OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (June 1-8)

 

June 8, 2012

OpenStack Community Newsletter — June 8

Highlights of the week

The results of Bug Triage Day are in

Nova has more bugs than all the other core projects combined, and the most slack to clean up. We went from 237 “New” bugs at the beginning of the day and down to 42, a completion rate of 82%. In the mean time we managed to close permanently 86 open bugs over a total of 627 [more, with charts]

Zuul: a Pipelining Trunk Gating System

The OpenStack Infra team has released a new tool to improve the trunk gating system. Zuul is a program that performs speculative execution of tests.  By constructing a virtual queue of changes based on the order of their approval, it runs jobs in parallel assuming they will all be successful.  If any of them fail, then any jobs that were run based on the assumption they succeeded are re-run without the problematic changes included.  This means that in the best case, as many changes can be tested and merged in parallel as computing resources will allow for testing.  And of course, with cloud computing, that isn’t much of a hurdle.

OpenStack Blog Authors Code Of Conduct

With the current number of authors on the community blog there is a need to have a clear understanding of what it means to have an account on such visible community asset. There is always time to send your comments.

A good list of opportunites for Industry Conferences & Sponsorship

And the next OpenStack Conference and Summit on October 16-20 (destination TBD).

Recent changes to wiki

  • Quantum V2 APIIntro quick intro to v.2.0 API for Quantum developers already familiar with the v1.0 and v1.1 API
  • StartingPage now showing a new video every month
  • Quantum Starter Bugs These are bugs that folks new to Quantum might want to pick off as an introduction

New version of gerrit – with new features!

Based on the new upstream version 2.4, but in addition we’ve landed two additional features on top of that – so there’s tons of new toys to play with.

Forking an OpenStack project to remotely save changes

Find on this thread the answer to the question: If you have a relatively long-lived topic branch, what’s the best way to remotely save changes?

Reports from past OpenStack events

Upcoming Events

 Other news

Welcome new contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Zhiteng Huang, Intel
  • Vincent Untz, Suse

 
  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 Blog Authors Code Of Conduct

 

June 7, 2012

With the current number of authors on the community blog I think it’s a good idea to make sure we all have a clear understanding of what it means to have an account on such visible community asset. I think it would be good for the whole community to have a brief, clear, understandable code of conduct for all existing authors and for the future ones. We discussed on our community team and we came up with the OpenStack Blog Authors Code Of Conduct below.  We’ll publish this together with other community policies (like the OpenStack Event policy) in the next days: add your comments below or send them to the community team.

OpenStack.org Blog is the asset owned by the community and a platform where to share thoughts, ideas, reports and news about OpenStack. All the authors of blog posts have the responsibility to respect this common space while being grateful for the opportunity it represents. As a writer you should write articles respecting other’s opinions, even if you disagree. The OpenStack Community will benefit from sharing, debating and reflecting rather than discounting and disparaging others’ thoughts. Remember that as an author of OpenStack.org blog, the community trusts you to give voice to the community as a whole.

Writers accept these simple principles:

  • Prefer facts to opinions: be always aware that what you publish will be read by thousands of people and that your opinion is not necessarily that of the whole community. Try to stick to facts, like reporting the result of a meeting, announcing upcoming community events, describing technical achievements.
  • Disclose, don’t promote: it’s good to let people know that a company is contributing to OpenStack, sponsoring an event and such but the OpenStack.org Blog is not the place to publish a company’s press release or other type of commercial offering message.
  • Contribute to the commons: our blog is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike version 3 unported. Pay attention to the license of any material you add to the blog, make sure it’s released under compatible terms.

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OpenStack in action 2! – Production ready / Paris, 31 May 2012

 

June 5, 2012

Last Thursday, we held the «OpenStack in action 2 ! – Production ready» event in Paris. For this second edition, we were very happy to welcome more than 150 people who came from France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Austria, and even…Japan ! This shows how OpenStack is getting bigger and more concrete every day.

