OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (January 29 – February 4)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – February 4, 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 (1/28– 2/3)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 6 Active Reviews
    • 132 Active Branches – owned by 40 people & 9 teams
    • 1,001 commits by 60 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 5 Active Reviews
    • 44 Active Branches – owned by 19 people & 3 teams
    • 285 commits by 14 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 91 tweets; 87 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 1008
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  365 Tracked Bugs; 57 New Bugs; 16 In-process Bugs; 17 Critical Bugs; 48 High Importance Bugs; 247 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  158 Blueprints; 10 Essential, 6 High, 12 Medium, 16 Low, 114 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  7,881 Visits, 18,389 Pageviews, 62.33% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 40.46%; /projects 11.69%; /projects/compute 19.37%; /projects/storage 13.54%; /Community 6.35%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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The OpenStack Bexar Release

It has been an intense and productive three months since OpenStack unveiled the initial “Austin” release to the world. We have had code contributions from 130 developers and have added over 30 new features to the project for the “Bexar” release. The project has matured in the processes for managing and tracking milestone targets, with the Bexar release coming together smoothly and without hiccups with our new release manager.

For Bexar here is what you can expect to see:

OpenStack Object Storage (Swift)

  • Large objects (greater than 5 GB) can now be stored using OpenStack Object Storage. Introducing the concepts of client-side chunking and segmentation now allows virtually unlimited object sizes, limited only by the size of the cluster it is being stored into.
  • An experimental S3 compatibility middleware has been added to OpenStack Object Storage.
  • Swauth is a Swift compatible authentication and authorization service implemented on top of Swift. This allows the authorization system to scale as well as the underlying storage system and will replace the existing dev_auth service in a future release.

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

  • Support for raw disk images for hypervisors that are libvirt compatible (such as KVM) and XenAPI hypervisors.
  • IPv6 support in all network modes but FlatManager. Support for the remaining network mode will come in the “Cactus” release.
  • Support for a lot of new virtual volume backends to provide highly available block volumes for virtual machines: Sheepdog, CEPH/RADOS, and iSCSI (XenAPI only).
  • Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor is supported.
  • Lots of new features have been added around the Openstack API, for example admin features to pause, suspend, lock, and password reset instances.
  • New “rescue” mode allows an instance to mount affected disks and fix problems.
  • Web-based serial console to access instances where networking fails is available through the OpenStack API.
  • Database versioning and migration support, for painless migration from one version to another.
  • Instances now use copy-on-write by default for better performance.
  • Support for availability zones, through the introduction of a new scheduler: ZoneScheduler.

OpenStack Image Registry and Delivery service (Glance)

  • Glance APIs (for registry and delivery) were unified, and a specific client class created.
  • Support for uploading disk images directly through the Glance REST-ful API.
  • Addition of the glance-upload tool which can register new AMI-like images or raw disk images.
  • Glance can now fetch image data on a S3-like backend as well as from Swift.
  • Documentation for Glance is now available at http://glance.openstack.org.

Looking forward to the “Cactus” release.

The “Bexar” release introduced and completed a lot of features in the project. For the next release, Cactus, we will focus even more on stability and deployability, better preparing OpenStack for really large, carrier-grade installations.

This is not to say there will not be exciting features also being completed in this milestone. Current blueprints include:

  • Support for VMware ESX & ESXi hypervisors.
  • Support for Linux container virtualization through support for OpenVZ and LXC (Linux Containers).
  • Additional disk and appliance formats supported in Glance.
  • Disk and appliance format conversion support in Glance.
  • Live migration of instances (just missed the Bexar release!)
  • Features and operational elements availability via XenAPI by Rackspace in preparation for large scale deployment.
  • Performance and scaling improvements in Swift.
  • Internationalization and localization in Swift.

And these are just the highlights!

There has also been a lot of discussion on IRC and the mailing list about extending the Nova Volume and Network controllers and providing public API’s to these services. We should expect to see more discussion and specific blueprints coming in shortly.

In addition to the direct planning for “Cactus” and follow-on “Diablo” releases there has been a handful of submissions to the Project Oversight Committee (POC); these include considering the process for adding core developers to projects, image format support, and overall charter for the near term (2011) of the OpenStack project. We have gotten our feet wet with our governance process, made some adjustments, and expect to see more activity by the POC as we continue to guide and define the OpenStack project.

