Contribute to OpenStack Activity Board

 

May 1, 2013

We’ve released the complete documentation for OpenStack Insights, with binaries and source code downloadable from Sourceforge while the OpenStack Dash tools are the vanilla MetricsGrimoire set hosted on github. The code is free as in freedom so you’re welcome to play with it. We’re working to put both pieces of code in the hands of the OpenStack Infrastructure team soon.

Following up on the long session hosted during the  Summit in Portland and 1-on-1 discussions, I’ve created a new topic on the Development mailing list.  You can join the conversations about OpenStack metrics and the Activity Board  avoiding the high volume traffic on the Development list by subscribing only to the Metrics topic. You’ll receive only messages that have the words [metrics] or [activity] in the subject and nothing else.  Go to http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/options/openstack-dev to subscribe and pick “Metrics” among the topic categories you would like to subscribe to.

If you want to know how the OpenStack Activity Board can help you understand your team’s activities in the project, build reports, integrate data from different sources, join the webinar we’re hosting on May 9th. We’ll keep ironing out the known issues while we think about the future of the platform.

OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Apr 12 – 25)

 

April 26, 2013

Special post-Summit issue

OpenStack docs and tooling in 20 minutes

Howto get started with all the tooling and setup needed to build, review, and contribute to OpenStack Documentation. By Joe Heck.

How It’s Made: the OpenStack API Reference Page

The site at http://api.openstack.org is a collection of HTML pages, and one page has an especially interesting story about how it is built. Anne Gentle reveals the secret.

Storage != Transfer

John Bresnahan argues that concepts of data transfer and data storage should not be conflated into a single solution.  He believes that OpenStack can benefit from a new component that offloads the burden of optimally transferring images from existing components like nova-compute and swift.

Report from Previous Events

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Other News

Welcome New Developers

  • Tilottama Gaat, Rackspace
  • Zang MingJie, None
  • Jason Dunsmore, Rackspace
  • James Slagle, None

Got answers?

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

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.

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3rd Swiss OpenStack User Group Meetup

 

April 25, 2013


chosugFollowing on from our 2nd meeting, the Swiss OpenStack user group met on 24th of April at the University of Bern.It was an excellent event with many attention grabbing presentations! A big thanks goes out to the sponsors:

 

Once we kicked off, there were five presentations, 3 which were more detailed and 2 that were more lightning talks in nature. The presentations in there running order were:

Upcoming

There are other upcoming Swiss events that will include much talk of OpenStack. Of note are:

Also the Swiss Informatics Society have started a cloud computing special interest group, where all folk active in cloud are welcomed to join. More details can be found at their site.

Swiss OpenStack User Group Channels

 Original post: ICCLab

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Women of OpenStack at the Portland Summit

 

April 22, 2013

Keeping in step with the rapid growth in the OpenStack community, the Women of OpenStack presence at the Summit has grown significantly as well – over 200 women registered. Upon arriving at the Summit in Portland women were welcomed with specially designed lady’s-cut red hoodies, an invitation to attend a networking breakfast, and an open platform to share knowledge and ideas for how to get more women involved in the OpenStack community.

Over 70 women attended the networking breakfast hosted by the OpenStack Foundation and lead by community leader, Anne Gentle.  During the breakfast Anne was surprised to be recognized by the Foundation with the creation of the Anne Gentle Travel Scholarship for Women named in her honor. The scholarship will continue to fund travel for women to attend future OpenStack Summits. The initial use supported three OpenStack interns who attended the Portland Summit – Laura Alves and Victoria Martinez de la Cruz from Argentina and Anita Kuno from Canada. Learn more about the Outreach Program for Women here.

To watch a glimpse of the Women of OpenStack who attended the Summit, check out this video, Getting More Women Involved in OpenStack, filmed by Rackspace Videographer, Jacob Forbis.

To get involved yourself – join the Women of OpenStack group on LinkedIn today!

Group Shot of those who attended the Breakfast for Women

Group Shot of those who attended the Breakfast for Women

Anne Gentle is recognized with a Travel Scholarship for Women named in her honor

Anne Gentle is recognized with a Travel Scholarship for Women named in her honor

GNOME Interns: Laura Alves Anita Kuno Victoria Martínez de la Cruz

GNOME Interns:
Laura Alves
Anita Kuno
Victoria Martínez de la Cruz

Red hoodies given out at the Summit were specifically designed for women - based on feedback from the previous Summit

Red hoodies given out at the Summit were specifically designed for women – based on feedback from the previous Summit

OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Apr 5 – 12)

 

April 12, 2013

Highlights of the week

Introducing the OpenStack Activity Board

I am pleased to announce that a beta release of the OpenStack Activity Board (beta) is now live. The development Activity Board announced few months ago provides a visual overview of all the OpenStack public activity of community members across multiple dimensions: contributors and organizations, projects and tools. From a single interface, you can easily surf OpenStack project content, whether it is coming from the LaunchPad bug tracker, Git or Gerrit, all mapped against the OpenStack Foundation members database. Join the session at the Summit to learn more and give feedback.