Following an «almost traditional» opening by Thierry Carrez, Release Manager for OpenStack, Loic Dachary, eNovance Chief Research officer, presented a very intuitive OpenStack live demo. The idea was to make an online game go worldwide through a deployment demo. The game is very cool to play by the way, you can give it a try here: MIOP game.

Nick Barcet, representing Ubuntu/Canonical, who is also a regular guest, talked about MAAS and Juju to deploy an Ubuntu Cloud infrastructure. Nick also announced our recent partnership : eNovance is now the official Canonical partner to deliver OpenStack based solutions in France!

Here at eNovance, this 2nd edition of «OpenStack in action!» will remain a very important date for us since we launched the same day eNocloud – the 1st European OpenStack cloud, which was in beta for the last 9 months. Raphaël Ferreira, eNovance’s CEO explained how eNocloud was built, step by step, and related the use cases of our most famous beta-testers: Soasta, Fasterize and the CNES.

After a short coffee break, Taco Scargo, from Dell talked about Crowbar and announced the release of Copper – an experimental yet very promising ARM server.

He was followed by Rick Clark who highlighted the most challenging problems OpenStack currently faces. His perspective as a co-founder of the project and his successful deployment of OpenStack for the US Department of Defense for CISCO gave the audience an exclusive peak at one of the largest use case in the world. His unbiased and provocative style made for a chaotic and humorous talk.

Florian Haas, CEO of Hastexo, closed the conference and really captured his audience whis his talk on High Availability in OpenStack. He explained how the Folsom release that will be published in october 2012 will benefit from the various HA strategies demonstrated.

We wanted to address our special thanks to Canonical and Dell for helping us make the event possible: we look forward to the 3rd edition of «OpenStack in action!» that will be held this autumn.

  • openstackinaction-enovance
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  • openstackinaction-enovance
  • openstackinaction-enovance

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OpenStack Essex Deploy Day Summary

 

On May 31st, more than 200 people from around the world  gathered to learn about how to automate OpenStack deployments with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. This day-long, world-wide event brought  together developers, operators, users, ecosystem vendors and the open source cloud curious.  The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in four physical locations, where more than 70 enthusiasts gathered for the event:

In addition, nearly 125 participants joined online on the live webcast and various online channels.

We have validated our deployment against the Essex release and our objective with this Essex Deploy Day event was to test deployments of Open Stack in a variety of environments.  Accordingly, we reached out to the OpenStack and Crowbar communities for training, testing, deployment, and collaborative development of the OpenStack Essex release.  The response was amazing!

The Deploy day offered two parallel tracks for OpenStack newcomers and experts.

The Introductory Track: In this  track, we focused on basics of OpenStack, Crowbar, and DevOps and discussed their value and benefits. In five three-hour sessions that spanned  three time zones covering the East/West coast and the Asia pacific regions, we demonstrated  LIVE (the recorded sessions are available here: http://bit.ly/crowbarOSED) ) how to automatically deploy OpenStack .

Here are the slides used for this track:

http://www.slideshare.net/kamesh001/essex-deployday

Additionally, this track featured presentations and demos from ecosystem partners including enStratus, InkTank, Suse, MorphLabs, and OpsCode who discussed how they are leveraging Essex and bringing unique value-add to the OpenStack community and customers.

The Experts Track: The expert track was intended for people that already had some familiarity with Crowbar, Chef, and DevOps, and wanted to take a deep dive into new features of OpenStack Essex and Crowbar and how Crowbar works under the hood. The expert track had a separate screencast, and featured live and online collaboration with Crowbar developers and engineers.

The expert track explored  several advanced topics such as upgrading OpenStack  and developing barclamps etc.

