Lessons, Learning, and Long Views for Internship Programs

 

June 7, 2013

In January 2013 the OpenStack project welcomed aboard three interns and excitedly assigned them to work on fairly complex projects in our first attempt at an organized project-level internship program. The OpenStack Foundation participated as one of the organizations with the GNOME Outreach Program for Women and learned quite a few lessons during the six months internship period.

By February, two of the interns had learned the tough lesson of what happens when coordinated work efforts move at a fast pace. For example, Laura Alves, an API documentation intern had a patch with a manually created WADL for the Networking project nearly completed. She started requesting reviews from the core developers. We soon discovered that the devs were working on an automated method for creating the WADL. It certainly took some quick communication and coordination to make sure her work wasn’t wasted. Her efforts certainly weren’t wasted but it also hasn’t landed quite yet either. Lesson learned: internship projects are difficult to scope and it’s nearly impossible to set aside tasks in a reserve area just for interns.

Still more lessons learned were that the timing of code freeze dates landing prior to the internship’s completion made for a steep on ramp for new interns with early deadlines. We also found that interns can contribute so much right away with their fresh perspective — and they created such valuable blog entries for newcomers, like Logging and debugging in OpenStack by Victoria Martínez de la Cruz,  so they’ll be helping more newcomers for months.  We pulled all our lessons learned together for a “What Everyone Should Know About OpenStack Internships” panel session at the Summit in Portland.

One of the takeaways from the Summit was to learn more about mentoring from Katy Dickinson, and the blog at MentorCloud where she is Vice President has been very valuable to learn from as we continue to shape our plans for interns wanting to learn and contribute to OpenStack. Katy attended our brainstorming session at the Summit and gave us very useful suggestions. We surveyed outgoing interns and are working on a plan to coordinate early and often to identify and promote natural mentors in the OpenStack community.

The more you look for internships and mentors in OpenStack, the more you’ll find. Cisco has interns working on OpenStack projects each summer. One OpenStack intern, Emilien Macchi, at StackOps went on to do a graduate part-time internship at eNovance. Rackspace has interns working on multiple OpenStack projects.

The Foundation is continuing the involvement in the Outreach Program for Women also in the northern hemisphere’s summer edition: Terri Yu started working on the Ceilometer project with Juilan Danjou at the end of May: be sure to welcome her! Look for more opportunities to connect the dots with interns and mentors in the coming months. If you have funds for travel so interns and mentors can meet each other in person, let Stefano Maffuli know. If you have a great intern story to tell, please let us all know.

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Havana: An Enterprise IT Perspective

 

Intel IT has been working with OpenStack in our labs starting with Cactus, our first deployments into production were with Diablo, which we quickly moved forward to Essex and have been running production apps on this since the summer of 2012.  Since then we have been getting deeper and deeper into OpenStack, and recently had 8 of our Intel IT engineers approved to start contributing to the codebase, and have done our first contributions in the last few months.  May sound simple, but complex for a large enterprise shop like ours – and we are super jazzed to start contributing more and more…  looking forward to working as part of the community with more breadth and depth now thanks for having us 🙂

While we are in the midst of our Grizzly rollout, we are getting involved in the Havana specifics, and I wanted to share some of the key features we are excited about and share some of the use cases these help us with.

Our overall goal is to turn all of our data center into a software exposed environment, virtual machines, physical machines, networking, storage, and all of the components that make our complex and simple apps work at scale.  A number of the Havana features are really going to help make some big steps for us all into this level of capabilities:

At the foundation level, since we run traditional enterprise workloads along with new cloud-aware apps it is very important that resilient infrastructure solutions continue to improve, for instance live migration and restart on failure capabilities which are both supported by boot from volume block storage, and improvements in the orchestration code.  We also intend to use OpenStack to control physical nodes, therefore metal as a service work is increasingly important to us; our intent is to control our VMM sand physical nodes with one scheduler and one set of APIs/CLIs.

A lot of our work is happening at the higher levels of OpenStack, as we enable more complex applications and cloud-aware apps we need strong orchestration and automation for all of the resources OpenStack controls..  for instance we need auto-scaling, ability to deploy many machines in complex collections, controlling various networking asoects from IPs to firewalls all as part of the rollout of a single application.  Advances in HEAT to get us to a production level for our more advanced use cases are vital, as well as the improvements happening with LBaaS and OpenStack Networks.  We are also excited about the introduction of the service chaining concept which will let us declare our application flow and have OpenStack implement it from Internet all the way to the backend DBs.

