OpenStack at FISL 2013 Brasil

 

July 12, 2013

The FISL is an International Forum on Free Software that started in year 2000 and in its 2013 edition saw a massive presence of OpenStack. During four days, the main themes of Open Source were presented with speakers from various regions of the world. The Brasilian OpenStack community distributed lots of OpenStack t-shirts and stickers to the over 7000 participants to the 14th edition of FISL .

On the second day of the event, was the first lecture on OpenStack:

  •  How to manage a public or private cloud using OpenStack platform – Marcelo Dieder

Marcelo Dieder presented OpenStack, the main components of the platform and ways to contribute to the project.

On the morning of the third day, there was a meeting of the group OpenStack-Brasil. Participants included students, public and private companies and the presence of Alan Clark. The meeting began with Marcelo Dieder presenting the proposed meeting. After some other topics were presented::

  •  StackOps Portal Manager Head – Danilo Perogil and Renato Armani – Dualtec Cloud Builders.
  •  Review about Grizzly version – Davis Oliveira – Brazil Serpro

Finally, Alan Clark presented an overview of OpenStack and also on Suse’s involvement in the development of the platform.


On the afternoon of the third day of the event, Davis Oliveira Serpro presented OpenStack, the use of the platform in Serpro Brasil and mobile device management:

  •  Managing mobile devices (MDM) from a private cloud with OpenStack – Davis Oliveira

Alan Clark presented Openstack and Suse on FISL:

  • Build & Deploy to a Cloud Infrastructure – Alan Clark

Finally, on the last day of the event, Marcio Roberto Starke presented OpenStack and use the platform in Serpro Brasil.

  •  Unraveling the OpenStack: Technical aspects of its operation – Márcio Roberto Starke

The videos and lectures of the event can be found on the group Brasil OpenStack. More photos can be found on flickr. We thank everyone involved for their participation in FISL 2013!

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Hong Kong OpenStack 2nd Workshop: Deploy a 3D Virtual World on OpenStack

 

The Hong Kong OpenStack User Group 2nd Workshop: ‘Learn how to deploy a 3D Virtual World on OpenStack Cloud’ has been successfully organized by the Hong Kong Cyberport and Hong Kong OpenStack User Group (HKOSUG) at Cyberport Campus on 5 July 2013.  We took the unprecedented step of focusing the OpenStack workshop in digital entertainment.

This was a short rapid paced workshop where participants installed and used the OpenStack to practice creating and using a distributed computing approach for collectives of global small business and small artist collaborations.  The OpenSim 3d virtual world server was presented as a working example for the workshop.  Participants were able to share a collective cloud and demonstrated how shared clouds could be set up to be distributed computing nodes for the development of digital entertainments.

The lecturer, Todd Cochrane is a software developer in research and for art, and Senior Lecturer in the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology in New Zealand.  Participants were coming from different domains, ICT startups, university students, Telecommunication companies and Rackspace Hong Kong.

Bruce Lok and Raymond Chan, the Coordinators of HKOSUG and the Team in Cyberport who initiated and established the first HKOSUG, are dedicated to promote and drive the cloud adoption to the ICT industry in Hong Kong.  Bruce finally introduced the upcoming event of OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong and encourage participants to join and share their innovative ideas on OpenStack during the Summit.

Finally the feedback has been good, it was really worth it as the ideas shared from participants were useful for our further planning on OpenStack workshop in Hong Kong.

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Open Mic Spotlight: Joe Topjian

 

Joe TopjianThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.  

Joe Topjian is a systems architect at Cybera where he is currently designing, deploying, and maintaining various cloud environments to help technology adoption in Alberta, Canada. Cybera has been using and deploying OpenStack since the Cactus release.

1. What do you do when you’re not obsessing over and working with OpenStack?

In late May, my wife and I became parents to an awesome little guy. We spend all of our time with him – not just for the obvious reason that he’s a newborn, but because it’s incredibly fun. I always try to have side projects going on which can range anywhere from Puppet to synthesizing sounds to catching up on reading.