The need for releases

The beginning of a new release cycle is as good as any moment to question why we actually go through the hassle of producing OpenStack releases. Twice per year, on a precise date we announce 6 months in advance, we bless and publish source code tarballs of the various integrated projects in OpenStack. Every week we have a meeting that tracks our progress toward this common goal. Read Thierry’s post if you want to know why.

International Community Forum – Wednesday April 17 3.40pm in A105

If you are travelling to the OpenStack Summit from afar, we are holding an International Forum where we would like you to come along with your answer to the following question, “What’s an important, unique and interesting thing about OpenStack in my country”. The aim of the session is to share the answers so that we all might learn and gather new ideas for the improvement of the OpenStack community around the world!” It will be great to see just how many countries we can see represented in the one room, and a great opportunity for international networking.

Understanding nova-conductor in OpenStack Nova

Nova conductor is a new service in Nova introduced in the Grizzly release. It as one of the top three changes in Nova in the Grizzly cycle, along with bare metal provisioning and cell. In this article, Yun Mao discusses its pros and cons to help you understand it better.

OpenStack Networking, use of “Quantum”

We have to phase out the trademark or attention getting use of the code name “Quantum” when referring to the the OpenStack Networking project, as part of a legal agreement with Quantum Corporation, the owner of the “Quantum” trademark. The Board of Directors and Technical Committee members involved in Networking related development and documentation were notified so we could start working to remove “Quantum” from public references.

At the summit we have a session scheduled to talk about project names generally and the path forward for OpenStack Networking specifically. For instance, in places where there is a need for something shorter, such as the CLI, we could come up with a new code name or use something more descriptive like “os-network.” This is a question it probably makes sense to look at across projects at the same time. If you have input on this, please come participate in the session Thursday April 18 at 4:10pm: http://openstacksummitapril2013.sched.org/event/95df68f88b519a3e4981ed9da7cd1de5#.UWWOZBnR16A

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Other News

Got answers?

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

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.

Bonus videos

Introducing the OpenStack Activity Board

 

April 11, 2013

I am pleased to announce that a beta release of the OpenStack Activity Board (beta) is now live. The development Activity Board announced few months ago provides a visual overview of all the OpenStack public activity of community members across multiple dimensions: contributors and organizations, projects and tools. From a single interface, you can easily surf OpenStack project content, whether it is coming from the LaunchPad bug tracker, Git or Gerrit, all mapped against the OpenStack Foundation members database.

The Vision Behind the Activity Board

The intention is to give the community a way to answer very precise questions like: who’s contributing to that particular feature of OpenStack? What is that developer/company working on? Which commits/changes are related to a particular bug? Who’s joined the development community recently? With the Activity Board, we have integrated information across the different systems used to develop OpenStack to give corporate and community users a unified view of all the efforts going into OpenStack. There are two main parts of the Activity Board: the Dash and the Insights. The Dash contains reports built by Bitergia using the free software suite MetricsGrimoire, it focuses on trends and quantitative presentation. The Insights, enriched with a semantic layer, powered by zAgile’s open source Wikidsmart adds qualitative details with faceted search of concepts across all the different repositories, tracing people and artifacts across different repositories and bug tracker in order to reconcile people and corresponding contributions.

Looking to the Future

With the integration, we know that we can become a much more efficient project in terms of communicating to members, monitoring our progress, and getting work done. The project is its infancy and we wish to continue to evolve the solution and enhance it with everyone’s feedback. First of all we need you to look at the data and let us know if you find any mistake (we’re keeping a log of known issues). There are a number of areas we want to consider, for example:

  • Streamline the faceted search interface according to the community’s desires
  • Add more reports based on community requests
  • Add integration with other OpenStack project data sources (blueprints, mailing lists, Ask, user groups, IRC)
  • Potentially enable interoperability (which is inherent in the Wikidsmart abilities) so that an event in one tool, for example LaunchPad, kicks off another action or update within another tool
  • Remove the dependency on Confluence, port the visualization to an open source wiki or portal,
  • Publish all the code and tools, integrate the Activity board in the OpenStack infrastructure processes

Learn More

If you would like to learn more, we are featuring the OpenStack Activity Board in the upcoming events:

I look forward to your comments and further collaboration to make sure this solution benefits the whole community to the maximum extent.