Success By the Numbers

The overwhelming response and the large number of attendees makes this the most successful deploy day by far.  The breadth of companies and individuals that participated makes this a truly collaborative and international event  and is an  impressive indication of the excitement that is building around OpenStack. Here is look at broad participation metrics:

  • 200 people participated from 9 different countries
  • 70 people attended in-person in the four locations: NY, Boston, Austin, Sunnyvale
  • 250 downloads of the software from zehicle.crowbar.com and the build server
  • 20+ companies represented world-wide
  • Great participation from ecosystem vendors including enStratus, MorphLabs, Suse, InkTank, OpsCode

Here is a just a small sample of some of the companies that participated

Dell (sponsor), Opscode, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Enstratus, Yahoo, AT&T, HP, OpenTV, cloudTP, Fidelity, Lucent-Alcatel, IBM Labs, Critical Media,  AppFirst

We wish to thank everyone who participated in making this event a huge success!

 

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OpenStack at Gjøvik University College

 

The SkyHigh Team: Lars Erik Pedersen, Jon Arne Westgaard and Hallvard Alte Westman

A group of students from Gjøvik University College wrote the first bachelor thesis on OpenStack, based on my knowledge*. Lars Erik Pedersen, Jon Arne Westgaard and Hallvard Alte Westman studied an implementation of OpenStack as a framework for virtual computer at College’s labs to replace the current system. The college uses in teaching subjects like “Database and Application Administration” so that the administrator can distribute virtual machines to students for assignments, which they use the entire semester. The current system based on MLN doesn’t have a GUI and requires lots of time from class administrators and students.

For their bachelor thesis, Lars, Jon and Hallvard developed a custom OpenStack Horizon GUI module to fully integrate the workflow for the laboratories. The source code of the custom module and the full report (in Norwegian) is on github.com. This implementation is intended to replace the current solution for this purpose. The report presents the process of realising this project, and includes the installation, implementation, configuration and development that has been done.

* if you know of other thesis, dissertations, research projects involving OpenStack please join the OpenStack Academia Initiative and let us know.

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OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (May 25 – June 1)

 

June 1, 2012

OpenStack Community Newsletter — May 25

Highlights of the week

Mark your calendars: Bug triage day on June 7th

Short on the heels of folsom-1 publication and the upcoming Swift 1.5.0 release, it sounds like a good moment to spend some time sanitizing the bug databases for OpenStack projects. This can be achieved by completing the tasks described on the BugTriage page.

How to setup and use the OpenStack VNC console

Yong Sheng Gong reports on how to use the Virtual Network Computing (VNC) in Nova. VNC is a very convenient tool for end user to access the VMs by GUI.  Nova provides two kinds of VNC proxies: noVNC and nova-xvpvncproxy.

Want to install OpenStack Swift? Here’s how to do it!

Martin Loschwitz took some time to update the OpenStack installation guide.The guide covers SQL-backed Keystone and VNC support in the Dashboard now. And: It explains how to install OpenStack Swift now, too! If you want to install Swift and need a step-by-step howto, then this is what you are looking for.

Caimito – WebDAV frontend for OpenStack Swift Cloud Storage

Caimito is now on github: https://github.com/ngasiproj/caimito

 OpenStack’s Jenkins Job Filler

Andrew Hutchings describes the new tool to manage OpenStack’s Jenkins server, with its ~300 jobs. Jenkins Job Filler is the solution developed by the CI team to keep the jobs under control.

New git-based jenkins jobs and pre-approval check jobs

Monty Taylor announced that now we have the basic jobs for all of the projects (except Horizon) applied to jenkins based on some scripts and some yaml files that are in a git repo.anybody could conceivably do some hacking and submit a change to gerrit, instead of the current status quo which is that you have to be a jenkins admin to touch anything. Also the CI team is now running merge checks, pep8 checks and unittest jobs on the patch-uploaded event and reporting the results into the code review so that people can skip code reviewing patches that don’t work yet.

Work in progress on Openstack provider for Juju

Robbie Williamson reported work in progress to add an OpenStack API provider to complement the existing set of EC2 and LXC (local dev) providers.