Getting to this point with Swift and Nova has been a tremendous amount of effort, everyone involved is to be commended. Looking forward we will continue to execute on delivering project milestones but at the same time start to introduce and discuss longer term visions and roadmaps for this project. There is consistent community feedback that in addition to understanding the current project as scoped a longer term view needs to be communicated. This will introduce new projects, new opportunities for the community to contribute, and greater value and impact of the OpenStack project in the cloud industry. I am looking forward to the discussions, debates, and projects this will spark.

John

Call for Speakers/Topics for OpenStack Conference

The OpenStack Program Committee formally announces the Call for Speakers/Topics for the April 26-29 OpenStack Conference/Design Summit in Santa Clara, CA at the Hyatt Regency. As the Design Summit agenda is drawn directly from the submitted developer blueprints, the call for speakers/topics is only for the OpenStack Conference held on April 26-27.

EVENT INFO
OpenStack Conference – April 26-27, 2011
OpenStack Design Summit – April 27-29, 2011

SUBMISSION PROCESS
All speakers interested in submitting a topic can either send an email to [email protected] or update the Topic Submission Etherpad at http://etherpad.openstack.org/SubmittedTopics. All topics received will be added to the Etherpad for Program Committee review as well as community input. The submission process is open from January 31, 2011 until February 28, 2011. As of March 1, 2011 the Program Committee will begin putting together the complete agenda.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
The following information is required when submitting your topic:

  • Title of session
  • Brief abstract
  • Speaker name
  • Length of time needed (e.g. 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes)
  • Track for session

AGENDA

The current high-level agenda of the OpenStack Conference for speaker submissions:

April 26, 2011

GENERAL SESSION (9:00 am-  11:45am)

Lunch

COMMUNITY TRACK (1:00 pm – 4:30pm)
This track allows the community to focus on critical issues related to development processes and plans, management and oversight as well as business planning. All community members are welcome to participate as the community moves from its infancy to a young and substantial open source project.

TECHNICAL TRACK (1:00pm – 4:30pm)
This track focuses on various technology issues related to OpenStack and cloud computing in general.  These sessions are not meant to focus on upcoming features for the projects; we have blueprint sessions for that.

April 27, 2011

USER TRACK (9:00am – Noon)
This track provides OpenStack users the opportunity to learn first hand how OpenStack meets their business needs and delivers the open standard cloud computing solution for the marketplace.

Lunch

ECOSYSTEM TRACK (1:00am – 4:30pm)
This track lays out the foundation for the OpenStack partner ecosystem providing partners an exclusive roadmap for future development activities and revenue opportunities.  Existing partners providing information on their ecosystem development offers business development managers a chance to learn and improve their own OpenStack ecosystem engagement.

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OpenStack Developer Activity Review (January 21 – 28)

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/)

  • State of Glance? –  Jay Pipes gives an overview of all features developed for Bexar in Project Glance as well as the current thinking for the Cactus Project Glance release. More details at https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg00358.html
  • Network Service for L2/L3 Network Infrastructure Blueprint – Ewan Mellor responded to interest from several developers on the status of the bexar-network-service blueprint and its status. The blueprint will be postponed to Cactus and a discussion about this blueprint was started.
  • Cactus Release Preparation – Rick Clark gives an overview of the strategy behind the Cactus release and requests that all new features for Cactus be proposed to the community by February 3, 2011. The Cactus release schedule is http://wiki.openstack.org/CactusReleaseSchedule

Statistics

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

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (January 21 – 28)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – January 28, 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 (1/21– 1/27)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 1 Active Reviews
    • 119 Active Branches – owned by 37 people & 7 teams
    • 1,122 commits by 61 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 1 Active Reviews
    • 38 Active Branches – owned by 18 people & 3 teams
    • 273 commits by 15 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 58 tweets; 42 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 204
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  326 Tracked Bugs; 41 New Bugs; 11 In-process Bugs; 12 Critical Bugs; 43 High Importance Bugs; 225 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  131 Blueprints; 6 Essential, 7 High, 12 Medium, 19 Low, 87 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  6,677 Visits, 15,183 Pageviews, 57.27% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 41.15%; /projects 12.20%; /projects/compute 17.51%; /projects/storage 13.30%; /Community 6.53%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Project Oversight Committee

The OpenStack Project Oversight Committee (POC) was formed at the end of last year. The committee is a mixture of appointed and community elected members who fill nine seats. The current members are Jesse Andrews, Jonathan Bryce, Rick Clark, Soren Hansen, Mark Interrante, Vish Ishaya, Joshua McKenty, Ewan Mellor and Chuck Thier. One of the responsibilities of the POC is to approve policies for the operation of OpenStack sub-projects.

