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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Mar 8-22)

March 22, 2013

Highlights of the week

Participate in the first OpenStack User Survey!

If you are an OpenStack user or have customers with OpenStack deployments, please take 10 minutes to respond to our first User Survey or pass it along to your network. Our community has grown at an amazing rate in 2.5 years, and it’s time to better define our user base and requirements, so we can respond and advocate accordingly. TAKE THE SURVEY

A new agent management approach for Quantum in OpenStack Grizzly

In Folsom, Quantum didn’t have facilities to schedule its agents between cluster nodes, but the Grizzly release brings the support of a new component management approach, which addresses this issue.

Havana Project Technical Leads

Welcome to the new PTLs for OpenStack’s future release, Havana:

Nova: Russell Bryant
Ceilometer: Julien Danjou
Keystone: Dolph Matthews
Cinder: John Griffith
Glance: Mark Washenberger
Heat: Steven Dake
Horizon: Gabriel Hurley
Oslo: Mark McLoughlin
Quantum: Marck McClain
Swift: John Dickenson

They were elected democratically by their peer developers according to the rules of the OpenStack community to lead the next release cycle. Congratulations. The new PTLs will join three more people whose election is still ongoing, to form the OpenStack Technical Committee.

Moving to open development: OpenStack / Crowbar / Chef on SUSE

Crowbar was originally developed by Dell engineers, and is now a fully-fledged Open Source project involving close collaboration with SUSE and others. There are weekly public meetings, a public mailing list, a #crowbar IRC channel, public Trello boards and so on. As an indication of the project’s independent nature, the authoritative location for the git repositories has changed from https://github.com/dellcloudedge to https://github.com/crowbar, and a new homepageis currently under construction.

OpenStack Miniconf at PyCon Australia 2013

PyCon Australia 2013 will be hosting two one-day miniconfs on Friday 5 July before the main conference proceedings kick off on Saturday 6 July. Miniconfs are events that focus on a specific community that relies heavily on Python, and allows practitioners in those communities to explore those topics in a much deeper way than the main PyCon conference can allow.

The Call For Presenters for the OpenStack Miniconf is open now and closes on 15 April, 2013. To submit a presentation, visit the OpenStack Miniconf CFP site at http://aptira.wufoo.com/forms/pyconau2013-openstack-miniconf-call-for-presenters/

Tips and Tricks

Security Advisories

Upcoming Events

OpenStack Hungary Meeting Mar 25, 2013 – Budapest, Hungary Details
Vietnam OpenStack Meeting Mar 30, 2013 – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Details
1st OpenStack User Group Nordics meetup Apr 03, 2013 – Kista, Sweden Details
OpenStack Summit April 2013 Apr 15 – 18, 2013 – Portland, OR Details
OpenStack meeting in Cologne May 04, 2013 – Cologne, Germany Details
OpenStack DACH Day May 24, 2013 – Berlin Fairgrounds Details
OpenStack Israel May 27, 2013 – Tel-Aviv, Israel Details
OpenStack CEE Day May 29, 2013 – Budapest Details
OpenStack meeting in Munich Jun 11, 2013 – Munich, Germany Details
GigaOM Structure Jun 19 – 20, 2013 – San Francisco, CA Details
OSCON 2013 Jul 22 – 26, 2013 – Portland, OR Details

Reports from past events

Other News

Amanda Enterprise 3.3 brings advanced backup management features
Report from the Chairman of the Board, Alan Clark: A Pretty Good Place to Be
openSUSE 12.3 is out, with OpenStack love
Chef 11: Interview with Lucas Welch, Director of Communications at Opscode
OpenStack Project Meeting: Summary and full logs

Welcome New Contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

Christopher Yeoh, IBM
Scott Devoid, ANL
Greg Ball, Rackspace
Andy Hill
Roman Podolyaka, Mirantis
afazekas, Redhat
Senhua Huang, Cisco
Ilya Kharin, Mirantis
Ryan O’Hara, Redhat
Michael Kerrin, HP
Allan Feid

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: Newsletter Weekly

Participate in the first OpenStack User Survey!