As a large IT shop we also have to run our capacity like a supply chain so we need quotas and showback of resources for all of the services we expose to ensure the right usage behaviors while still allowing for rapid elasticity. Ceilometer across all resource types with granularity for users and projects get us to where we need for managing our capacity real time and with proper buffer capacity before new physical hardware lands, in turn allowing us to appear infinite in resources to our end users.

Speaking for the entire Intel IT Open Cloud team… the fast pace of the OpenStack community is why we decided to run this solution and contribute to it, we look forward to even more after Havana which will take our open cloud platform further out onto the cutting edge.  Don’t take a rest yet, we have a marathon we are on…. Hope to see you in November.

OpenStack Project Infrastructure Sees Rapid Growth

 

The OpenStack project infrastructure has grown tremendously over the
past year, and now is a great time to get involved in helping to run
one of the largest and fastest-growing open source projects!

The project infrastructure encompasses all of the systems that are
used in the day to day operation of the OpenStack project as a whole.
This includes development, testing, and collaboration tools.  All of
the software that we run is open source, and its configuration is
public.  In fact, the whole of the project infrastructure is run in
exactly the same manner as the rest of the OpenStack project: anyone
may contribute a configuration change via code review, and then a team
of core reviewers provides feedback and may eventually approve the
change for merging.

As the OpenStack project has grown, so have the services provided by
the infrastructure team.  The code review system, Gerrit, now houses
134 source code repositories.  The scope of the project infrastructure
is so broad that it comprises 24 of those repositories, including
software in languages such as Java, Python, shell, Ruby, and Puppet.
We work on exciting projects that include how to test and facilitate
distributed development at a large, and rapidly growing, scale.

New contributors to the OpenStack project infrastructure are welcome.
We recently began reorganizing our documentation to focus on helping
people make their first contribution.  You can read about our systems
and how we operate at <URL: http://ci.openstack.org/>.

Contributions to the project infrastructure are highly valued by the
project as a whole.  If you’re interested in helping the OpenStack
project grow, and working with a wide variety of systems that impact
every developer working on OpenStack sounds fun, we’d love your help.
If you are willing to make a significant time commitment to the
project infrastructure, we are scheduling a new-contributor bootcamp
in New York, NY on June 27 and 28.  If you’re interested in attending,
please contact Monty Taylor <[email protected]>.

Ripple Effect

 

I enjoying hiking, and one trek I enjoy is a climb to over 10,000 feet within the Great Basin National Park to a small lake called Stella Lake.  Stella is very small and insignificant, if measured by size and depth. It sits at the foot of a small ancient glacier cirque sheltered by 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak.

Stella is cold and clear, fed by pure forested winter snows. Its remote location preserves its pristine environment. Its sheltered location creates an atmosphere of calm serenity. On many of my visits, the air has been so calm the surface of Stella was as a mirror, reflecting the beauty of the granite cliffs, evergreen trees, clean blue skies, and cottony white clouds off its clear glassy surface. The toss of a small stone into such still waters ripples across the entire lake reaching the farthest shores, catching the silver sparkles of the sun in its wake.

The ripple effect.  Where a seemingly localized action transfers to great distances.

With all that is being accomplished within the OpenStack project, we should not forget about the ripple effect.  This effect occurs daily through the associated commercial and community open source projects tied into the project. An OpenStack release, such as Grizzly, is like a toss of a stone into the waters of the cloud ecosystem.

Many community projects and commercial ventures closely follow the OpenStack project through the life of each release.  Tracking changes on a daily basis they see the code, learn from it, adapt it, and enhance it.  Processes that not only ripple out to the Cloud ecosystem but ripple back into the OpenStack project as well creating a mutually beneficial relationship.

Community open source projects check out the changes, build OpenStack within their own projects, run functional and unit tests for each component, and put the code through its paces.  Their  development processes included additional code reviews, component integration and testing tailored to their community or organization projects.  Through their processes additional bugs are quickly found and fixed.  Through their efforts OpenStack is distributed as a part of their projects. Through their efforts OpenStack receives the ripple effect of return contributions through reported bugs, patches, and feature enhancements.

Commercial programs conduct similar testing and review steps while typically adding service and support for a variety of platforms, middleware, and applications. Their contributions back to the OpenStack project provide increased quality and more easily integrated software.  Attributes that keep getting better with each OpenStack release.

As you can see the ripple effect not only extends OpenStack into a worldwide distribution but into a worldwide community.  A community of vastly growing knowledge and ideas.  Quite simply, the ripple effect helps make open source software better, faster.

