Brief report from Ljubljana, Seminar “Open and safe in the cloud”

 

December 20, 2011

On December 14th I completed my talk about OpenStack in Slovenia, in front of 66 people (49 registered, 17 more showed up last minute) from Slovenian small businesses, government agencies and academia. Incredible vibe, very competent crowd about cloud computing and IaaS in general.

The agenda of the day (full agenda, in Slovenian)

  • OpenStack – how and where — Stefano Maffulli, OpenStack Community Manager
  • Overview of Open Source “IaaS” solutions and practical demonstration OpenStack framework – Robert Dukarić, MD. Matjaz B. Juric, Laboratory for Information Systems Integration, Faculty of Computing and Informatics Institute (FRI), www.fri.uni-lj.si
  • Security in the cloud — Dr.. Mojca Ciglarič, Assistant Professor and Head of the Laboratory for Computer Communications at the Ljubljana Faculty of Computer and Information Science. Is a member of “Cloud Security” Alliance and  research director of the Slovenian section of the association. www.fri.uni-lj.si
  • Security in OpenStack — Primož Cigoj, dipl. ing. Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks (E5), Institut “Jozef Stefan” www.e5.ijs.si
  • KC Class and eurocloud.si / eurocloud.org – Dalibor Baškovč, www.KC-Class.eu
  • Storing data in OpenStack – mag. Ivan Tomašič, Electrotechnical Faculty in Zagreb and Rashkovska Alexander, BSc. ing. Inv., PSI International Postgraduate School, Department of Communication Systems (E6), Institut “Jozef Stefan” www-e6.ijs.si
  • How to use tools, build affordable high-performance data storage system – Dr. Matjaz Krevl Pančur and Andrew, BSc. ing. Inv., Laboratory for Computer Communications, Faculty of Computing and Informatics Institute (FRI), www.fri.uni-lj.si
  • Development of the clouds in RedHat – Ales Justin JBoss by RedHat

Most of the event was in Slovenian, so I cannot comment too much on it. I found extremely interesting the presentation from the Slovenian representative of Eurocloud.org, a pan-European organization whose mission is to create awareness of Cloud Computing within the industry and public administrations. It reminded me how much of the demand for IT in Europe is created by regulations, at the local and European level.

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OpenStack Sydney Australia Meetup Dec 13

 

Openstack Sydney Australia Meetup December 13Tuesday night December 13 saw the inaugural meetup of the Australian OpenStack Users Group at the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

There was obvious enthusiasm right from the start because even though we weren’t meant to start until 6.30pm there were already about 30 people there at 6.00pm. By 7.30pm we peaked at about 55 people and we filled the venue! What started in October as 5 of us going for a beer had become something awesome.

The purpose of the night was to be an in formal get together to stimulate the community and get interested “OzStackers” talking to each other, and it was clear that we got people talking. I got to meet almost everyone and we had many attendees with purely a personal interest, but we also had folks from our telcos and service providers, universities, manufacturers, retail and finance industries.

When it first became apparent we might do something more than just a few beers we thought we might get one OpenStack involved vendor to come along. What we ended up with was an overwhelming response. Each of our attending vendors were given the chance to give a talk about their involvement with the project.

Mark Randall, Rackspace Country Manager for AU/NZ, led the talks with a background and overview. Next up was Daniel Pendlebury, Citrix Lead Systems Engineer for Datacenter and Cloud giving an insight into their Project Olympus. APAC Solution Architect at F5, Adrian Noblett, talked about F5’s involvement, followed by Peter Jung, Cloud Solutions Architect at Dell with some in depth technical news on Crowbar. Nic Rouhotas from Cisco went next overviewing Cisco’s involvement and then Declan Conlon talked about Riverbed joining the community and their purchase of Zeus. Last up was Phil Rogers from Aptira with experiences of his development contributions towards several Swift client applications.