2. What are the essentials for someone just getting started with OpenStack? Sites? Books? Conferences? People?

Docs.openstack.org, the OpenStack mailing list, and the OpenStack-Operators mailing list are invaluable resources.

In addition, I think there are two other key areas to help beginners:

First, I’ve found that the most essential thing for people new to OpenStack is to understand that it’s simply an orchestration service for various underlying technologies such as KVM, Xen, LVM, NFS, etc. You don’t need OpenStack to run a basic virtual machine server – it’s totally possible to manually maintain KVM, a collection of qemu images, and user access to the server, but it’d be a pain. OpenStack takes responsibility of these tasks and makes everything work together. This idea demystifies OpenStack and its components into something more understandable.

Secondly, when a beginner has read up on the basics of OpenStack and has built a small cloud or two, they usually have a ton of questions. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with groups of new OpenStack users and just let them ask questions for hours – literally hours. These meetings are great ways to boost their self-confidence about OpenStack.

3. What other OpenStack developers deserve a shout out for the work they’re doing in the community? Who are our unsung heroes? Your own?

Definitely the team I was part of to write the OpenStack Operations Guide: Tom Fifield, Anne Gentle, Lorin Hochstein, Jon Proulx, and Everett Toews. As well, the OpenStack-Docs crew. OpenStack can have a steep learning curve and to try to fully understand and document it from a user’s perspective is an extremely difficult thing to do. Their desire to help users learn and understand OpenStack is very inspiring and it’s one of the main reasons I contribute back as much as I can in return.

Sam Morrison and crew from NeCTAR. Sam’s always a step ahead of me. Most of the time when I find a bug in OpenStack, he has already opened a bug report just a few days prior.

4. Describe an interesting OpenStack deployment that you were part of, and why others ought to know about it. What made that project work? Tick?

DAIR helps entrepreneurs by providing a Canada-wide OpenStack cloud to develop on. We ran a pilot of DAIR using OpenStack Cactus between 2011 and 2012 and received a lot of help from the OpenStack community to get it off the ground. We published all tools and scripts used during the pilot in hopes that others would benefit.

In October of 2012, DAIR graduated to a production cloud running OpenStack Folsom. In the same tradition as the pilot, we’re sharing our architecture design, deployment scripts, and configuration management scripts with the community.

5. If you could only have one album as your hacking playlist for the rest of time — what album would it be and why?

The Orb’s Orbus Terrarum has been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager.

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The All New OpenStack Travel Support Program

 

July 11, 2013

The OpenStack Foundation announces the availability of travel grants under the OpenStack Travel Support Program. The program’s aim is to facilitate participation of key contributors to the OpenStack Design Summit covering costs for travel and accommodation. The Travel Support Program is based on the promise of Open Design, one of the founding principles upon which the OpenStack project is built.

Key contributors are contributors whose presence is specifically relevant for the topics to be discussed at the Summit they’re applying to. Relevance of somebody’s presence is never evaluated in general ways: it’s always relative to the content being discussed at the specific Summit. The OpenStack Foundation will set aside a fund to support this program. The total amount of the fund is to be divided among the key contributors.

How to apply

All contributors to OpenStack (developers, documentation writers, organisers of user groups around the world, Ask moderators, translators, etc) are invited to submit a request. PTLs and code reviewers also are requested to propose candidates.

  • Candidates apply on the online form starting today with the deadline of July 31
  • Travel Selection Committee evaluates entries based on criterias stated on the wiki page Travel Support Program
  • Travel Agent coordinates with key contributors.

The OpenStack Foundation will coordinate directly with the approved key contributors to arrange for their travel, according to the level of funds granted. More details on the wiki page Travel Support Program.

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Open Mic Spotlight: Mike Perez

 

Mike PerezThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.  

Mike Perez is a Senior Software Developer at DreamHost and core developer on the OpenStack Block storage project Cinder. Since attending the Bexar design summit and being a contributor in 2010, he has been hooked and lacks a life. His twitter handle is @thingee.

