2. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you learn in college? On-the-job?

I studied mostly C and C++ in college but I’ve learned much more during my professional life. I’ve used different languages before Python (Ruby, Perl, Javascript) and I find it very helpful. To be a good developer, you don’t need to know a language at your fingertips, but rather take out the best of every community.

3. What does “open source” mean to you?

For me, it is all about collaboration and not simply sharing the code. What is important is to recognize any contribution: coding (of course) as well as testing, bug reporting and documentation. Making decisions in the open is also a key component.

Even though there’s a lot of space for improvement, OpenStack encompasses this vision and pushed the “open source” paradigm one step further (see how it has inspired other projects such as OpenDaylight). Finally working on open source projects is a great way to improve your technical and human skills.

4. What is your favorite example of OpenStack in production (besides yours, of course!) 

At the first OpenStack Rhone-Alpes meetup, Gavin Brebner from HP Cloud did a great presentation explaining how the Q&A team was testing, qualifying and stressing their infrastructure. The talk was really enlightening as he listed all the challenges you have to tackle for keeping a large cloud up and running.

5. What publications, blogs, mailing lists, etc do you read every day?

Planet OpenStack and the openstack-dev list, of course. 🙂

But I’ve got plenty of other blogs in my reader:

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