OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (June 8-15)

 

June 15, 2012

OpenStack Community Newsletter — June 15

Highlights of the week

Announcing OpenStack Asia/Pacific Conference 2012

The OpenStack Asia/Pacific community is hosting a large OpenStack conference on August 10th and 11th, with a main venue in Bejing and a remote participation in Shanghai, hosted by the Chinese OpenStack User Group (COSUG) and CSDN, supervised by CSIP.

Companies interested in sponsorship opportunities in the area can browse the sponsorship prospectus and pick the best options for their budget.

Speakers are welcome to submit their speaking proposal, also in English. If you want to help with the organization of the event you can still join the OpenStack APEC community group.

Meeting To Discuss Next OpenStack Conference And Summit

All people interested in the next OpenStack Summit and Conference, especially former sponsors and coordinators of tracks in past events, are invited to register for the meeting OpenStack Summit & Conference Fall 2012 Planning,  next Tuesday, June 19 at 10:00 AM CDT. It will be the right time and place to discuss the challenges faced as the events have grown, and potential changes to the format to address them going forward.

LVM disks support in OpenStack Nova Folsom

GridDynamics implemented LVM disk support functionality (based on previous work for Diablo) and successfully delivered it to upstream.

New LVM image backend can be enabled by setting libvirt_images_type flag to value lvm.For more information on this functionality you can consult the blueprint and review code changes here.

swift.common.client library and swift CLI moved to a new home

In order to improve code manageability and consistency across all OpenStack projects, swift.common.client and the bin/swift CLI moved to a separate repository https://github.com/openstack/python-swiftclient

This should be compatible with swift.common.client with only difference being to import swiftclient instead of importing swift.common.client. Send bugs/feature request under the swift project in launchpad https://bugs.launchpad.net/swift/+filebug using the tag python-swiftclient.

Keystone v3 API draft (update and questions to the community)

Joe Heck reporting on the progress for the new API and asking feedback to the community. Join the discussion on Keystone v3 API draft.

Call for testing : nova, glance, keystone and horizon 2012.1.1 tarballs

Mark McLoughlin is ready to release an update to OpenStack Stable branch with over 60 bug fixes since the release in April.

Welcome RHEL/CentOS/Fedora to docland!

Anne Gentle pushed a couple of changes to the docs landing page and added a brand new install/deploy guide for RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora. Comments are now enabled by default on each page and there are now two guides to install OpenStack from scratch: one for Debian/Ubuntu systems (apt) and one for RedHat/Fedora/CentOS (yum).

Upcoming Events

Other news

Welcome new contributors

Celebrating the first patches submitted this week by:

  • Boris Filippov, GridDynamics
  • Eric Harney
  • Deevi Lalitha, Persistent Systems
  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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Meeting To Discuss Next OpenStack Conference And Summit

 

June 14, 2012

It’s never too late to get started, especially with a complex series of event like the OpenStack Summit and Conference. We’ve received the results of the survey after the past event in April in San Francisco and we want to keep the conversation open with the community.

All people interested in the next OpenStack Summit and Conference, especially former sponsors and coordinators of tracks in past events, are invited to register for the meeting OpenStack Summit & Conference Fall 2012 Planning,  next Tuesday, June 19 at 10:00 AM CDT. It will be the right time and place to discuss the challenges faced as the events have grown, and potential changes to the format to address them going forward.

Update: read the results of this meeting on OpenStack Summit coming October 15th-19th to San Diego, CA

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Announcing OpenStack Asia/Pacific Conference 2012

 

June 13, 2012

We talked about during the community sessions at past OpenStack Design Summit, we’re now ready to announce it officially: the Asia/Pacific community is hosting a large OpenStack conference. Mark your calendar: August 10th and 11th, with a main venue in Bejing and a remote participation in Shanghai, hosted by the Chinese OpenStack User Group (COSUG) and CSDN, supervised by CSIP.

OpenStack developers and companies building products based on OpenStack from Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation will meet to present their solutions and to plan ways of working together on promoting OpenStack in local enterprises and industries.

There is still space available to sponsor the event: thousands of users from the region are expected. Interested companies can browse the sponsorship prospectus and pick the best options for their budget.

Speakers are welcome to submit their speaking proposal, also in English.

If you want to help with the organization of the event you can still join the OpenStack APEC community group. You can also follow: @CSDN and @CSDN Cloud Computing for updates in Chinese.

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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.

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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