1. What is the most important contribution you’ve made that will make OpenStack users happy?

I contributed version 2 of the Cinder REST API. There were some great new features that came out of it, as well as some restructure changes to help continue development of separate versions of the API and tests. The most important thing to me in the whole change was to make sure that the upgrade was easy for both users and system administrators. I can pretty much say that everything you were able to do in version 1 works just as well in version 2. At the Havana summit in Portland, I had great feedback from different companies that were very happy with Cinder’s upgrade process. This doesn’t just stop with Cinder though. I feel like the conversations I had with other contributors at the summit were all very exciting – wanting to know my views, tips and tricks we did for compatibility that they wanted to bring to other projects.

2. What comment(s) have you received from users that made you proud of your work? When have you felt best about your work?

Documentation. When creating a new API it’s especially important for people to know how to communicate with it and what to expect.  I <strike>painfully</strike> very lovingly went through each command in all versions of the Cinder API and documented the possible responses and caveats. I can happily say we have version 1 and 2 of Cinder API documented as of Grizzly, along with the quick start reference guide. The praise at the summit was totally worth it, especially random people wanting to buy me a drink. I love that.

3. What do you think are the benefits of the open, community-driven approach to development?

First off, this couldn’t work without a great community. From IRC, to the mailing lists, to code reviews, to the summit, it’s all great communication and energy; that’s something OpenStack really shines in. One of the great things about our community is our diversity  in how we all come from different backgrounds and have different use cases. When you have a proposal at a summit, be prepared for semantic questions and edge cases. This, in my opinion, is commonly viewed as a negative thing in the community to hold back development. Instead I think we should feel positive about the wealth of knowledge we have to share and take advantage of it, but not lose focus of satisfying the basics of the use case and build off of it incrementally. With the number of users using my work today, it’s quite a relief to have this community backing me up.

4. If you could only have one album as your hacking playlist for the rest of time — what album would it be and why?

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack album from the movie The Social Network. It has some great tracks for concentrating on code reviews and getting motivated for a late night of fixing bugs and getting new features done. Plus it secretly makes me feel like such a hacker, like the young Mr. Zuckerberg in that one scene where he uses a Perl script to download images of his college mates. (lol) When I’m running Tempest tests, you can usually find me blasting Dope’N’Stack Cloud Anthem hoping for the best.

5. What is your favorite productivity hack? Secret trick? Shortcut you’re slightly embarrassed to admit? 

I have a couple. First off, this may not seem like a shortcut, but with the current state of things, it has allowed me to get up to speed faster. The Cinder developer documentation shows how things talk to each other using mostly flow charts. Flow charts are great, but they don’t explain a lot of the details, caveats, possible code paths, etc. So as a result I find myself using ipdb which exports Python Debugger features and gives some added features. I find myself putting a breakpoint at the beginning of a request being received by a service and just stepping through everything until I understand it. I also use a notepad to keep track of all the layers I’ve gone through. Yes, this notepad will be upstream someday in the Cinder developer documentation. 😉

Secondly, every code review I do, I check out the change and pull it up on my Vim editor.  The Vim plugin Syntastic basically highlights pylint and pep8 issues I’m going to report back to the author, so I can focus more on the implementation. I’ve gotten compliments on my thoroughness, but little do people know…

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Open Mic Spotlight: Aaron Rosen

 

July 10, 2013

Aaron RosenThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.  

Aaron Rosen currently works on OpenStack for Nicira/VMware. Most of his time is spent working on the Network Side (Neutron), though he also dabbles in the compute side (Nova). He’s most interested in networks, especially virtual ones. He graduated with a Masters in Computer Engineering from Clemson University in 2012, and joined Nicira right out of school. 