OpenStack

March 21, 2013

Below you’ll find a link and instructions to complete the User Survey by April 1, 2013. It takes 10 minutes. Doing so will help us better serve the OpenStack user community, facilitate communication and engagement among our users as well as uncover new OpenStack users that might be willing to tell their stories publicly.

TAKE THE SURVEY

All of the information you provide is confidential to the Foundation and will be aggregated anonymously unless you clearly indicate we can publish your organization’s logo and profile on the OpenStack User Stories page.

Make sure to tune in to the User Committee when they present the aggregate findings of this important survey at the OpenStack Summit, April 15-18, in Portland, OR. For those unable to attend, we’ll share the presentation and have a video of the session to view after the event.

Please help us promote the survey, and thank you again for your support!

Event Report: OpenStack workshop Bangalore, India

koolhead17

March 18, 2013

On 16th March 2013 PESIT, Bangalore, India had invited over 250 students from local engineering college in town. The agenda was spread the word of OpenStack to all the students.

One can find complete agenda of event http://www.meetup.com/Indian-OpenStack-User-Group/events/107140322/

All the students were asked to join an introductory OpenStack session one day in advance i.e 15th March.

Nithya Ganesan gave an overview on Tempest along with demo. It was good to see the participation we received from the students. Next I along with Srinivas Gowda did a demo & introductory session on OpenStack Swift.

We had a nice lunch followed by demo on Keystone by Surya Prabhakar.

I would like thank Mr. Dinkar Sitaram & his team of faculty members along with the students of PES IT who organized a nice workshop.

All the slides will be uploaded on http://www.slideshare.net/openstackindia

Photos of the event are available on https://plus.google.com/photos/106314994124977332570/albums/5856732614030254177

To get more update on our OpenStack India related activities follow us on @openstackindia

Introducing the OpenStack Operations Guide

Tom Fifield

March 14, 2013

Planning to run, or design an OpenStack Cloud? There’s a new book you should take a look at – the OpenStack Operations Guide. Get your free download now at http://docs.openstack.org/ops/!

You may have already seen the blog post, We Did It: Zero to Book in Five Days, from Anne Gentle, the OpenStack documentation coordinator who came up with the idea to write the book sprint-style and gathered the team – including myself.

Our overarching guidance (and why you should read this book) when writing was to share our experiences. The authors have all lost sleep and worked through holidays to nurse OpenStack clouds into a production-ready state. To that end, the book covers two main sections: Architecture and Operations.The aim of the Architecture section is to, once you’ve understood enough about OpenStack to realise that you are actually going to build a cloud using it as a basis, step you through many of the common and non-so-common concerns to deliberate while in design. Some of it might be principles you consider standard already, but others look to specifically address the hard questions specific to this platform. Questions like “How do you scale your OpenStack cloud?”, “How many servers should you buy for control infrastructure?”, “Should your storage be external or in the compute node?” are covered in an opinionated manner, with realistic perspective on what works.This book does not include installation instructions. This is already covered in the installations guides at http://docs.openstack.org/install/, so the book segues into Operations assuming that you now have a working cloud – though a pre-install skim is a good idea too.In the Operations section, we really tried to consider running OpenStack from the perspective of a time-poor systems administrator. It starts with a to-the-point tour of your cloud via the commandline as a way of familiarising yourself with what will be your working environment. Following this is a compendium detailing ways in which you’ll be working with the cloud. “User Facing Operations” attempts to give you enough of a perspective on what users are trying to do at the IaaS level that you can can help them, while “Maintenance, Failures and Debugging” works on the dual principle of fixing broken services, or preventing them from breaking in the first place.Two important chapters end the section – “Customise” and “Upstream OpenStack”. Openstack is as much of a community as it is a software project, and the latter gives some insights on how to interact with the community – including how to get help when you’ve tried everything else. The former, probably the most advanced chapter in the book, assists in taking advantage of the framework to extend it without touching the core code. Hopefully you’ll use the two in conjunction and share your work with the community!For excellent bed time reading – perhaps to help understand that others are in the same boat, and reduce those stress levels – there’s an appendix called “Tales from the Cryp^H^H^H^H Cloud”. Here, a few of us share our OpenStack operations stories to help you understand the processes we go through when the stakes are high.