As Rick mentioned in this week’s release meeting, one policy has just been approved–a procedure for adding developers to core teams. This was a policy that was proposed to the general OpenStack mailing list for open discussion. After a period of time, the POC then took up discussion of the issue and voted to adopt the proposal. John Purrier has followed a similar process for a number of proposals and the POC is currently considering two.

The majority of POC discussion and voting has happened on a Launchpad group mailing list. Archives are publicly available and anyone interested in reviewing the detailed discussion can view the threads here: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack-poc/

In addition, the POC will be holding regular IRC meetings, and the logs and minutes of those meetings will be available as well. A summary of POC activity and links to relevant information will be available on the OpenStack wiki: http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/POC

In the last six months, OpenStack has grown and matured, and we have heard a lot of great feedback on the governance model. As the year progresses, I expect that we will continue to refine and improve our governance processes and models. If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions, please share them with me ([email protected]).

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OpenStack Meetup and Open Bar in California

OpenStack Meetup & Open Bar
Feb 3, 2011
6:00 – 9:00 pm
Hyatt Santa Clara Convention Center
Second Level Mezzanine

Join OpenStack contributors, users, and backers to celebrate the second release of the fastest-growing open source cloud platform, code-named Bexar.  There will be a community Meetup with speakers from 6:00 – 7:00 pm, followed by an open bar from 7:00 – 9:00 pm.

At the Meetup, Jim Curry, VP of OpenStack for Rackspace, and Jonathan Bryce, chair of the OpenStack Project Oversight Committee, will kick things off with a quick progress report and overview of key features in the Bexar release, scheduled to be available February 3.  Then we’ll mix things up with a series of five-minute lightning talks from various community members.  Confirmed speakers include:

  • Jesse Andrews, co-founder and CEO, Anso Labs
  • Victoria Livschitz, founder and CEO, Grid Dynamics
  • Anne Gentle, Content Stacker, OpenStack
  • Rob Hirschfeld, Principle Cloud Solution Architect, Dell
  • Chiradeep Vittal, Chief Architect, Cloud.com
  • Cloudscaling

RSVP http://openstack.eventbrite.com/

About OpenStack

OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system. Founded with source code from Rackspace and NASA, and with more than 40 corporate sponsors, OpenStack is currently developing two interrelated projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. OpenStack Compute is software to provision and manage large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.

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OpenStack Developer Activity Review (Jan 14 – 21)

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/)

  • Can ec2-api-tools maintain OpenStack Nova? –  Kenji Funasaki asked if it is possible to get image information by using ec2-describe-images functions within the EC2-API-TOOLS? Soren Hansen and Masanori ITOH responded that ec2 api tools use the SOAP based API for EC2 which are in development for the Cactus release in April.
  • Windows/Hyper-V – Jordan Rinke inquired about Hyper-V running on NOVA and was looking for more information; Chiradeep Vittal supplied a wiki page http://wiki.openstack.org/HypervInstall.
  • New Config File for Nova-API – Armando Migliaccio asked about the new way of configuring nova-api as the old glags style has been replaced by past.deploy style.  Jay Pipes, Andy Smith, and Anne Gentle responded on the need to improve documentation in this area; Armando did respond that flags and paste.deploy don’t configure the same things and he had confusion from the way he as using –flagfile=nova-api.conf.
  • Live Migration Branch Status – Thierry Carrez posted information on the decision to delay the release of this code from Bexar to Cactus. Masumotok confirmed this decision.
  • Deprecating nova-objectstore – Thierry Carrez posted information on the long term plan to remove the objectstore post Bexar and leverage Glance. Further discussion on the technical method to achieve this is discussed in the email thread…