1. What’s the most critical feature you think cloud software needs to be widely adopted over the next year?

I would have to say Software Defined Networking (SDN). The network has been one of the major bottlenecks in the time that it takes to provision a new application. In addition, using traditional networking techniques such as VLANs are hard to manage and have scaling limitations. With SDN, it enables networks to be self service entities where users can provision networks, routers, load balancers, firewalls, etc. on demand via a self service portal, and deploy their application immediately. Previously, one would have to submit a help ticket and wait for the IT department to process it (some days or weeks later). In my opinion, this is one of the most important features of cloud and what the OpenStack Neutron (formerly Quantum) project aims to solve.

2. What is the most important contribution you’ve made that will make OpenStack users happy?

My most important contribution that I’ve made to OpenStack was the Security Group API implementation in Neutron. In Folsom, if one wanted to use security groups, one would need to use Nova’s security group implementation, which had a few limitations that we wanted to fix. The first limitation was that Nova security groups implementation did not work in conjunction with overlapping IP addresses. Since the point of Neutron was to let people have self-service control over their networking and addressing, this meant it was hard to use security groups with Neutron at all.  In addition, Nova’s security groups did not support egress filtering unless a tenant enforced this themselves within the instance.

Egress filtering allows tenants to enforce, which end hosts and protocols their instances are able to initiate communication with, which is useful if one wants to lock down who their instances can communicate with.

The last part of the security group work was to implement the ability for Nova to proxy its security group calls to Neutron. This is important because it allows one to create an instance via Nova and specific security groups in Neutron in addition to allowing existing scripts/tools to continue to work and allows Nova’s EC2 security group implementation to work with quantum.

3. Describe an interesting OpenStack deployment that you were part of, and why others ought to know about it. What made that project work? Tick?

At VMware we have an internal OpenStack cloud (~200 servers) that we use to host test/dev workloads and labs to demo our software to customers in addition to dogfooding our software on before it gets to customers. The interesting part of this deployment is that all of our developers use this as their primary development environment.

When I first joined the company, everyone was issued a server to run their VMs on that they were responsible for maintaining and running backups. Now, over a year+ since this cloud has been deployed, nearly every developer has returned their server that previously sat under their desk as it was no longer needed. I think what makes this deployment work is the dedicated and talented team that is tasked with maintaining this cloud and the open mindedness that its users have in the power that cloud provides. I’d have to say this is probably one of the most sophisticated cloud deployments out there powered by OpenStack with Nicira NVP for SDN, running both KVM and ESX hypervisors. I’m also proud to admit that we successfully upgraded this cloud from OpenStack Folsom to Grizzly a few months back!

4. What other open source projects do you think work well with OpenStack, and why?

  • Python! — Nuff said (Everything in OpenStack is written in Python.)
  • Open vSwitch — A programmable software virtual switch that most neutron plugins leverage to implement SDN.
  • Gerrit (http://review.openstack.org) — There are a few things I don’t like about it, but all in all I think it works well in order to keep track and review the massive amount of patches against OpenStack.

5. How would you suggest to someone that they should pick OpenStack for deployment? What is the most compelling argument for OpenStack in your mind?

The compelling arguments that I would raise for deploying it would be that OpenStack is backed by a large community of users and companies. There are a large number of service providers deploying OpenStack, which allows you to cloud burst on demand to leverage public OpenStack clouds using the same automation you’ve already built around the OpenStack APIs.

Most importantly though, that it allows you to have flexibility to pick the best in class components from a variety of vendors rather then being forced into a vertically integrated stack.

Open Mic Spotlight: Joe Gordon

 

July 9, 2013

 

Joe GordonThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.

Joe Gordon was first introduced to OpenStack Cactus as an intern at Fujitsu Labs of America, and began actively contributing during Essex development while at Cloudscaling. He currently works solely on OpenStack as a member of nova-core and hacking-core on behalf of HP.

1. What are the essentials for someone just getting started with OpenStack? Sites? Books? Conferences? People?

Start playing with it. When I first started using OpenStack, there was very little documentation and it took two of us several weeks to get something working, now one can get something like devstack up and running in under a few hours.

2. What other OpenStack developers deserve a shout out for the work they’re doing in the community? Who are our unsung heroes? Your own?

