OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Mar 1 -8)

 

March 8, 2013

Highlights of the week

We Wrote an OpenStack Operations Guide in 5 Days!

OpenStack Operations GuideAnd here it is…the OpenStack Operations Guide. You can read it in EPUB, MOBI, PDF, or print. The electronic formats are free to download so click away. The print version costs $29.90 and all proceeds go to the OpenStack Foundation to support more book sprints like the one that produced this book. Read from the protagonists how they did it: Lorin Hochstein, Everett Toews, Anne Gentle.

Case Study on OpenStack Cloud in Health Care

Computing for health care and life sciences is rapidly adapting to opportunities created by new technologies for scalable data storage, elastic compute service resources, and data analytics. Given the powerful forces changing the economics of the overall health care marketplace, technologies that can address security and compliance at reduced cost are getting a lot of attention.

OpenStack Object Storage and quotas in upcoming 1.8.0 (Grizzly) release.

OpenStack Object Storage (codename Swift) will have two new middleware for managing quotas: container_quotas and account_quotas. The first, container_quotas, allows users to specify a limit on one of their containers. The account_quotas is more the typical quota implementation. A «super user» with the reselleradmin group/role can set a byte limit for an account and the account will not be able to have new objects/containers until someone cleanups his account to get under the limited quotas.

OpenStack Updated Individual Contributor License Agreements

Last weekend we updated the OpenStack Individual Contributor License Agreement and all OpenStack contributors needed to sign a new individual agreement. We graphed the data of the rate of signups: almost 400 developers signed in less than a week.

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Reports from past events

Other News

Welcome New Contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Bob Ball, Citrix
  • Stas Maksimov, Dell
  • Fei Long Wang, IBM
  • Avinash Prasad, NTT Data
  • KC Wang, Bigswitch
  • Divakar Padiyar Nandavar, HP

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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We Did It: Zero to Book in Five Days

 

March 5, 2013

OpenStack Operations Guide Call me crazy, call me maybe, but we did it! We have a 50,000 word book, 230 pages long, now available for download in your favorite ebook format, or purchase a printed copy if you like the no-batteries-required version. Go to http://docs.openstack.org/ops/ to get a copy and watch a video we made on day four.

We started the week off with a cookout at Everett Toews’s house. I transposed the house numbers and walked up to the wrong house, rang the bell and everything! A nice Texan lady told us we looked like we were going to have fun but the party wasn’t at her house. Woops! We found the right house on the same street and had a great time. The evening was complete with peach cobbler as we nervously awaited our fate: Could we complete a book in a week?

On Monday we assembled to find out. In a room with an entire wall of white board, our facilitator Adam Hyde unwrapped packs and packs of sticky notes with fresh markers. He introduced the book sprint process and said that he has done about 55 of these. He also said we may not get the book we thought we would going in, but by the end we will get the book we need. Sure enough, we collectively wrote about 10,000 words a day, bringing in all the content we could, revising, reshaping, rewriting, until it all hung together as a real book.

Our hope is that it is the book we all need, that it fills a gap for an under-served audience, the operators of clouds. We want your input, so start reading!

 

 

OpenStack at Linux.conf.au 2013 – Videos posted and some pics

 

March 4, 2013

I know it was just over a month ago and I apologize for being dreadfully late to blog it, but I just thought I’d post up a few pics of LCA2013 and links to the videos of the talks.

Here’s the full list of talks from LCA2013:
… and all the OpenStack ones (that I can find in that list), from both the miniconf and the main track.
This is a significant tally of content given there was exactly 1 OpenStack talk at LCA2012! (go Monty!)My thanks to the many attendees and especially the speakers, many of whom travelled a long way to Canberra for the event. Thanks to the Foundation and especially Kathy Cacciatore for the main conf sponsorship that also allowed us to give out the best t-shirts ever from http://www.dopenstack.com. Thanks also to Susan Derrick at HP, Florian Haas at Hastexo, Tim Serong at SUSE and Katrina Clauscen at Aptira for sponsoring the “Cloud Hour” happy hour.With amazing keynotes from the likes of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Radia Perlman and Bunnie Huang and a wealth of incredibly diverse and deep technical content, if you’ve not been to LCA before, go next year! We will be back with what will be sure to be an even bigger OpenStack miniconf.