It was pretty clear that everyone had a great time and there was lots of enthusiasm to get together again as soon as possible, and many made it clear they want to see and share config and install demos and real world deployment experiences, so we’ll focus on that for follow-up meetups in the next coming months.

At the moment we have a single Australian Meetup group, the rationale being that whilst we’re still a small community down under we thought it was best to create a single nationwide group. The not necessarily bad trade off of this is that because we do recognise a significant portion of the Australian OpenStack community is not in Sydney we have an obligation to have the inaugural meetup continue in cities where the community resides! So far Melbourne is next on the list, but if there’s more of you interstate please don’t hesitate to join the meetup group at http://aosug.openstack.org.au. The listed location will change for upcoming meetup locations.

Reminder January 17 Meetup in Melbourne!

Next up is the inaugural meetup “part 2” in Melbourne on January 17. We’re hoping to get the same vendors along, there’ll be beer and food, I look forward to seeing you there.

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Community Weekly Review (Dec 9-16)

 

December 16, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 16, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers from Mon Dec 05 00:00:00 UTC 2011 to Sun Dec 11 00:00:00 UTC 2011

This 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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Results Of Survey After OpenStack Design Summit And Conference

 

December 14, 2011

In preparation for the next OpenStack Design Summit and Conference, I gave a look at the survey results of past edition. The events are a considerable investment for our team that is widely paid off by the good reviews we received from all participants. Looking into the answers it’s quite clear that the format and length were good and we should try to stick to it. We agreed that the attendance on Friday afternoon was not optimal and we’re thinking of ways to improve this aspect.  I’m very happy to see that participants to the Design Summit felt welcomed, included and encouraged to speak all the time (see table below).

Speaking of areas of improvement,  a key criteria for selecting the next venue will be high quality access to Internet or we’ll bring our own equipment (like Canonical does for the Ubuntu Design Summit). We’re also looking for more choice regarding hotel rates.

Both the unconference and lightning talks should be advertised better in order to improve attendance. Probably it’s because both were hard to find, being on a different floor. We should probably discuss how to improve them once we have fixed the venue.

On the Conference side we see a request to increase the presentation of case studies and have more sessions and choices (see table below). We’ll see how to balance this while keeping the format of the event.

Overall the responses were extremely positive and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved so far. For the next Summit and Conference, we’re targeting the week of April 16 in New Orleans. We will post more information as soon as it is confirmed: keep watching this space for announcements.

14. Please rate how you felt the Design Summit sessions were managed:
Not at all Rarely Sometimes All the time N/A Rating
Average		 Response
Count
Did you feel welcomed, included, and encouraged to speak for yourself? 0.0% (0) 2.3% (1) 22.7% (10) 72.7% (32) 2.3% (1) 3.72 44
Were the sessions well-moderated, focused and productive? 4.5% (2) 4.5% (2) 56.8% (25) 34.1% (15) 0.0% (0) 3.20 44
Did session leaders go out of their way to solicit your personal feedback? 4.5% (2) 9.1% (4) 65.9% (29) 18.2% (8) 2.3% (1) 3.00 44

 

15. How would you rate the sessions during the Conference (1-4):
poor (1) fair (2) good (3) great (4) N/A Rating
Average		 Response
Count
Morning keynotes 0.0% (0) 8.9% (5) 50.0% (28) 32.1% (18) 8.9% (5) 3.25 56
Technical sessions 1.8% (1) 7.1% (4) 44.6% (25) 41.1% (23) 5.4% (3) 3.32 56
Panel sessions 1.8% (1) 21.4% (12) 46.4% (26) 21.4% (12) 8.9% (5) 2.96 56
User stories 0.0% (0) 8.9% (5) 44.6% (25) 35.7% (20) 10.7% (6) 3.30 56

Read the full results of the survey.

