OpenStack Developer Activity Weekly Review (April 1- 8)

Many people have asked for more insight into the developer activities for OpenStack as the large number of code changes and proposals make it difficult to monitor everything happening. In hopes of exposing more of the developer activities, I plan to post a weekly or biweekly blog post on the latest development activities. If you have any ideas for this blog post, please email me at [email protected]. I am always ready to listen to the community for new ideas.

Activities

Developer Mailing List (archive: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/)

This is select list of topics discussed this week in the developer mailing list and is not a complete list.  Please visit the archive to see all the topics.

  • Cactus Gamma Freeze now in effect – Thierry Carrez has announced a Gamma freeze.
  • Design Summit – call for sessions – Thierry Carrez reminded the community that the Diablo Design Summit starts April 27 – April 29. Session topics submissions are following a detailed process at http://wiki.openstack.org/Summit.  Accepted sessions for the event are at https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/ods-d.
  • Dotnet cloud file access – Jon Slenk asked about getting https://github.com/rackspace/csharp-cloudfiles to work with a local Swift install and is looking for assistance. Chuck Thier responded with some items to consider for C# bindings.
  • Logging, 500, Debugging – Zed Shaw asks about debugging settings for the Swift product.   Mike Barton responded that there is not a log of debug-level logging in the Swift proxy server. Zed indicated that he plans to write up some details about the discrepancies b/w LOG_LEVEL0 as the “default” in the docs.

Statistics

  • Number of OpenStack Developers on Contributors List – 165 (+3 for week)
  • Cactus Release Status – Blueprints (http://wiki.openstack.org/releasestatus/)
    • Essential – 5 Design Approved; 5 Implemented
    • High – 12 Blueprints; 9 Implemented – 3 Deferred
    • Medium – 20 Blueprints; 17 Implemented – 3 Deferred
    • Low – 15 Blueprints; 8 Implemented – 7 Deferred

For the latest on development activities on OpenStack please check these sites for more details:

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Community Weekly Newsletter (April 2 – 8)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – April 8, 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 email [email protected].

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (4/1– 4/7)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 37 Active Reviews
    • 220 Active Branches – owned by 54 people & 13 teams
    • 2,231 commits by 67 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 2 Active Reviews
    • 52 Active Branches – owned by 22 people & 5 teams
    • 184 commits by 15 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 87 total tweets; OpenStack 233 total tweets  (does not include RT)
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 510 Tracked Bugs; 55 New Bugs; 48 In-process Bugs; 9 Critical Bugs; 70 High Importance Bugs; 293 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  182 Blueprints; 3 Essential, 11 High, 12 Medium, 21 Low, 135 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  10,904 Visits, 23,496 Pageviews, 57.72% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 44.83%; /projects 11.27%; /projects/compute 15.84%; /projects/storage 11.19%; /Community 7.09%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Welcomes Facebook Open Compute Project

Today, Facebook announced a very exciting initiative called the Open Compute Project. It promises to open a vast amount of expertise to the market including the technology used in their servers, power supplies, server racks, battery backup systems and building design, and to do it as efficiently and as “green” as possible. And through collaboration with partners like Rackspace, Dell and Intel and the broader community overall — all of whom have substantial expertise in the underlying infrastructure of cloud — it promises to accelerate the overall industry knowledge base substantially. This is “open source” at its best. Open Compute is commoditizing and standardizing a layer that has traditionally been proprietary and secret, accessible only to a few. In opening this up to the world, we are not only able to consume it, but also collaborate and contribute to advance the project, so we all benefit from the best possible technology, processes and design.

We think this is huge news for the promise of open cloud. OpenStack is building the operating system upon which an open cloud can be built. But building and operating a cloud obviously requires more that just software. There are many other variables you must get right in order for OpenStack or any cloud operating system to be successful. I think everyone would agree that Facebook and their Open Compute partners have been successful at this. And now they are bringing us, the OpenStack community, in as collaborators.

OpenStack is proud to be collaborating with Open Compute to deliver something that is truly powerful for our communities. We are working with Facebook to assure OpenStack can run on top of their reference architectures. We are working with other community partners such as Dell to ensure organizations wanting to consume both projects can do so. And we are looking at how we can do more things together to deliver a truly open cloud to the world. There will be lots of opportunities for our two communities to work together, and we look forward to engaging with them going forward.