Cheers
Tristan

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Feb 22 – Mar 1)

 

March 1, 2013

Highlights of the week

Important CLA changes coming this weekend (2nd try)

Last weekend the change was blocked at the last minute by a request to amend the CLA text. We’re trying again this weekend.

Starting on March 3, 2013 1700UTC all contributors MUST review and agree to the new OpenStack Individual Contributor License Agreement and provide updated contact information at https://review.openstack.org/#/settings/agreements. On that day the Gerrit interface will be changing to present the new CLA text referring to the OpenStack Foundation, and will prompt you to agree to it there. Any previous agreement with OpenStack LLC will be marked expired at that time. The text of the new agreement is available for your convenience. You must also sign up for an OpenStack Foundation Individual Membership with the same E-mail address as used for your Gerrit contact information: http://openstack.org/register/.

What’s new in OpenStack Grizzly ?

Folsom brought us two new core projects : Quantum (Networking) and Cinder (Volumes). Two new projects have been incubated : Ceilometer (metering) led by Nicolas Barcet (VP Products at eNovance), and Heat (Cloud Orchestration). Oslo is a new incubated project which produces a set of python libraries containing infrastructure code shared by all OpenStack projects. More details for each OpenStack project on this post by eNovance.

OpenStack Ceilometer and Heat projects graduated

The OpenStack Technical Committee have voted these last weeks about graduation of Heat and Ceilometer, to change their status from incubation to integrated. Heat and Ceilometer will be released as part as OpenStack for the next release cycle Havana, due in October 2013.

Raspberry Pi as a transparent squid caching proxy

How does a hacker improve build times when he has a slow Internet connection? A fascinating use of a tiny sub-$50 computer (RaspberryPi) to build cloud images for OpenStack. By Steve Baker

Data placement in OpenStack Object Storage Swift

Technical deep dive in how OpenStack Object Storage solves one of the hard problems of all distributed storage system: how to effectively place the data within the storage cluster. Swift has a “unique-as-possible” placement algorithm which ensures that the data is placed efficiently and with as much protection from hardware failure as possible.

The life of an OpenStack libvirt image

The main stages of a Virtual Machine disk image as it transfers through OpenStack to be booted under libvirt explained by Pádraig Brady.

Security Advisories

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Reports from past events

Other News

Welcome New Contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Jian Zhang, Intel
  • Dae S. Kim
  • Robert van Leeuwen, Spilgames

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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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Feb 15 – 22)

 

February 22, 2013

Highlights of the week

Important CLA changes coming this weekend

Starting on February 24, 2013 all contributors MUST review and agree to the new OpenStack Individual Contributor License Agreement and provide updated contact information at https://review.openstack.org/#/settings/agreements. On that day the Gerrit interface will be changing to present the new CLA text referring to the OpenStack Foundation, and will prompt you to agree to it there. Any previous agreement with OpenStack LLC will be marked expired at that time. The text of the new agreement is available for your convenience (changes “LLC” to “Foundation”, restores a sentence from ASF and corrects a few typographical errors). You must also sign up for an OpenStack Foundation Individual Membership with the same E-mail address as used for your Gerrit contact information: http://openstack.org/register/.

OpenStack outpaces Amazon, at least by hype

A study conducted by TrendKite shows that at this point OpenStack has more media mentions than Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, CloudStack and OpenNebula combined. If that is not enough, another chart from the same study appears to show that “OpenStack” media mentions are on par with that of “Cloud Computing.”

CloudEnvy: Development in the cloud!

Jake Dahn is working on a project called CloudEnvy which has potential to change the development patterns of web developers everywhere: it allows you to configure and distribute reproducible development environments in the cloud.

Bring on the Crazy: Zero to Book in Five Days

Anne Gentle is leading a “crazy” project: a large, highly focused documentation sprint to write that operator’s guide — for operators by operators. Anne promised to pluck operators out of their day jobs, put them in a room, fuel them with coffee, BBQ, and TexMex, and get to writing. Sounds awesome to me: I’m voting for their panel On Writing the OpenStack Operations Manual in 5 Days at the upcoming OpenStack Summit.

The OpenStack Gate

The OpenStack project has a really impressive continuous integration system, which is one of its core strengths as a project. Every proposed change to our gerrit review system is subjected to a battery of tests on each commit, which has grown dramatically with time, and after formal review by core contributors, we run them all again before the merge. How can this gate merge hundreds of changes per day? Learn about Zuul, the OpenStack gatekeeper.