Everyone in the #openstack-infra for helping make OpenStack development work at a massive scale.  With 290 contributors and 2,288 commits in June alone, keeping everything running efficiently is a huge accomplishment.

3. How do you think the OpenStack community will need to evolve over the next few years in light of the fast growth and maturing user needs?

I would like to see more people focus on making sure OpenStack is stable, scalable and robust.  As a technical contributor I would like to see OpenStack become so widely used and mature that no one thinks twice about using it, similar to electricity, cars, the Linux kernel, and MySQL.

4. What is your favorite productivity hack? Secret trick? Shortcut you’re slightly embarrassed to admit? 

As a nova-core I spend more time than I care to admit doing code review, and use my email as a review queue.  I recently wrote a script to help keep my queue up to date by marking unread emails for recently merged gerrit patches as read.

5. What is your biggest hope for the OpenStack community in the next 5 years? What would be really, really amazing?

I hope to see all the OpenStack cloud providers succeed and continue contributing back to the community. This will validate OpenStack based clouds as a business model.

 

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Blow Out the Candles – OpenStack Turns 3!

 

Update: Visit the new OpenStack birthday page with links to an infographic, the web badge and more!

OpenStack will celebrate it’s third birthday July 19, and we’re celebrating this month!  In three short years, Openstack has truly emerged as the center of cloud innovation, with hundreds of companies around the world relying on OpenStack to run their business. OpenStack is maturing, it’s coming of age and new users being announced every week (Fidelity, Comcast, Best Buy, Bloomberg).Over the past three years, we’ve also seen OpenStack grow internationally. There are now over 40 global user groups and more than 10,000 community members across 121 countries. And we’ve recently crossed the 1,000 authors threshold to the code base.  This calls for a big toast to the OpenStack community!

In celebration of the birthday month, we’ve launched the OpenStack #OpenMic series to spotlight contributors who’ve helped make the project a success . Each weekday in July, we’re highlighting one OpenStack technical contributor in a blog post on OpenStack.org as and syndicating it on Twitter. We want to celebrate the people who have helped make OpenStack possible during our birthday month, and to help community members get to know each other. To participate: https://etherpad.openstack.org/fivequestions

On July 24 the Foundation will host OpenStack’s 3rd Birthday Bash in Portland, Oregon at the OSCON conference – where OpenStack was launched in 2010. If you are in the area or attending the conference we would love to see you there. Please RSVP here – http://openstack3rdbirthday.eventbrite.com.

We’ve also invited all our user groups to celebrate with us. This month over 35 OpenStack birthday parties will be thrown all over the world – celebrating with cake, drinks, music, and more!  We encourage everyone to join the conversation and share party pictures using the hashtag #OpenStack3Bday

Update:  We also produced a web badge you can embed on your blog by copy and pasting this html:

<img src=”http://97ddcca80f76c4bfffa8-fba9438aa8767b03b10d7d590f8ffd05.r77.cf1.rackcdn.com/openstack-3rd-anniversary.png” width=”180″ height=”260″ alt=”Happy 3rd Birthday, OpenStack”/>

Please attend or help promote an OpenStack birthday party near you:

Atlanta – July 18
Austin – July 18
Boston – July 16
Brazil – July 19
Brisbane – July 19
Canberra – July 19
Chicago – July 9
China – July 20
Colorado – July 22
DC – July 17
Ecuador – July 18
Egypt – date TBD
Florida – July 18
Germany – date TBD
Hungary – July 19
India – July 21
Indonesia – July 9
Israel – July 21
Italy – July 19
Japan – July 24
Korea – July 18
LA – July 19
London – July 19
Melbourne – July 18
Minnesota – July 17
NYC – July 17
Nairobi – July 18
Paris – July 23
Philippines – July 24
Singapore – July 19
Slovenia (Invitation through email) – July 18
Sydney – July 18
Taiwan – July 1
Thailand – July 18
Toronto – July 22
Zurich – July 19

[Webinar] OpenStack Development: The Infrastructure Behind the Infrastructure Wed, July 10

 

July 8, 2013

Join Jim Blair, OpenStack core infrastructure engineer, for a 60-minute behind the scenes discussion about the unique tools and processes that handle up to 200 contributions an hour for one of the fastest-growing open-source cloud projects, OpenStack. Jim’s talk is one in a series of O’Reilly webinars covering the open source world leading up to OSCON. Don’t miss it!