— Jim Curry

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OpenStack Korea User Group – Technical Seminar April 14 or 15

News from the OpenStack Korea User Group on a Technical Seminar scheduled for April 14th or 15th at the NIPA Building in Seoul, Korea. For event details contact @songerie on Twitter). This will be a good opportunity to discuss not only technical details about OpenStack but also about how we move forward as an open source user group in Korea.

Voting is ongoing to determine the event date (April 14th or 15th) at http://www.doodle.com/4faub9qwpu6d4m99

TIme Session Speaker
1:30 – 2:10 Enhancing OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Replicator Mechanism Kyungyun Kim, Cluenet
2:10 – 2:50 Configuration/Deployment Management Automation Jaesuk Ahn, Hohyun Jun, Eohyung Lee, KT
2:50 – 3:20 Recent Trends in Cloud Computing Dongjae Kang, ETRI
3:20 – 3:30 Coffee Break
3:30 – 5:10 Nova & Swift InstallFest and Technical Discussion KT
5:10 – 5:20 Coffee Break
5:20 – 6:00 Discussion: How to run OpenStack Korea User Group Jaesuk Ahn
6:00 Dinner

For event information in Korean, please visit http://www.openstack.or.kr/bbs/board.php?bo_table=os005.

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OpenStack Conference and Design Summit Registration Update

As you are all aware, the OpenStack Conference and Design Summit Sponsored by Citrix is April 26- 29, 2011 in Santa Clara, CA. You may also be aware that we have reached the registration limit which has created a large waiting list. I wanted to provide more information on the decisions that have led to this current situation as well as provide details on how I am handling the situation for the people currently on the waiting list.

EVENT PLANNING
When planning for this event, we decided to host in Santa Clara, CA as the majority of attendees at the San Antonio Fall 2010 OpenStack Design Summit were from the Silicon Valley area. I also anticipated growth in the number of attendees from 150 in San Antonio to a much larger number in California and originally planned for 500 attendees; however, the facilities, costs, and planning required to support a 500 person event was beyond the current capabilities of the community so I reduced the number to 350 which better aligned with the facilities available and was within the cost structure that the community could support. I also felt that a 133% increase in attendance would meet the needs of the community at its current growth rate; especially with the focus on active developers in the community attending the 3 day Design Summit. It is a testament to not only the active community members but also the overall project recognition within the industry that we are seeing substantial demand for this community event and I anticipate and will plan for larger events in the future to meet the demand.

UPDATE – I have spoken with the hotel and we are able to accommodate 40 more attendees than planned so the new registration maximum will be 390 instead of 350.

REGISTRATION PROCESS
The registration system was designed to openly register anyone interested in attending the event up to 325 attendees at which time the system started a waiting list. I posted the maximum attendance information on all registration posts such as http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/02/openstack-conference-design-summit-update/ to ensure that community members were aware that a limit existed. The final 25 65 slots are being filled based on the following process that I believe meets the needs of the community; especially with the emphasis on active developers:

  1. Active developers on project with priority to developers who have submitted code
  2. Ensure that all participating organizations have at least 1 attendee representing the company
  3. International attendees with previously booked airfare

I plan to shut off the registration system from accepting any more wait listed participants tomorrow at Noon CST to obtain a final list for selection based on the 3 criteria elements listed above. I will be contacting all accepted names on the waiting list tomorrow afternoon as well as people not accepted to notify them of their status. With people putting travel plans on hold, it is critical to finalize this process quickly so people can make any necessary arrangements.

Finally, all OpenStack Conference presentations will be videotaped by a professional video firm with videos and associated slides being posted at least 1 week after the event. Design Summit meetings will have active EtherPads for each session that people can monitor should they want to know more about a given blueprint or feature for the Diablo release. I am also going to post a daily blog from the event and will encourage community members to do likewise; twitter will also be active during the event and you can follow the #openstack hash tag.

To all the wait-listed unable to attend this event, I offer my apology that I was unable to offer you a slot and will plan accordingly for our 2012 community events to have flexible sizing to accommodate your attendance. Please also take advantage of the many global events that OpenStack participates in (see Events Page) as well as the regional community events I am working on for 2011 in Europe and Asia; more information on those coming soon.