The next steps for OpenStack Activity Board

 

The interest around OpenStack Activity Board launched only two months ago is rapidly becoming the self-service place to find details about the activity of OpenStack development. There are still some known bugs to fix and while those are solved it’s time to start thinking about the future.

Today the Activity Board is capable of answering quantitative questions on the Dash like: how fast are we committing code to OpenStack? How many people are involved in fixing bugs and adding features to projects, like OpenStack Compute or Ceilometer? How much traffic and how many voices are active on the mailing lists? It can also give Insights on the context of any action of the community: who (people or company) is fixing bugs or committing code related to OpenStack Block Storage? Who’s contributed something (code or bug reports) for the first time or who’s doing ‘stuff’ in the past 30 days?  The insights can be useful for new members of the community to identify, for example, the most knowledgeable people in a particular area of the code. Or for a potential customer to identify the companies with most expertise in areas crucial for them. Since Activity Board launched we’ve received also comments and requests for new reports from project managers, developers and marketing managers. Keep them coming: the more feedback we get the more useful the tool can be.  We are thinking of ways to include more sources of data. For example, now the page for OpenStack Object Storage shows the list of recent bugs, reviews, milestones and branches, links to core repository but we can add links to the recently relevant questions on Ask OpenStack and to relevant documentation pages and even show there information about people and companies active on reviews, bug fixing and code contributions. A page like that could well become one of the main source of relevant, always up to date, information about any project.

The Activity Board project is a young project but it is growing fast: there are many ways to contribute to OpenStack Activity Board, the simplest of which are to join the discussions tagged [Metrics] and add your ideas to the wishilist. If you have special requests, data that you would like to see tracked and reports you’re interested in let us know.

New Foundation Gold Members & Corporate Sponsors

 

The OpenStack Foundation was thrilled to add two new Gold Members and 13 corporate sponsors so far this year to the already impressive list of companies who are supporting the Foundation and driving innovation on the platform.    Ericsson and Juniper Networks won the OpenStack Board’s approval at the April board meeting and joined the Foundation as Gold members.  To learn more about these companies and their OpenStack initiatives please visit www.ericsson.com and www.juniper.net

We’ve also seen amazing support in Corporate Sponsorship and we want to share the impressive list of recent additions.

The diversity in technologies and geographic location of these new additions to the ecosystem reflects the growth of OpenStack and its footprint worldwide.  We are looking forward to enjoying each these companies’ unique contributions going forward!

Busy, Busy OpenStack in SF Bay

 

June 4, 2013

Two weeks ago Piston Cloud hosted the first SFBay OpenStack Meetup in San Francisco since August of last year. That was a long, sad drought, and the San Francisco participants of SFBay OpenStack are working on correcting it.

This meet up, “Blue Night“, was focused on mutnauQ. We had collaborators from Piston Cloud, VMware & Nircira, Nebula, Midokura, and other leaders in this area. It was very casual.

Now in June, you can get more of your fill of OpenStack in the SF Bay:

If you live in the San Francisco, Oakland, or San Jose areas and are interested in cloud computing, please join us.

Enter OpenStack’s T-shirt Design Contest!

 

SmallTshirtDesignContestAd

Show us your creative talent & submit an original design for our
2013 OpenStack T-shirt Design Contest!

  • Winning design will be announced the last week in August 2013
  • Original artwork will be showcased on T-shirts given out at LinuxCon Cloud Open in New Orleans, September 16-18, 2013 as well as future events worldwide
  • Creator of the winning design will receive attribution on the T-shirt and public recognition on OpenStack’s website
  • Submissions will be accepted through August 1, 2013
  • Email submissions to [email protected] –  Subject: OpenStack T-Shirt Contest

For reference, view current OpenStack T-shirt designs HERE.

Submitting an entry:

  • Please make file Actual Size in inches (up to 10″ x 10″)
  • Digital art entries only; high-resolution (300 dpi) layered .psd/.eps/.tif (Photoshop) file or .ai/.eps Vector Files (Illustrator) are preferred
  • Do NOT send Microsoft Office files or Low- Resolution Files
  • There should be no embedded bitmap images (jpg, tif, bmp)
  • Colors should be spot with no half-tones
  • Convert and group all fonts to outlines
  • Please notate the preferred T-shirt color for printing
  • Please provide a jpg/png/screenshot of the completed artwork to act as a proof for your submission files.
  • Email submissions to [email protected] Subject: OpenStack T-Shirt Contest
  • Submissions will be accepted through August 1, 2013
  • Note: If you have any questions about how to properly submit your file, please contact email questions to [email protected] Subject: T-Shirt Contest Help