Nodejs in horizon? Not at the moment

A long discussion on the mailing list about adding dependencies to the project, picking the best tools for the job, the Not Invented Here and Reinventing The Wheel syndrome. A very good read. The community of developers agreed taht we will work to make node.js an optional build time component and leave it as an distro packaging issue. Node.js was being evaluated as a potential solution to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/horizon/+spec/realtime-communication, but that blueprint isn’t targeted for Folsom, so it’s very future. There will be time to evaluate python based alternatives.

A good list of opportunites for Industry Conferences & Sponsorship  on OpenStack Events Update

And the next OpenStack Conference and Summit on October 16-20 (destination TBD).

Facebook for Social Support? I like.

Anne Gentle reports about the experience of using the Facebook group for people to ask questions specific to TryStack. Checkout the video

Reports from past OpenStack events

Upcoming Events

 Other news

Welcome new contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Aaron Rosen, Nicira
  • Florian Haas, Hastexo

 
  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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Recap: OpenStack Meetup Apr 26

 

May 31, 2012

About a month ago, LA had its third OpenStack™ Meetup, “This Calls for Essex-y Party”.  The atmosphere was electric and the air was thick with love – love for OpenStack and burritos.

It could have been that many of us were still flying high from the OpenStack Summit/Conference that occurred the week before.  It could have been that we were excited for the Essex release that dropped in early April.  Or perhaps it was our anticipation for the future of OpenStack – code-named Folsom.  Whatever the reason, we were all on cloud nine.

With our bellies full of big fat burritos and a couple of Mexican beers, we kicked off the fiesta with a presentation from Sean Roberts, who is in charge of Infrastructure Strategy atYahoo!.  DreamHost’s Cloud Architect, Carl Perry, anchored the Meetup with the second presentation.  For your eyeball and earball pleasure, I’ve included the videos below with a brief description of what was covered.

 

 

 

Sean presented on the recently released Essex version of OpenStack, and talked about the future of Folsom. He also touched upon the newly formed OpenStack Foundation.  (I experimented with a wireless mic and failed at capturing almost half of the Q/A. Lesson learned.)

Carl discussed how to deploy OpenStack as the basis for a public IaaS product. He shared his tips and tricks to overcome the common challenges including networking, storage, monitoring, and automation. Stick around to the end for a great in-depth technical Q&A.

DreamHost was generous enough to facilitate, host and sponsor last month’s OpenStack LA event.  It was well attended with over 50 Stackers present.  Tonight, we look forward to our fourth OpenStack Meetup that will be hosted by AT&T, and co-sponsored by AT&T and Inktank.  “The Return of the Ceph Lords” will feature the legendary Josh Durgin, and the inimitable Christopher MacGown.

Written by: Brent Scotten

Upcoming OpenStack Events in Australia

 

We have some Australian OpenStack User Group (AOSUG) events organised around the country in the coming months.

Brisbane June 26 – Meetup

We’re holding a meetup on June 26th, at a venue yet to be determined. I’m looking for assistance in picking a venue in Brisbane, a pub will be fine but preferably one where we can meet and chat without getting blasted by music etc, and where they have food, and most importantly, where we can throw on a bar tab! Please get in contact with us at AOSUG if you want to help select a location, help organize the event or sponsor in any way. Details and RSVP

Sydney June 28 – AOSUG Meetup and Aptira EOFY bash

On June 28, we’re going back to the Harbour View Hotel in the Rocks in Sydney for a combined User Group meet and Aptira End Of Financial Year bash. Those that came to our first AOSUG Sydney meet back in December last year will remember the Harbour View fondly I’m sure. It had great drinks, great food and it kicked off our Aussie meets in spectacular fashion! The meet will be a social gathering, just an informal get together for us to meet and chat and drink and eat. Details and RSVP