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Project Policy Board Membership – Update Post Election

Now that the Spring 2011 Governance Elections have completed, I would like to formally update the community on the OpenStack Project Policy Board:

Member Status
Jesse Andrews Appointed
Jonathan Bryce Appointed
Thierry Carrez Elected – Term ends Spring 2012
Rick Clark Elected – Term ends Fall 2011 (replacing Vish Ishaya)*
Eric Day Elected – Term ends Spring 2012
John Dickinson Swift PTL – Term ends Fall 2011
Soren Hansen Elected – Term ends Fall 2011
Vish Ishaya Nova PTL – Term ends Fall 2011
Joshua McKenty Appointed
Ewan Mellor Elected – Term ends Fall 2011
Jay Pipes Glance PTL – Term ends Fall 2011
John Purrier Appointed

* The election of Vish Ishaya as the Nova Project Team Lead vacated his previously held elected position on the PPB. Based on the governance rules , the nominee with the next highest votes in the PPB general election will serve out the remaining term of the vacated seat. Thus, Rick Clark having received the third most votes in the PPB election will take over Vish Ishaya’s previously held position on the PPB which will expire in the Fall 2011.

This appointed and elected board of community leaders provides a solid leadership team to drive the project forward and I look foward to working with this board in 2011.

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Dedicated Doc Day

Rather than having a doc sprint session at the upcoming Summit, I’ve decided to do a push for docs for Cactus with a single two dedicated doc days this Wednesday, April 6th, and Wednesday, April 13th. I’d like to get us all on the same page with this post. (Ha, page.)

I track my doc tasks with a bunch of Post-it notes on my white board, and I’ve moved a lot from In Progress to Done this release. But I want to have a day dedicated to OpenStack docs to keep adding supporting documentation to the project.

OpenStack doc task board

Scope

The priorities for Cactus were clearly on reference documentation for flags and the API for Compute, and for Object Storage, logging information. We’ve had great efforts here which are rolled into the openstack-manuals Launchpad project and automation surrounding flags is available in Nova.

I’ve published a draft for the Compute Admin Guide for Cactus and plan to place a new home page so that readers can peruse either Bexar or Cactus (trunk) documentation. For the dedicated doc day, the scope is narrowed to these topics:

Target Audience

As you well know, OpenStack provides documentation for developers and system administrators both. The RST-sourced documentation is for developers and the DocBook-sourced docs are for system and cloud administrators. This dedicated doc day invites writers for both audiences, with a focus on the topics above.

Location

I’ll be in San Francisco at the headquarters-formerly-known-as-Anso HQ on Wednesday (update: 4/13). We don’t have room for additional writers right now, though, but contact me if you’re up for a group dinner that evening.

After a long day of writing and diagramming, we’ll need libations. I’ll post a place for a meetup in the Mission area of San Francisco once we determine a location.

Closing Haiku

And lastly, a haiku from Daniel Green, who wrote a Doc Sprint haiku for Atlassian and won their doc sprint haiku contest:

No time to eat now.
Should be writing more content.
Too late, never mind.

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Q1 2011 OpenStack Community Snapshot

At the end of 2010, I posted a community snapshot blog (http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/01/q4-2010-openstack-community-snapshot/) that provided a variety of community health data-points. Seeing measurements on a quarterly basis provides insight to the health and growth of our community. If you have any ideas for other metrics to monitor, please contact me at [email protected].

End of Q1 2011 Data

Measurement Q4 2010 Q1 2011
Number of registered developers 95 165
Number of entities in a formal relationship 42 62
Number of technology releases 1 (Austin) 1 (Bexar)
Number of attendees at Design Summit 150 (San Antonio, TX) 350 (Santa Clara, CA)
Number of members Facebook OpenStack group 195 319
Number of members LinkedIn OpenStack group 213 395
Number of members Ohloh Swift group 22 25
Number of members Ohloh Nova group 47 98
Number of members announce mailing list 1052 1144

Totals Data

Measurement Q4 2010 Q1 2011
Number of visitors to OpenStack.org website 97,260 128,343
Number of pageviews to OpenStack.org website 279,750 293,892
Number of #openstack tweets 1,439 876*

* Missing 4 weeks of data due to measuring tool issue

I am also tracking several data points (bugs, blueprints, etc) that I publish in the OpenStack Wiki at http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter.