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Community Weekly Review (Dec 2-9)

 

December 9, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 9, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers from Mon Nov 28 00:00:00 UTC 2011 to Sun Dec 04 00:00:00 UTC 2011 (week 48)

This 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 Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes

 

December 6, 2011

We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.

This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg Althaus and Rob Hirschfeld), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya from Rackspace, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.

We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build.  Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!).  We need Keystone support.  Anyone up for that?

Highlights

There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.

  • After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
  • The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
  • There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
  • Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level.  The Quantual Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.  
  • HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
  • We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
  • Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).

Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!

Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.  Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts!

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 26-Dec 1)

 

December 2, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 1, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week.
  • Top 10 monthly committers to the repositories (by number of commits)

This 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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Hacking on Ebooks

 

November 29, 2011

Gentlemen prefer PDF, according to Tim O’Reilly’s data from Rough Cuts five years ago. At OpenStack we see some preference for PDF, though there are three times as many visits to the HTML version of our Compute Admin manual. Still, the PDF version of the guide is downloaded about five times a day. I do believe that gentlemen prefer PDF or some sort of book-like reading material. When asked, readers cite portability and search scope as two benefits to the form. However, as David Cramer, our doc tools developer put it at our recent hackathon, “PDFs are like cement.” With the boom of mobile and tablet screens, a stretchy and flexible screen-reader format like epub fills a need – we need content that works well on the 200 plus devices that fit into one hand.


So on 11/11/11, in the Austin Rackspace office, we did some hacking to be able to create epub output from our DocBook source files. I blogged about it for the OpenStack Planet blog from my blog, DocBook, ePub, Hackathon, what more could you ask for? prior to the event, talking about some of our prep work.

I’m pleased to show you the results – we did get output for epub and also tested the Mobi output on a Kindle, all in one day, with a team of about seven hackers including developers, writers, and testers.

We first tested the process using built-in epub transforms that ship with Oxygen, our XML editor, who supports open source projects like OpenStack by donating licenses to documentation contributors. Thank you Oxygen! We were able to use that output to start testing. Here’s our white board with the list of bugs.

While the writers and testers were hacking on output, programmers were working on ensuring we could get the epub output through Apache Maven, our build tool. By the end of the day, we could output epub through our automatic build process also!

As happens with hackathons, there’s some cleanup work to do – for example, our neat-o dynamic SVG cover page that takes in variables like the book title doesn’t output a cover for the epub. Also, most “real” epub output workflows convert tables from text to image (I know, crazy huh, when you think about the loss of search capability), but the tables in epub output act a little funky when resizing. Also, mobi, the Kindle format, has a problem with the way lists are marked up, but these are fixable and on the bug log.

I haven’t decided yet whether the epub output is high quality enough to offer it for download for every book on the OpenStack docs site, nor do I know if there’s much demand for the output, but I’d like to offer the OpenStack Starter Guide as an epub download. The team at CSS OSS works hard on this content, and I’d like to see it get spread onto many devices. Let me know how well it works for you and if you think epub has a place as a regular output for OpenStack documentation.

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 11-18)

 

November 18, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 11, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • A new format for the community statistics: the gallery below shows the activity on some of the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week. Let us know what else you would like to see on a weekly basis.
This 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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Community Weekly Review (Nov 4-11)

 

November 11, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 11, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

  • New weekly graphs of commit activities on OpenStack main repositories
  • The OpenStack wiki now accepts Launchpad ID for login (thank you, Chmouel)
  • OpenStack packaging coordination effort hangs out on irc.freenode.net #openstack-packaging
  • The OpenStack devroom was accepted at FOSDEM 2012: shine your passport, meet developers in Bruxelles, Feb 4-5

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • A new format for the community statistics: the gallery below shows the activity on some of the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week. Let us know what else you would like to see on a weekly basis.
  • Contributions to swift week 44
  • Contributions to nova week 44
  • Contributions to manuals week 44
  • Contributions to keystone week 44
  • Contributions to glance week 44

 

This 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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