Perth July 16 – Meetup

We’re planning to hold a meetup in Perth July 16, at a venue yet to be determined. Once again I’m looking for assistance in picking a venue, like Brisbane, a pub will be fine but preferably one where we can meet and chat without getting drowned out by music/noise. Once again, please get in contact with us at AOSUG if you want to help organize the event or sponsor in any way. Details and RSVP

Melbourne July 17 – Meetup

At the Melbourne meetup earlier this month, consensus was to set a regular date for  meetup ongoing. The third Tuesday of every second month is proposed and after the last event at the awesome Gryphon Gallery at the University of Melbourne (again many thanks to NeCTAR for arranging such a beautiful venue!), we’re hoping to continue to hold events there. If it works out, the next event will be a social beer and pizza night. The proposal is to  alternate the meet agendas between doing a tech/presentation event one month, then a social event at the next meet, and so on, and interleave these with a similar pattern in the alternating months in Sydney.

Adelaide August 28 – Meetup (note date change was 22 now 28!)

This just in today – In conjunction with SAGE-AU and many thanks to Robert Mibus for the invitation, we’re inviting South Australian OzStackers to join the regular Adelaide chapter of SAGE-AU’s monthly meeting in Adelaide on August 28. I’m planning to ask one of the OpenStack project tech leads or the like to participate by way of beaming them in via WebEx or other (as we’ve done in Sydney and Melbourne recently) to present a talk on their involvement with OpenStack. Numbers for this event are limited so if you’re an SA OzStacker please jump onto http://aosug.openstack.org.au and RSVP to reserve your spot.

OpenStack APEC Conference (OSAC) – August 10-11, Beijing and Shanghai

Hosted by the China OpenStack User Group (COUG) and the Chinese Software Developer Network (CSDN), a massive event is being organised to be held simultaneously in Beijing and Shanghai. This event is shaping up to be the biggest OpenStack event ever, with 1000+ guests expected for Beijing, and 600+ guests expected for Shanghai, with live streaming to link the 2 conference sites. I am very excited about this event, I’ll be attending and if anyone else from Australia is thinking of going please get in touch with me! Links to the event web site will be posted once it goes up in the coming days.

Canberra OpenStack User Group

For those who might be in Canberra or know of OpenStack aware people in the ACT, Kristoffer Sheather has started a Canberra user group. You can join up at http://www.meetup.com/Canberra-OpenStack-Users-Group/. With Linux.conf.au being held in Canberra in January and the call for presentations opening June 1, this will be a great opportunity for the Canberra group to represent OpenStack.

Anyway that’s all from me for now, hope you all have a great Friday. At Aptira we have a “no-changes” policy on all infrastructure on Fridays so we can be sure to make Friday arvo drinks and have an easy weekend.

Cheers
Tristan
Australian OpenStack User Group

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OpenStack Events Update

 

May 29, 2012

OpenStack will be represented at several industry conferences this summer, and community members across the world are hosting regional OpenStack days.  Below are some highlights from the event schedule,  including how you can sponsor or participate.

Global OpenStack Days
OpenStack Israel 2012 | May 30 | Tel Aviv, Israel
More than 250 people are registered for the inaugural OpenStack event in Israel with speakers from Alcatel-Lucent, Dome9, GigaSpaces, IBM, Rackspace, Radware and StackOps.

OpenStack in Action! 2 | May 31 |  Paris, France
Following the successful OpenStack in Action event last September, the production-ready themed day has speakers from Dell, Canonical, Cisco, eNovance, Hastexo and Rackspace.

Global Essex Deploy Day | May 31 |  Various Locations
The OpenStack Deploy hack-a-thon focuses on automation for deploying OpenStack Essex with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. The day-long, global event is still seeking local hosts and sponsors if you are interested in participating.

OpenStack Meeting Brazil | June 20 | Sao Paulo, Brazil
The first OpenStack event taking place in Brazil will feature speakers from Globo.com and StackOps, who will discuss their experiences deploying OpenStack.