It’s been a privilege working on this book for you – learning as much as contributing – and I hope you find it useful.

History behind the book:

The creation of this book happened in just five days, but the story that goes with it is a little longer. More or less since people started using OpenStack for their production clouds (let’s call that Cactus timeframe – those before that were fairly ‘brave’) there’s been a request for information on the best practices for designing and running our favourite cloud software. As it were, the small number of people working on documentation were struggling just to keep track of the hundreds of configuration options that make this framework so flexible. Then, in May last year, Anne Gentle created a seemingly innocent blueprint “Create and OpenStack Operators Manual”, and started gathering a team – people who’d spent months sacrificing their sleep to tune their OpenStack deployments, and able to share their knowledge.

Originally, the proposal for a book sprint was submitted to Google Summer of Code’s documentation track – it didn’t make it in. The OpenStack foundation came to the rescue, providing the funding needed to get the writers to the one place and keep them fed. Thanks to the Book Sprint methodology, from February 25th to March 1st, 2013, the authors worked out of Austin, Texas producing more than 10,000 words a day, allowing a launch of the book the following week.

Tags: OpenStack Update

A Pretty Good Place to Be

Alan Clark

One of the best things about my work with OpenStack is the excitement I get when I envision the impact the work we do here today will have on the IT departments of the (very near) future.

Imagine a stay in a hospital, where instead of of nurses and med techs coming in every four hours around the clock to monitor your vital signs, a small monitoring device with specific sensors sends a steady stream of medical information to a central monitoring station. Software at the station not only looks for large anomalies, but also innocuous patterns that could indicate something serious.

Or imagine that kind of medical data being delivered to a central monitor when the patient is in their home. Or at work.

Fill a city with climate and environmental sensors, like noise and light levels, and use those sensors to identify emergencies before someone can dial a phone or long-term problems about the health of a particular neighborhood.

Put some sensors in a farm field in a developing country, and let farmers use the gathered data to know exactly how much water and nutrients to use for different parts of the field. For pennies a sensor, the yield of the field is maximized to help support a family for another year and maybe bring a little extra to the market.

A train car that knows exactly where it is at any given moment, cutting down on waste and unexpected routings.

A smart home that can control temperature, ambient light, and even alert a parent when a toddler is opening a cabinet they are not supposed to be in.

These are all just a very few examples of what the media calls the Internet of Things, either very real or in development as you read this. If you look an an object and imagine what that object could do if it were connected to the Internet, you can think of cool new applications on your own.

“Internet of Things” is a romantic notion. It’s not like web servers and file servers were animate objects all this time. But whatever you call it, this new interconnected network of everyday objects will greatly impact people all of the world.

You can be sure that entrepreneurs are thinking of creative new ways to plug more devices into the Internet of Things, and all of them will need the same thing: a safe, secure platform on which they can store the data they will gather and analyze it to deliver the key services they will provide. If that platform is highly configurable and open, so much the better to mesh the platform to their needs.

One of the many applications of OpenStack technology will be to build that platform, and be a part of a world that will talk to us and tell us how to take better care of ourselves.

And that’s a pretty good place to be.

AlanClark

OpenStack and Friends at SCALE 11x

Kathy Cacciatore

March 13, 2013

The Foundation had a great time meeting friends old and new as a Silver sponsor of this year’s Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles February 22-24.

We thank Christopher MacGown, Founder and Chief Scientist at Piston Cloud, whose standing-room-only, The Tao of OpenStack, talk was one of the hottest of the show. Thank you also to Community Hero, Stephon Striplin, from DreamHost and OpenStack LA User Group co-organizer, who helped staff our busy booth alongside Foundation Community Manager Stefano Maffulli and Event Planner Kathy Cacciatore.

