OpenStack at Gjøvik University College

 

June 5, 2012

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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OpenStack Melbourne Australia Meetup May 15

 

May 21, 2012

Last Tuesday night (17/5) in Melbourne I attended 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.

The evening started with Tristan Goode (Aptira) welcoming the group to the meetup, then sharing his impressions of the recent OpenStack conference in San Francisco, which he believes was the best conference he has been to in over 20 years in the IT industry.
Tom Fifield (NeCTAR) gave an energetic talk about the OpenStack project. It’s the fastest moving open source project he has ever seen, and he is glad to see the openness of the project being protected by the founding of a non-profit organisation that will hold all the IP and trademarks of the project. An open attitude to the project will lead to a better product in the end. OpenStack is real and its ready for use now, the current Essex release will have long term support on Ubuntu.
Angus Salkeld (Red Hat) gave a demo of project Heat. Heat provides a mechanism to provision up PaaS configurations, via template. It supports versioning of templates and the full PaaS installation. His WordPress demo brought up a MySQL instance and an apache instance, in approx. 5 minutes.
The final speaker of the night was John Dickinson (Rackspace), discussing the Swift component of OpenStack. He provided some history to the project, where Rackspace were at when they decided to embark on what is now Swift, a massively scalable object storage, allowing you to store unstructured data without bounds. He also described the design of the system, providing details on the core components of Swift, the object server, the proxy server, consistency server and rings.
One of the principles of the design was to reduce the impact on the operational staff, running with minimal manual intervention. Impressive considering it aims to store data reliably on unreliable hardware.
John is also very passionate about open source, he sees OpenStack as a way to overcome data sovereignty issues which are a growing concern with Australia and other parts of the world. It is amazing that people of this calibre are willing to make themselves available to a relatively small user group.

The meetup is an unbelievable opportunity to meet not just other people who use the technology, but the people who build it and contribute to it. Everyone is so enthusiastic about where OpenStack is right now and where it plans to be in the future. If you’re using OpenStack now you really need to come along to the next meetup, if you’re just playing around with OpenStack you definitely need to be at the next meetup, if you just want to find out more about OpenStack then there is no better place to be than the next meetup.

Look forward to seeing you there.
Evan Watson
Chief Software Architect
Aptira

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Starter docs and articles

 

I wanted to send a note out to discuss the growth of all the starter docs and “articles” on a particular topic. Thanks all who are sending these as links to the mailing list or tweeting ’em. We are listening.

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. Here are some ideas. I’d like to get input from our wider community as well.

What we’re doing:

  • Add a “Where do I start?” section to the docs landing page. Let us know what you think of this approach by taking a look at the pending review. We discussed quite a bit a more friendly approach to the docs site but I haven’t identified a web dev and designer to do the re-do, contact me if you’re interested.
  • Reach out to writers and where licensing allows and something “official” is not already documented, bring the content into the official docs. We’ve done this a few times now, an example is how to custom brand the OpenStack Dashboard.
  • Add link to helpful blog entries to a “BloggersTips” wiki page.
  • Expand the install/deploy guide to include more distros so the “single distro” guides can standalone. This effort is still a work in progress.
  • Hastexo has offered to write a separate high availability (HA) guide, so we won’t bring in their 12.04 “all in one” install guide after all, since the CSS OSS Starter Guide covers a similar scenario.
  • Remove “articles” from RST docs. (Currently nova only, in further discussion with the Project Technical Leads, QA and CI team leads.)
  • Add blog URLs to the Google Custom Search Engine at http://docs.openstack.org. I took this as an action item from our last doc team meeting.

What we’ve discussed:

  • Removing redundant docs. At the Design Summit, members of the nova core team asked for removal of “article” style RST documents from the nova source repo, creating a more doc-string based nova.openstack.org. Members of the swift core team, when asked, did not want to go to this architecture. I haven’t specifically asked all the PTLs on this particular item. So there’s still a potential problem here of consistency, where to write what, and having all the project.openstack.org sites that aren’t really tied together. I don’t have a good solution to suggest just yet but know we’re thinking about this particular problem. One idea was to have devs who want to write compose WordPress “articles” and that would aggregate together, but we haven’t found an ideal implementation (design is fine, working code, not so much).
  • Setting up a separate WordPress blog for documentation only. Apparently the aggregation tools just don’t give us all the requirements for version labels, bringing in one blog entry at a time (RSS feeds are needed), and so on.
  • Setting up a “support knowledge base” article site such as http://support.mozilla.org. We discussed this at the last doc team meeting. It seems to solve a lot of problems we have, but my current thinking (which of course can change) is that a support KB is for troubleshooting articles, while the “official” docs should create a happy path. These are two different scenarios, and I’m pretty sure the docs team cannot take on the support scenario with our current resources. A support knowledge base with translation built-in will go a long way in supporting our growing base, so this is important to me, but not in the Folsom plans currently.

I’ll follow up with each PTL for the docstring discussion, and welcome all input. Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for the docs. Now get started!

Starting line

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Community Weekly Review (May 11-18)

 

May 18, 2012

OpenStack Community Newsletter — May 18

Highlights of the week

 Decision On Third Party APIs

The PPB in its May 15 meeting decided that:
An OpenStack project will support an official API in it’s core implementation(the OpenStack API). Other APIs will be implemented external to core. The core project will expose stable, complete, performant interfaces so that 3rd party APIs can be implemented in a complete and performant manner.

[more…]

Performance Comparison: Ubuntu 12.04 + OpenStack Swift Essex Release ” by Zmanda Team Blog

The Zmandateam published a cloud backup performance comparison between OpenStack Swift Essex on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and OpenStack Swift 1.46 + Ubuntu 11.10, as well as demonstrated the functionality of Object Store in the OpenStack Dashboard.

[more…]

Swift Part-Power and Performance – SwiftStack Blog

We work a lot with smaller-scale Swift clusters. Today we were asked a question about a Swift configuration setting which relates to the number of partitions in the ring data structure that are created. Data lives in partitions and it’s up to an operator to decide how many partitions should be created.

[more…]

At the Essex conference summit this past month, Mirantis presented a session on OpenStack Essex architecture. Find the slides for that session.

[more…]

Electric Duncan: CERN, OpenStack Keep Resonance Cascades at Bay

As previously mentioned, there’s a growing momentum around ops-oriented participation in the OpenStack community. DreamHost is deeply invested in DevOps, seeing how that’s where we’re going to be living in a few months!

[more…]

OpenStack nova-scheduler and its algorithm (IBM OpenStack)

Among the current core projects of OpenStack, Nova project is the core of the cores. Just as described in OpenStack website, Nova is a cloud computing fabric controller, the main part of an IaaS system. There are more than 20 binaries in OpenStack nova project.

[more…]

Indian User Group first meet up

The first formal meetup of the Indian OpenStack User Group was held in Bangalore last weekend on the 5th of May. The event was attended by 25 enthusiastic InStackers.

[more…]

Upcoming Events

 Other news
 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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Here is what happens inside Nova when you provision a VM

 

May 15, 2012

At the Essex conference summit this past month, we presented a session on  OpenStack Essex architecture. As a part of that workshop we visually demonstrated the request flow for provisioning a VM and went over Essex arthicture. There was a lot of interest in this material; it’s now posted in Slideshare:

In fact, we’ve packaged up the architecture survey/overview as part of our 2-day Bootcamp for OpenStack. The next session is scheduled 14-15 June. This time around will carry out the training at the Santa Clara CA offices of our friends at Nexenta. Last course was delivered at our Mountain View office right before the OpenStack summit in April to a sold out crowd. You can find more information about the course at www.mirantis.com/training

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