You can find more upcoming events at OpenStack.org/events, or add your own by sending the title/date/location/link to [email protected].

Industry Conferences & Sponsorship Opportunities
OSCON | July 16-20 | Portland, OR
OpenStack launched at OSCON 2010, and for the first time OSCON will host an OpenStack-focused day, Tuesday, July 17. Like last year, the OpenStack community will have a big presence at the event, and you can get involved as a co-sponsor. We will have a 20×20 OpenStack pavilion in the expo hall available to 8 exhibitors, and will also be hosting an evening event and producing giveaways. And if you are already sponsoring OSCON, you can still get involved without committing to the pavilion.  The prospectus and agreement are available if you are interested in sponsoring (due June 11), otherwise we look forward to seeing you at the event!

Linux Foundation CloudOpen | August 29-31 | San Diego, CA
The first CloudOpen conference will be co-located with LinuxCon, and we are exploring a sponsorship and possible expo hall pavilion similar to OSCON. If you are interested in sponsoring, please contact [email protected], and we will post more details as soon as they are confirmed. Please note speaking submissions are due June 1.

Gartner Symposium & ITxpo | October 21-15 | Orlando, FL
Several companies have expressed interest in sponsoring OpenStack activities at Gartner IT Expo. If you are interested or have ideas, please contact [email protected]. It might be an event we look at more closely in 2013.

Next OpenStack Design Summit & Conference
We’re already looking forward to the next OpenStack Design Summit & Conference, scheduled for the week of October 15, 2012.  We’ll schedule an online meeting in the next few weeks to gather feedback as we start making plans.

Community Weekly Review (May 18-25)

 

May 25, 2012

OpenStack Community Newsletter — May 25

Highlights of the week

 S3 emulation to OpenStack Swift has moved

Following PPB’s decision of May 15 meeting the S3 emulation layer to OpenStack Swift has moved to a new home: https://github.com/fujita/swift3

[more…]

Building a Swift Storage Cloud? Avoid Wimpy Proxy Servers and Five other Pitfalls

The Zmanda team describe six pitfalls to avoid, when choosing components for your Swift Cloud

[more…]

OpenStack Melbourne Australia Meetup May 15

A report from the 2nd meetup of the Melbourne contingent of the Australian OpenStack User Group. It was a fantastic night with great speakers and a great group of people who are passionate about OpenStack. There was a mix of people with various OpenStack experience, from the NeCTAR team who have made contributions to the source, to IT staff from various companies trying to get a handle on the new technology that everyone is talking about.

[more…]

The doc team has been discussing ways to ensure we help people find what they seek while still getting high-quality content into the “official” documentation. They shared some ideas and are asking for input from our wider community as well.

[more…]

May 31: OpenStack Essex Deploy Day

The OpenStack Deploy hack-a-thon focuses on automation for deploying OpenStack Essex with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. This is a day-long, world-wide event bringing together developers, operators, users, ecosystem vendors and the open source cloud curious.

[more…]

Proposal for OpenStack Identity API v3

Have your say about a broad CRUD based API supporting authentication and authorization needs in OpenStack. Back-end implementations of Keystone may not support all components of the API, hence an API return may be NotImplemented. This is to support Keystone as a programmatic facade to an deployment’s existing authentication and authorization system(s).

[more…]

OpenStack Deployments in Scientific Environment

CERN is currently targeting a pre-production service based on OpenStack this year and targetting around 15,000 hypervisors spread across two data centres by 2015. [more…] While Information Sciences Institute of University of Southern California is developing GPU, bare metal, and large SMP (think SGI UV) support for
Openstack, targeting HPC/scientific computing workloads. [more…].

For people interested in discussing OpenStack and academia, join the team and mailing list.

Upcoming Events

 Other news

Welcome new contributors

Celebrating the first patch submitted this week by:

  • Katherine Elliott, 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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