Security Advisories

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Reports from previous events

Other News

Welcome New Contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Toshiyuki Hayashi, NTT
  • Joe Topjian
  • David Höppner
  • Erik Zaadi, IBM
  • Nathanael Burton
  • alatynskaya, Mirantis
  • David Peraza, IBM
  • Brant Knudson, IBM

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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Bring on the Crazy: Zero to Book in Five Days

 

February 21, 2013

Well, since my team mate Everett has outed me as crazy (yes, it’s true), I think I’ve got some ‘splaining to do! It’s true, we’re crazy, but we’ve got to write that operator’s guide — for operators by operators. And if you know ops folks like I do, you realize quickly that these guys have hardly any time to write down their notes! We’re going to pluck them from their day jobs, fuel them with coffee, BBQ, and TexMex, and get to writing.

I’ve run doc sprints for OpenStack at various times on different scales, but this one is highly focused. So highly focused in fact that I’ve turned down people who wanted to attend but hadn’t run clouds day-to-day. Sorry guys! Super hyper focus, blinders on.

I had originally put the proposal together for the Google Summer of Code Doc Summit, which I attended in 2011, but out of 30+ applying organizations, we weren’t selected. Undaunted, I revised the proposal for the OpenStack Foundation to consider, and they are funding it!
1-IMG_3304
We’re gathering in the Willie Nelson room at the Austin Rackspace office next week, and we’re going to try a tool called BookType, hosted by Source Fabric. It’s the same tool I’ve worked with for book sprints with FLOSS Manuals, and it’s made specifically for sprinting. We’re using a pre-installed instance of it at http://openstack.booktype.pro. If you look at it today, it’s empty except for a Test book sandbox. By next week it’ll be bursting with content! The outline we’re working with to start is at https://etherpad.openstack.org/EssexOperationsGuide. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed it and commented so far.

You all are welcome to watch our progress next week at at http://openstack.booktype.pro and offer editing and reviewing as we go. Please realize it’s a pressure cooker of a week, and a real challenge. I’m saying, be helpful and encouraging so we can be productive and accurate. Once we’re done, ship it! We’ll have copies of the book available (likely for a donation initially to cover costs) by the end of next week.

If you want to hear all the gory details, we have a few opportunities. Next week, if you’re in Austin, come see us at the Austin OpenStack Meetup on Wednesday night. Then, at the Summit, we want to bare our souls at a panel titled, On Writing the OpenStack Operations Manual in 5 Days. Come see if we are crazy, or driven there this week.

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2nd Swiss OpenStack User Group

 

Following on from our 1st meeting, the Swiss OpenStack user group gathered on 19th February at the SWITCH offices in Zurich.

With more people volunteering to give talks than we had time for, the user group had voted their selections for the packed agenda. The main 3 talks covered 30 minutes each and 10 minute (or so) slots for lightning talks.

Over 60 people attended and the room was full with standing room only. Photos of the event are available here. Recording of the sessions is available at https://cast.switch.ch/vod/channels/2i5k459xe3.

OpenStack HA – Florian Haas, Hastexo

Slides

Florian started us off with a rapid overview of approaches for high availability in OpenStack. While the talk was ‘insanely short’, he explained the different types of components in OpenStack deployment and how to make these redundant. The talk is the base for the open that is proposed for the summit in Portland during April so those attending can vote to hear it there.

High availability implementations of MySQL, AMQP and API services were presented based on the Pacemaker suite which while it is not the most user friendly of packages, has become the defacto standard for these implementations. The good news is that the OpenStack implementations can be performed by copy/paste of reference configurations or using Puppet/Chef manifests.

High availability of guests has been a topic for intense discussion at past summits. The cloud providers based on scale out application architectures do not need these features but the providers running enterprise workloads would like functionality such as ‘restart this VM on a different hypervisor if the hypervisor goes down’. While there were some tricks in Folsom which could be used, in Grizzly there is now a ‘node evacuate’ function which performs this operation when the hypervisor is down. Some scripting is still required though as this is not automatic and the choice needs to be made between using nova migrate (if the hypervisor is running) and nova evacuate (if it is down). More work expected in the Havana release…

A couple of features may make the cut before the feature freeze for Grizzly next week. VM ensembles ensures guests providing redundancy are put on different hypervisors to avoid single points of failure.  Libvirt watchdog support will restart VMs if they are blocked.