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OpenStack Conference & Design Summit Spring 2011 Sponsored by Citrix Final Agenda

The OpenStack Conference agenda for the first two days of the 4 day event is now finalized and ready for attendee consumption. The Design Summit agenda for the final 3 days of the event is still in active development following a process detailed here.

All attendees will receive a program guide with the agenda at the event and we have also published the agenda via an online tool with options to download the agenda to your smart phone. The published online agenda is at http://openstack-spring2011.sched.org/.

April 26, 2011 Day 1
GENERAL SESSION
9:00 am – 9:15 am Welcome & OpenStack Vision Jim Curry (Rackspace Hosting)
9:15 am – 9:45 am OpenStack – Where We Are John Purrier (Rackspace Hosting)
9:45 am – 10:30 am NASA and OpenStack James Williams (NASA)
10:30 am – 10:45 am BREAK
10:45 am – 11:30 am The Site Architecture You Can Edit Ryan Lane (Wikimedia Foundation)
11:30 am – 12:15 pm eBay and OpenStack Neal Sample (eBay)
12:15 pm – 1:15 pm LUNCH
1:15 pm – 1:45 pm The Opportunity for OpenStack Gordon Mangione (Citrix Systems)
COMMUNITY TRACK
2:00 pm – 2:45 pm Collaboration Tools in OpenStack Thierry Carrez
2:45 pm – 3:30 pm Golden Configuration Automated Testing Jesse Andrews
3:30 pm – 4:00 pm Introduction to the OW2 Open Source Cloudware Initiative Cedric Thomas and Denis Caromel
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm Governance Policy Panel Jonathan Bryce
5:00 pm – 5:30 pm OpenStack NTT Data Perspective Yoichi Kihara
TECHNICAL TRACK
2:00 pm – 2:45 pm OpenStack API Extensions Jorge Williams
2:45 pm – 3:30 pm PaaS on OpenStack Nati Shalom
3:30 pm – 4:00 pm Networking in OpenStack Compute Hisaharu Ishii
4:00 pm – 4:45 pm OpenStack Dashboard Devin Carlen
4:45 pm – 5:30 pm Scaling Applications in the Cloud Sebastian Stadil
April 27, 2011 Day 2
USER TRACK
9:00 am – 9:45 am Trusted Pools in Cloud Architecture Raghu Yeluri & Jim Greene
9:45 am – 10:30 am The Switch That’s Just Another Server Kenneth Duda
10:30 am – 11:00 am Petascale Cloud File-System Design and Implementation Anand Babu Peroasamy
11:00 am – 12:00 am Standing up an OpenStack Cloud in Intel Architecture Billy Cox
12:00 – 1:00 pm LUNCH
StackOps MeetUp in Developer Lounge
1:00 pm – 1:30 pm OpenStack – The Time is Now Lew Tucker (Cisco)
SERVICE PROVIDER TRACK sponsored by DELL
1:45 pm – 2:15 pm Cloud Service Providers and OpenStack: Opportunity and Action Plan Bernard Golden
2:15 pm -3:00 pm Commercialization of OpenStack Object Storage Jaesuk Ahn and Andrew Shafer
3:00 pm – 3:45 pm Integrated Managed Services NG Stack via OpenStack Paul Pettigrew
3:45 pm – 4:30 pm Bootstrapping Hyperscale Clouds Rob Hirschfeld
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm Group Discussion on Service Provider Plans and Initiatives Leveraging OpenStack Hosted by Bernard Golden

Finally, we have three parties set for the event to allow for time to relax and get to know your fellow OpenStack community members:

  • Welcome Reception Sponsored by Cisco – April 26th from 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
  • OpenStack Developer Gathering Sponsored by Niciria – April 27th from 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
  • Developer Party at Dave and Buster’s Sponsored by Cloudscaling – April 28th from 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm

OpenStack Governance Election Results

The OpenStack Community has completed the governance elections as described in several previous blog posts: here and here. The results of the voting are as follows:

Project Technical Lead SWIFT: John Dickinson

Project Technical Lead NOVA: Vishvananda Ishaya

Project Technical Lead GLANCE: Jay Pipes

Project Policy Board (2 Positions): Thierry Carrez and Eric Day

Congratulations to the winners of this election and thank you to all the nominees and voters.

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