When: Wednesday, July 10, 2013; 10 AM PT, 1 PM ET
What you’ll learn:
  • how the OpenStack Core infrastructure team developed tools to handle increasing contribution activities
  • what benefits occurred after these processes were put in place
  • how you can access and use the innovations from these open source tools in your own environments

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Open Mic Spotlight: Everett Toews

 


Everett ToewsThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.  

Everett Toews is a Developer Advocate at Rackspace making OpenStack and the Rackspace Cloud easy to use for developers and operators. Sometimes developer, sometimes advocate, and sometimes operator. He’s a committer on jclouds and co-author of the OpenStack Operations Guide. In the past he’s built web applications, taught workshops, given presentations around the world, and deployed OpenStack in production. Follow him on Twitter @everett_toews.

1. What are the essentials for someone just getting started with OpenStack? Sites? Books? Conferences? People?

DevStack. I’m a big fan of DevStack at devstack.org. If you’re an application developer, it’s great for getting to know the OpenStack API. If you’re an operator, it’s great for learning how to deploy OpenStack and how all of the different projects fit together. If you’re an OpenStack developer, it’s great for contributing a feature or fixing a bug.

You can run it in a virtual machine on your laptop. You can run it in a server in the cloud. You can run it with a goat or in a boat. I’ve found it so useful I’ve blogged about it a number of times at blog.phymata.com.

2. What other OpenStack developers deserve a shout out for the work they’re doing in the community? Who are our unsung heroes? Your own?

Application developers. The developers who are building solutions on top of OpenStack. The ones who come to our mailing lists, IRC channels, and ask.openstack.org looking for answers on how to use OpenStack. IMHO, these people are our true users and an integral part of the community. They’re the ones who have to make all of OpenStack’s projects work together as a cohesive whole in their application architectures. They’re the ones who suffer the consequences (good or bad) of all of the design decisions made in the creation of OpenStack.

If we do our job right, application developers will demand to work on OpenStack clouds because they’re easy to use, reliable, and performant.

3. What’s the most critical feature you think cloud software needs to be widely adopted over the next year?

Tools. We need the existing and yet-to-be cloud focused tools to work well with OpenStack. For example: software development kits in many programming languages, graphical user interfaces, software configuration management tools, command line interfaces, etc. That means we as a community need to reach out to the developers of these tools, show them why OpenStack is important, and how to use it.

It would be amazing to see all of the contributing companies devoting developers to the open source tools ecosystem around OpenStack. These are the tools that will make application developers ecstatic and drive OpenStack adoption.

4. What other open source projects do you think work well with OpenStack, and why?

Software development kits (SDKs). Any of the ones listed at wiki.openstack.org/wiki/SDKs. When application developers talk to OpenStack they need to talk to its HTTP API. But the majority of application developers are not going to want to do that. They want to talk to OpenStack in the programming language of their choice. That means using an SDK.

But SDKs are just the start. Once you have those in place you can build higher-level tools on top of them. For instance, the Ruby fog SDK powers the cloud provisioning modules in Puppet and Chef.

5. What do you do when you’re not obsessing over and working with OpenStack?

I’m from Canada so I bleed hockey. I prefer to play it rather than watch it so sometimes that’s quite literal. On a related topic, I have a taste for strong beer or a strong taste for beer. When I’m not on the ice, I like to stay under water while scuba diving.

Also, comics. I like to obsess over my collection and ferret out back issues. I just finished Alan Moore’s run on The Swamp Thing. “We thought that the swamp thing was Alec Holland, somehow transformed in to a plant. It wasn’t. It was a plant that thought it was Alec Holland.” Great stuff.

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