Ceilometer – Lucas Graf, Toni Zehnder – ICCLab

Slides

When OpenStack was started, there was no billing functionality included. Ceilometer has been developed over the past year to perform metering (who is using what) and is being gradually extended to cover monitoring (what is working and how hard is it working).

With the Grizzly release, ceilometer will be incubated and integrated into the Horizon dashboard. A number of projects such as healthnmon and synaps are aligning their architectures to benefit from ceilometer and avoid gathering this data more than once. In the Havana release, monitoring will be included including a hardware collector developed by ICCLab to cover IPMI and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring.

It was particularly impressive to see the two presenters who have only been working on OpenStack for 4 months contributing to the community and mastering the topics, despite that the beer and pizza arrived during their talk (thanks to ICCLab and Rackspace)

Heat – Muharem Hrnjadovic – Rackspace

Slides

Muharem presented Heat, the orchestration component in OpenStack which is currently in inclubation in the Grizzly release. This provides a template system for creating applications similar to Amazon CloudFormations where you describe the different components of the application, define which parts can be scaled up or down and deploy to an OpenStack cloud.

Although Heat has only been developed during the past year, Muharem demonstrated its stability by running a live demo, creating a wordpress site smoothly.

OpenStack on OpenStack – Paul Voccio – Rackspace

Slides

Rackspace needed an easy way to spin up new OpenStack instances for development, test and production. To do this, they run OpenStack instances on top of OpenStack! Cutting an initial golden image, using load balancers to retire old instances and bring online new ones, they’re using approaches pioneered in web application development and applying them to infrastructure.

Snabb Switch – Luke Gorrie

Luke gave a talk without slides covering the motivations behind developing Snabb Switch (http://www.snabb.co/snabbswitch/). Snabb Switch provides an ethernet switch in user space, built on Open Source and implemented outside of the kernel which leads to improved performance and ease of implementation (much of it is written in Lua). The switch itself can therefore be easily extended in a similar way to writing macros for editors.

Cloud Foundry – Christof Marti

Slides

The current status of the Cloud Foundry PaaS was presented covering frameworks such as Rails, Spring and Java along with services such as MySQL and MQ. The applications can be deployed on multiple cloud providers. Recently, OpenStack   was added to these by Piston Labs.

Christof did manage the impressive task of explaining the architecture of cloud foundry in the dark as the automatic lighting and power controls for the conference room turned off in the middle of his talk. When the power returned, Marti took us through the different deployment models for 1 to 5,000 VMs.

Wrap Up

We’re reserving the openstack.ch domain for the Swiss user group for further communications and plan for the next meeting in around two months. For those who want to discuss before then, the mailing list at http://sympa.systemsx.ch/sympa/subscribe/swiss-openstack-usergroup is available.

Other upcoming events include a talk on OpenShift on March 13, /ch/open are organising swiss open cloud meeting on June 11th and a Swiss cloud special interest group is being formed.

It was great to see the enthusiasm continue amongst the attendees and many thanks to SWITCH for hosting, Rackspace for the pizza and ICCLab for the beer.

For those interested in joining the OpenStack User Group channels.

WIKI:

https://wiki.systemsx.ch/display/chosug/Swiss+Openstack+Usergroup+Wiki

LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/OpenStack-Switzerland-4493120/about?trk=anet_ug_grppro

MailingList

https://sympa.systemsx.ch/sympa/subscribe/swiss-openstack-usergroup

Twitter

http://twitter.com/OpenStackCH

General information about the group

http://www.cloudcomp.ch/the-icclab-community/openstack-user-group/

 

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TryStack.cn Community 2nd Meetup – 19th February 2013

 

February 20, 2013

In the first meetup we talked about what’s going on with China OpenStack User Group(COSUG), and shared the latest experience for Quantum with community members. This time we will tell you how to master OpenStack in 2 hours for the beginners. There were about 200 registers, and about 100 people attended this event through on-site and online live.

Trystack series

This is the first public lecture series of trystack.cn. First, we gave a Brief introduction about OpenStack, and talked about why OpenStack is so popular in China.

trystack series

Then a introductory way was provided to the beginners, using devstack scripts. Later in this lecture, I explained how to use stack.sh with some Tips & Tricks.

After a short introduction about trystack.cn, we enter into Hands-on Lab unit. There were some demo and show-off on trystack website to help the newbie to master OpenStack.