Guidelines:

  • The design must be your own original, unpublished work and must not include any third-party logos or copyrighted material; by entering the competition, you agree that your submission is your own work
  • Design should be one that appeals to the majority of the OpenStack developer community
  • Deign may include line art, text, and photographs
  • Your design is for the front of the shirt and may encompass an area up to 10″ x 10″ (inches)
  • Design may use a maximum of three colors

The Fine Print

  • Maximum of one entry per person.
  • Must be original art. Content found on the internet rarely has the resolution needed for print and is often considered unlawful to use without permission
  • Submissions will be screened by the OpenStack Foundation for merit and feasibility
  • The OpenStack Foundation marketing staff will select the contest winner
  • The OpenStack Foundation reserves the right to make changes to the winning design before printing, including changes in image size or ink color or t-shirt color.
  • By submitting your design, you grant permission for your design to be used by the OpenStack Foundation including, but not limited to, the OpenStack website, the 2013 OpenStack Cloud Open T-shirt, and future marketing materials
  • The OpenStack Foundation reserves the right to final decision
  • The creator of the winning design will receive attribution on the T-shirt and public recognition on the OpenStack website

OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (May 24-31)

 

May 31, 2013

Havana-1 development milestone available

The first milestone of the Havana development cycle, “havana-1” is now available for Keystone, Glance, Nova, Horizon, Networking, Cinder, Ceilometer, and Heat. It contains all the new features that have been added since the Grizzly pre-release Feature Freeze in March. Including the oslo libraries, 63 blueprints were implemented and 671 bugs were fixed during this milestone. The next development milestone, havana-2, is scheduled for July 18th. Further details by Julien Danjou for Ceilometer

The challenge of the network

Lorin Hochstein shared a very detailed story about debugging the network in OpenStack-powered instances. The story starts with a familiar message: I can’t connect to the instance. Hopefully his story will be shared by generations of new OpenStack users and become legend.

Travel less, save more: introducing the OpenStack volume affinity filter

It is a common desire to have some storage space associated with an instance running on cloud. It is also a common desire to have access to it be as fast as possible. OpenStack doesn’t provide a way to fine-tune this particular option out of the box. Mirantis engineer Alexey Ovchinnikov discusses how Mirantis implemented just such an extension, what roadblocks have already been encountered, and what problems one may encounter when using it.

OpenStack leaders learning by humility, doing and being good partners

Director Rob Hirschfeld shares his thoughts about OpenStack leadership, open source collaboration and community. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Notes from Board Meeting – May 30th

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors had a telephone meeting on May 30th at 9:00am PDT/1600 UTC. The meeting lasted just about 2 hours, but the Board ran through quite a few updates and short discussions on a number of topics. The board approved and published the minutes for previous meeting on the wiki. Executive director Jonathan Bryce has published a brief recap of May 3oth meeting.

Tips ‘n Tricks

Security Issues

Upcoming Events

Reports from Previous Events

Other News

Welcome New Developers

  • Zhou Xing, IBM
  • Jan Provaznik, Redhat
  • Yang Lei, IBM
  • Simon Pasquier, None
  • Chang Bo Guo, IBM
  • Roman Bogorodskiy, Mirantis

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.

 

Report: May month OpenStack meetup,Bangalore, India

 

May 30, 2013

In May we organized a meetup in Bangalore, India http://www.meetup.com/Indian-OpenStack-User-Group/events/117132352/

The meetup was attended by over 75 people from varied backgrounds: startups  students, researchers, developers, etc.

DSC_0323

Event started with a keynote from Vamsi Kottisa of Anuta Networks, it was nice technical presentation giving overall view of what they are doing on OpenStack space.

Next was Amol Wate from Anuta Networks giving a deep dive & demo of their SDN solution which will work with OpenStack Networking.

We were for the first time got a presentation on Ceph & how it plays with OpenStack by Syed Armani from Hastexo. A lot many questions were asked & got clarified about Ceph.

Last session was from Romil Gupta from HP who spoke about the driver they have developed for RHEV along with nice demo. A lot of questions were asked and roadmap/vision for the work was also discussed.

Photos of the meetup are available https://plus.google.com/photos/106314994124977332570/albums/5883261931521653409

Thanks to Anuta Networks for hosting the meetup & providing us with coffee/snacks 🙂

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