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Mar 29 – Apr 5)

 

April 5, 2013

Highlights of the week

OpenStack Grizzly

Done: OpenStack’s 7th release, called “Grizzly”, is out: thank you, the over 500 stackers who contributed and the many more who participated in the OpenStack Summit last October where this release was planned. This release, more than any before it, was driven by users who have been running OpenStack in production for the past year (or more) and have asked for broader support for the compute, storage, and networking technologies they trust and even greater scale and ease of operations. Mark Collier’s post has a summary of the new features and a screencast of the updated OpenStack Dashboard.

Building a Multi-Tier Application With OpenStack

In his blog post Aaron Rosen shows how to build a simple multi-tier application on OpenStack, something that is made possible by the new features of OpenStack Grizzly: security groups and about Load-balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS).

Autoscale and Orchestration: the Heat of OpenStack

Duncan McGreggor tells the story of how OpenStack orchestration service (codename Heat) is gaining new autoscaling features thanks to increased efforts by Rackspace. Following discussions at Pycon, Rackspace’s management decided to add two development teams to Heat and add some of the features that initially they were developing internally. Another good story of different companies collaborating inside the OpenStack Community.

There will be no reliable cloud (part 1)

It’s the eternal debate about cloud and high availability, legacy enterprise applications and chaos monkeys. Hendrik Volkmer shares his thoughts, summarised in “Stop wasting your time trying to find one”. His suggestion: With all that free time, start to build reliable systems on top of unreliable clouds.

Grizzly, the day after

Thierry’s, our fine release manager, wrote his therapeutic post-release essay, balancing the excitement of the new release and the sadness of all the things that could have done better. Put on relaxing music, sit back on the chair and listen like any therapist would do.

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Reports from past events

Other News

Got questions?

Ask OpenStack is the go-to destination for OpenStack users.

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 Grizzly

 

April 4, 2013

Today OpenStack’s 7th release, called “Grizzly”, will be released. and I just want to thank the over 500 stackers who contributed and the many more who participated in the OpenStack Summit last October where this release was planned.  This release, more than any before it, was driven by users who have been running OpenStack in production for the past year (or more) and have asked for broader support for the compute, storage, and networking technologies they trust and even greater scale and ease of operations.

On the compute side, we saw innovations for those operating at massive scale like “Cells” to manage distributed clusters and “NoDB” to reduce reliance on central databases, as well as big improvements in virtualization management with full support for ESX, KVM, XEN, and Hyper-V.

In the storage world, quotas were added to the object storage system as well as Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to enable browsers to talk directly to back-end storage environments.  And in block storage land, 10 new drivers were added including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara, while the system itself became much more sophisticated with an intelligent scheduler for allocating the right class of storage for each workload, such as for performance, cost or efficiency.

Networking is an area everyone is talking about (and investing in), and with Grizzly their was a focus on achieving greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services across multiple servers. A new load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) framework and API will bring another wave of investment and innovation in the coming months.  To deliver on the choice users are demanding,  we saw new plugins from Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet in addition to the existing support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow.  And many others are releasing plug ins now, including Arista, Extreme Networks, Ruijie, and Mellanox. Exciting time as we explore the final frontier of the software defined datacenter!

Since the Dashboard is all about UX, I recorded a short demo in place of a write up:

Some other helpful links:

  • Thierry posted to the openstack-announce mailing list with additional info and links here.
  • You can read more about the new features on this new Grizzly page.
  • Read the Grizzly Release Notes
  • Blog Post from Aaron Rosen:  Building a multi-tier application with openstack (highlights some exciting new features like LBaaS)
  • The folks at Bitergia once again did some great work analyzing the contributions and blogged about it today.

If you’re already a user, don’t forget to make your voice heard by taking this user survey and by attending our next OpenStack Summit in Portland April 15th-18th.  We fight for the users!

@sparkycollier

 

 

 

3rd Swiss OpenStack User Group Meetup

 

April 1, 2013

chosugWere back again and this time we’ll be holding the next meetup in Bern. Things will start on Wed 24th of April at 1800 and run until 2000.

We’d love to hear from you if you are interested in giving a talk related to OpenStack then shout out at the meetup site or simply message @OpenStackCH on twitter.  Otherwise, stay tuned for the line up of speakers.

The kind folks at SwiNG will be sponsoring beverages and the equally as kind Red Hat people will have your stomach full with pizza!

The venue details are as follows: Room 206, 2nd floor East, Universität Bern, Hochschulstrasse 4.