At last but not least, thanks to our contributors and partners/sponsors!  The next activity are looking forward to your participation. The slides for trystack meetup are all on slideshare, please pay close attention to @COSUG and @trystack for more information. If you have any questions and feedback, please contact us [email protected].

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Feb 8 – 15)

 

February 15, 2013

Highlights of the week

Important CLA changes coming in 10 days

Starting on February 24, 2013 all contributors MUST review and agree to the new OpenStack Individual Contributor License Agreement and provide updated contact information at https://review.openstack.org/#/settings/agreements. On that day the Gerrit interface will be changing to present the new CLA text referring to the OpenStack Foundation, and will prompt you to agree to it there. Any previous agreement with OpenStack LLC will be marked expired at that time. The text of the new agreement is available for your convenience (just changes “LLC” to “Foundation” and corrects a few typographical errors). You must also sign up for an OpenStack Foundation Individual Membership with the same E-mail address as used for your Gerrit contact information: http://openstack.org/register/.

OpenStack Object Storage (aka Swift) for new contributors

As a developer, jumping into a mature codebase can be somewhat daunting. How is the code structured? What is the request flow? What’s the process for getting my changes contributed upstream? Find answers to these questions on this post by SwiftStack.

Evolution of the incubation process

The Technical Committee approved a set of changes to the incubation process, the process through which a project becomes part of the co-ordinated, integrated OpenStack release. One of the visible change is the switch from using the term “Core projects” to “Integrated”.

Upstream University at the OpenStack summit

Upstream University is organizing a session in advance of the next OpenStack summit, in Portland. If you can fly in two days ahead of the event to spend the weekend improving your OpenStack contribution skills, please consider submitting an application to attend the workshop.

Python trademark at risk in Europe: Python Foundation needs your help

For anyone who works in a company that has an office in a EU Community member state, the Python Software Foundation needs your help. There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark the use of the term “Python” for all software, services, servers… pretty much anything having to do with a computer. The PSF is asking a letter on company letterhead to forward to their EU counsel. More details on PSF News.

Report of Openstack project on SF State University campus

Two students (Brandon Lai and Pascal Schuele) under supervision of prof. Sameer Verma worked on exploring the cloud computing space in Fall 2012. They built a demo/prototype of a private cloud platform on campus and presented at the end of the semester. Prof. Verma hopes to continue to expand this project in Spring 2013.

Security Advisories

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Other News

Welcome New Contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Tim Potter, HP
  • Jean-Baptiste RANSY, Alyseo
  • Nicholas Kuechler
  • Adalberto Medeiros, IBM

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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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Feb 1 – 8)

 

February 8, 2013

Highlights of the week

Best way to brag about contributing to Grizzly?

Contributors to OpenStack Folsom received a nice patch to stick on something you carry every day like a backpack or your favorite sweater. Would you like to get a patch for Grizzly, too? Would you rather get something else to brag about your ‘Contributor’ status? Let us know your preferences.

Packstack: Openstack Install tool

There is a new tool that installs Openstack either on bare metal or Vms: it can be found on github under the fedora-openstack organization. Packstack is currently in its first ages and still under heavy development but, it’s already capable of installing, customize some parameters and distribute most of the Openstack modules on a single server or several as well. It currently supports Red Hat based distros but there’s space for more.

Testing (OpenStack)

Anita Kuno, one of our awesome intern of OPW program, tells the tales common to new developers learning about OpenStack developer’s community. In this new installation she tells us how she had to run some tests in /opt/stack/nova and every command failed. Why? She didn’t know. But now she does.

Cloud Prizefight: OpenStack vs. VMware

There have been many discussions in the cloud landscape comparing VMware and OpenStack. In fact, it’s one of the most popular topics among those thinking about using OpenStack. Mirantis’ Lee Xie judged the two in the following categories: design, features, use cases, and value. The categories are scored on a 10-point scale and then tallied to determine the winner.

In a nutshell: How Does OpenStack work?

Victoria Martínez de la Cruz, another awesome intern of OPW program, uses pictures and words to explain in a blog post how OpenStack works.

Security Advisories

Tips and Tricks

Upcoming Events

Reports From Past Events

Other News

Welcome New Contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Kurt Martin, HP
  • Svetlana Shturm, Mirantis
  • Mitsuhiko Yamazaki, NEC
  • Andrea Frittoli, HP
  • James Morgan, Rackspace
  • Jesse Pretorius
  • Nathan Reller, JHU APL
  • Rami Vaknin, Redhat

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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