One of our favorite activities was the in-booth happy hour with besties Opscode and Rackspace – 2 kegs of Sierra Nevada and 12 bowls of chips happily consumed! Check out the pics….

Rackspace and other new friends

OpenStack Opscode and Rackspace happy hour pours with Tim Bell on screen

Opscode staff at happy hour

Christopher MacGown after his SRO Tao of OpenStack session

Stefano Maffulli and SCALE Poker Player

Here are the stats:

Over 2,300 attendees, 100 exhibitors and 90 speakers
68 VIP badges scanned – Very Interested People of OpenStack cloud software
250 Free as in Beer, Speech & Love t-shirts, 200 pieces of collateral, 150 stickers and 200 OpenStack LA User Group handouts given away.
Honorable mention for award for Favorite Clothing Item – our t-shirt came with the beer!

OpenStack track in Cologne, Germany

muharem

Mark your calendars for the OpenStack track at the PythonCamp 2013 in Cologne on Saturday, 04-May-2013!

The schedule is still being finalized but possible topics include

OpenStack introduction and updates from the summit
Introduction to HEAT

Also, if you would like to speak at this event please email us at os-track-cgn at lbox dot cc

Thanks!

Tags: cologne germany

OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (Mar 1 -8)

Stefano Maffulli

March 8, 2013

Highlights of the week

We Wrote an OpenStack Operations Guide in 5 Days!

And 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

OpenStack Day Tokyo 2013 Mar 12, 2013 – Tokyo, Japan Details
OpenStack Italia User Group Mar 14, 2013 – Milano, Italy Details
PyCon 2013 & Job Fair Mar 14 – 17, 2013 – Santa Clara, CA Details
OpenStack Meetup Mar 17, 2013 – Bangalore, India Details
OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) API Sprint at PyCon 2013 Mar 18, 2013 – Santa Clara, CA Details
OpenStack Paris Meetup Mar 19, 2013 – Paris, France Details
World Hosting Days 2013 Mar 19 – 21, 2013 – Rust, Germany Details
OpenStack Presentation at BALUG Mar 19, 2013 – San Francisco, CA RSVP
OpenStack Developers Meetup Mar 21, 2013 – Atlanta, GA Details
1st OpenStack User Group Nordics meetup Apr 03, 2013 – Kista, Sweden Details
OpenStack Summit April 2013 Apr 15 – 18, 2013 – Portland, OR Details
OpenStack Israel May 27, 2013 – Tel-Aviv, Israel Coming Soon
GigaOM Structure Jun 19 – 20, 2013 – San Francisco, CA Details

Reports from past events

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

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

Tags: Newsletter Weekly

We Did It: Zero to Book in Five Days

Anne Gentle

March 5, 2013

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

Tristan Goode

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:

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/

… and all the OpenStack ones (that I can find in that list), from both the miniconf and the main track.

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/OpenStack_Miniconf_Welcome.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Introduction_to_OpenStack.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/NeCTAR_Research_Cloud_OpenStack_in_Production.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/openstack-swift-overview.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/All-around_OpenStack_storage_with_Ceph.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Bare_metal_provisioning_with_OpenStack.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Enabling_Compute_Clusters_atop_OpenStack.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Heat_Orchestrating_multiple_cloud_applications_on_OpenStack_using_templates.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Lightweight_PaaS_on_the_NCI_OpenStack_Cloud.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/OpenStack_Zuul.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/OpenStack_and_Linux_Distros.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Open_Government_OpenStack_Shared_Panel.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Openstack_on_Openstack_a_single_management_API_for_all_your_servers.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Playing_with_OpenStack_Swift.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_OpenStack_Metering_Project.ogv

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Zuul.ogv

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

Tags: Australia LCA2013

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OpenStack track in Cologne, Germany

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

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