The registration page for the event can be found on our new meetup.com page.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

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Vietnam OpenStack Meetup 3

 

After several months of urging and waiting, the “fans” in Hochiminh city have been satisfied when they had a chance to meet, exchange and share on OpenStack – the open source platform that has recently gained the world’s increasing attention, even “huge bets” by  big players such as IBM, Paypal.

With the participation of nearly 100 members, including senior IT experts, OpenStack technicians, representatives from associations, ICT enterprises (DTT, NetNam, Lac Tien JSC, iNet Solution, VNG Corp., MHB Bank, VNPT EPAY, Fibo, DEK…), and teachers and students of technology universities (Nguyen Tat Thanh university, Hung Vuong university), OpenStack Meetup 3 was successfully organized at Nguyen Tat Thanh University on 30th March 2013. The workshop, lasting for more than 3 hours, was really an exchange forum for new knowledge community, new technology and new vitality. Especially present at this workshop were Dr. Hoa Nguyen, a senior consultant of Hochiminh city Department of Information and Community and Mr. Hien Cao, former VP of Bank of America and a senior IT consultant in finance and banking.

At 9:15am, OpenStack Meetup 3, also the first in HCM city, started with a presentation by a community activist, Mr. Tuan Nguyen from Strategic Unit of DTT Technology Group. Mr. Tuan Nguyen updated the Southern members on VietOpenStack’s establishment and development and, particularly, the opportunities and challenges faced by VietOpenStack community in the time to come.

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Mr. Tuan Nguyen, Strategic Unit of DTT Technology Group, updated on VietOpenStack

The workshop continued with an introduction and technical overview on OpenStack, presented by Mr. Thang Man, Lac Tien JSC. This session provided new comers with a knowledge base to approach and learn OpenStack.

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Mr. Thang Man, Lac Tien JSC, introduced on OpenStack.

The meetup then went in-depth with technical presentations by Mr Tien Nguyen, Lead of OpenStack team, DTT Technology group. Mr. Tien Nguyen presented 3 topics: developers’ and cloud operators’ approaches to OpenStack, assessing OpenStack in comparison with other platforms, and experience and resources sharing for OpenStack starters.

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Mr. Tien Nguyen, Lead of OpenStack team, DTT Technology Group, presented at the Meetup 3 with 3 topics.

NetNam volunteered to do a demo session with guides to installation of OpenStack and practical experience sharing. Thank you Mr. Do Hoang Nguyen Pham for this great demo.

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Mr. Do Hoang Nguyen Pham, NetNam, demo OpenStack

These in-depth technical presentations have actually equipped members of VietOpenStack with new knowledge, new modern technology that would be, as Dr. Tuan Hoa Nguyen and Prof. Anh Vu Le, vice dean of department of information technology of Nguyen Tat Thanh university co-shared, essential knowledge and keys for Vietnamese youth, especially IT students, to participate proactively, openly and equally into the playground of the world’s young and next generations.

In addition to learning OpenStack technical side, the participants also had a chance to listen to Mr. Hien Cao, former VP of Bank of America and a senior IT consultant in finance and banking, presenting on the topic “Open source cloud technology in Banking”. What an interesting, practical and business-inspirational topic has he given to the technical men of VietOpenStack community! Big thanks to his great presentation!

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Mr. Hien Cao, former VP of Bank of America and a senior IT consultant in finance and banking, presented on “Open source cloud technology in Banking”

Meetup 3 at Nguyen Tat Thanh university marked a new maturity stage of VietOpenStack community. On behalf of the community, we would like to thank the organizers, VFOSSA, DTT Technology Group, NetNam, Lac Tien JSC… and especially, Nguyen Tat Thanh University and its volunteer students for providing great hospitalities, contributing to the success of the event. Thank you, speakers and everyone for your participation and contribution.

All materials will be available here: https://www.box.com/s/070kokb4xa9ly4v8ohf1

VietOpenStack contact details:

Mailing list:     [email protected]

Facebook:        https://www.facebook.com/VietOpenStack

Coordinator:    Ms. Hang Tran ([email protected])

Meetup 4 is expected to be held in Da Nang city on 26th April 2013 on the occasion of National Workshop on Development and Application of Open source Software with with the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and Da Nang People’s Committee being co-sponsors. We hope to continue to receive support from all VietOpenStack members for a community to be developed and sustainable.

Some other photos on Meetup 3:

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Prepare for the event

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Registration

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Whole scene of Meetup 3

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Dr. Tuan Hoa Nguyen, a senior consultant of Hochiminh city DIC, sharing experiences on new knowledge approach to young people

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Prof. Anh Vu Le, Vice Dean of Department of Information and Communication, Nguyen Tat Thanh University, thanked experts and speakers for their great presentations that provides new technology knowledge to the students

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Workshop organizers and speakers