Statistics

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

Tags:

OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (January 14 – 21)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – January 21, 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 (1/14– 1/20)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 12 Active Reviews
    • 113 Active Branches – owned by 36 people & 6 teams
    • 1,161 commits by 62 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 4 Active Reviews
    • 45 Active Branches – owned by 21 people & 2 teams
    • 247 commits by 15 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 83 tweets; 57 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 857
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  275 Tracked Bugs; 55 New Bugs; 24 In-process Bugs; 8 Critical Bugs; 37 High Importance Bugs; 100 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  128 Blueprints; 2 Essential, 5 High, 13 Medium, 11 Low, 97 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  8,123 Visits, 18,048 Pageviews, 62.61% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 42.93%; /projects 11.54%; /projects/compute 17.83%; /projects/storage 12.85%; /Community 5.95%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Conference / Design Summit High Level Agenda

The OpenStack Conference/Design Summit planning is well underway with the Program Committee and I wanted to share our latest high level agenda with the community for feedback. The plan is to update this proposal over the next two weeks before starting a call for topics and speakers. Please send your comments directly to me so I can pass them along to the Program Committee.

Also, the number of sessions and times are subject to change; however, it is easier to view the agenda with sample sessions and times.

Here is the current proposal:

OpenStack Conference Agenda (April 26 – 27, 2011)

DAY1

GENERAL SESSION

9 – 9:30                               Welcome & OpenStack Vision
9:30 – 10:00                        OpenStack – where we are
10:00 – 10:45                       Keynote #1
10:45 – 11:00                       BREAK
11:00 – 11:45                       Keynote #2

11:45 – 1:00              LUNCH

COMMUNITY TRACK

This track allows the community to focus on critical issues related to development processes and plans, management and oversight as well as business planning. All community members are welcome to participate as the community moves from its infancy to a young and substantial open source project.

1:00 – 1:45
1:45 – 2:30
2:30 – 3:00                BREAK
3:00 – 3:45
3:45 – 4:30

TECHNICAL TRACK

This track focuses on various technology issues related to OpenStack and cloud computing in general.  These sessions are not meant to focus on upcoming features for the projects; we have blueprint sessions for that.

1:00 – 1:45
1:45 – 2:30
2:30 – 3:00                BREAK
3:00 – 3:45
3:45 – 4:30
6:00 – 9:00                Evening Reception

DAY2

USER TRACK

This track provides OpenStack users the opportunity to learn first hand how OpenStack meets their business needs and delivers the open standard cloud computing solution for the marketplace.

9:00 – 9:45
9:45 – 10:30
10:30 – 11:00
11:00 – 12:00
12:00 – 1:00              Lunch

ECOSYSTEM TRACK

This track lays out the foundation for the OpenStack partner ecosystem providing partners an exclusive roadmap for future development activities and revenue opportunities.  Existing partners providing information on their ecosystem development offers business development managers a chance to learn and improve their own OpenStack ecosystem engagement.

1:00 – 1:45                OpenStack Ecosystem Overview
1:45 – 2:30
2:30 – 3:00                BREAK
3:00 – 3:45
3:45 – 4:30
5:00 – 6:00                Guest Speaker

7:30 – LATE               Unofficial Pub Crawl in Palo Alto

OpenStack Design Summit Agenda (April 27 – 29, 2011)

Day 1

9:00 – 9:30                Welcome and Overview

BLUEPRINT SESSIONS

9:30 – 12:00

12:00 – 1:00              Lunch

BLUEPRINT SESSIONS

1:00 – 4:50

5:00 – 6:00                Guest Speaker

7:30 – LATE               Unofficial Pub Crawl in Palo Alto

Day 2

BLUEPRINT SESSIONS

9:00 – 12:00

12:00 – 1:00              Lunch

BLUEPRINT SESSIONS

1:00 – 6:00

7:00 – 10:00              Developer Party – TBD

Day 3

BLUEPRINT SESSIONS

9:00 – 12:00

12:00 – 1:00              Lunch

BLUEPRINT SESSIONS / HACKFEST

1:00 – 4:30

Lighting Talks

4:30  – 6:00               Open

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