OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (January 1 – 7)

 

January 7, 2011

OpenStack Community Newsletter – January 7, 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].

Join OpenStack at New York City Meetup Next Week (image worldwideluxuryfamilytravel.com)

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (1/1– 1/6)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 20 Active Reviews
    • 108 Active Branches – owned by 36 people & 8 teams
    • 909 commits by 51 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 8 Active Reviews
    • 46 Active Branches – owned by 21 people & 2 teams
    • 119 commits by 12 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 42 tweets; 67 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 516
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  180 Tracked Bugs; 43 New Bugs; 11 In-process Bugs; 4 Critical Bugs; 21 High Importance Bugs; 76 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  141 Blueprints; 1 Essential, 12 High, 18 Medium, 16 Low, 94 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  6,630 Visits, 21,693 Pageviews, 61.18% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 29.05%; /projects 6.67%; /projects/compute 11.99%; /projects/storage 6.51%; /Community 3.72%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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Q4 2010 OpenStack Community Snapshot

 

January 6, 2011

As the OpenStack community moves into 2011, I feel it is important to take a snapshot of the community at this moment in time to better help us gauge our growth and success in 2011. Listed below are some important values that I track regularly for future comparison.

End of Q4 Data

Number of registered developers 95
Number of entities in a formal relationship 42
Number of technology releases 1 (Austin)
Number of attendees at Design Summit 250 (San Antonio, TX)
Number of members Facebook OpenStack group 195
Number of members LinkedIn OpenStack group 213
Number of members Ohloh Swift group 22
Number of members Ohloh Nova group 47
Number of members announce mailing list 1052

Q4 Totals Data

Number of visitors to OpenStack.org website 97,260
Number of pageviews to OpenStack.org website 279,750
Number of #openstack tweets 1,439
Number of #openstack re-tweets 1,245

I am also tracking several data points (bugs, blueprints, etc) that I publish in the OpenStack Wiki at http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter.  If you are interested in having me track additional data, please contact me directly and I will add that item to my weekly tracking.

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OpenStack Meetup in New York City Next Week

 

January 5, 2011

The first OpenStack Meetup event in New York City is coming up next Wednesday; sponsored by AppFirst. It will be held on January 12th, 2011 @Dogpatch Lab (36 East 12th Street). Our guest speaker will be George Vanecek, PhD, he is a principal architect at Huawei’s US Innovation Center R&D where his team is currently designing a carrier-grade eBento Cloud Platform including VoIP extensions and supporting capabilities for M2M and SMB SaaS solutions.

Huawei is a leader in the telecom market, innovating to provide robust, scalable IaaS and PaaS services to their customers. When looking around the market Dr. Vanecek and his team considered building everything from scratch and adopting commercial technologies. Their decision ended up being to adopt OpenStack.

In this open discussion Dr. Vanecek will share what led him and his team to decide on OpenStack and some of the technical concerns he wrestled with. Dr. Vanecek has extensive experience in designing and building software systems, applications, and service platforms working as a solutions architect at Cordys, a chief scientist at AT&T Internet Platforms Organization, founder and lead developer at several software startups, and an assistant professor at the computer science department at Purdue University.

To RSVP, please go to: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-New-York-Meetup/calendar/15634525/. And don’t forget to forward this event to anyone who might be interested.

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (December 24 – 31)

 

December 31, 2010

OpenStack Community Newsletter – December 31, 2010

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 (12/24– 12/30)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 21 Active Reviews
    • 106 Active Branches – owned by 37 people & 8 teams
    • 805 commits by 47 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 5 Active Reviews
    • 41 Active Branches – owned by 21 people & 2 teams
    • 127 commits by 12 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 17 tweets; 33 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 106
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  168 Tracked Bugs; 41 New Bugs; 8 In-process Bugs; 3 Critical Bugs; 20 High Importance Bugs; 74 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  142 Blueprints; 1 Essential, 12 High, 20 Medium, 14 Low, 95 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  4,708 Visits, 14,802 Pageviews, 56.22% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 29.79%; /projects 6.43%; /projects/compute 9.31%; /projects/storage 7.31%; /NovaInstall 4.08%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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Coming up in OpenStack Bexar release

 

December 30, 2010

(This article is an updated version of a post originally posted here).

OpenStack is busy with so much development activity it’s hard to keep up.  42 (!) specs were targeted for the 3-month long Bexar development cycle… and there are more than 150 active branches. Over December alone, we saw more than 900 commits by 60 different people ! Taking a step back, what new features should you expect to land on February 3rd, in the Bexar release ?

Swift (OpenStack object storage)

The big news in Swift is support for unlimited object size, through the implementation of client-side chunking. The only size limit for your objects is now the available size in your Swift cluster ! You can read more about that exciting feature in John Dickinson’s blog post. We also hope to ship Swauth, DevAuth highly scalable replacement, directly into Swift codebase. Exposure of most of the S3 API in Swift may or may not make it.

Glance (OpenStack image registry and delivery service)

The Glance image service will expose a unified REST API (no more distinction between the image registry and the image delivery services). We will also have the possibility to upload image data and metadata over one single call. Unified client classes will be shipped directly in Glance. We also hope to have a S3 backend…

Nova (OpenStack compute)

There is so much coming up in Nova it’s hard to summarize. Nova will make use of those new Glance client classes, obviously. We will support booting VMs from raw disk images (rather than a kernel/ramdisk/image combination) and have a rescue mode to mount your faulty disks under a sane environment. We plan to have instance snapshots ready. API servers can now expose optional admin features (through the –allow_admin_api flag), like a specific XenServer instance pause or suspend feature.

Lots of improvements might go unnoticed, like the internationalization of messages, the standardization on services using eventlet, more robust logging, or the move of the IP allocation down the stack. We’ll also finalize some incomplete features, like access to your project VLAN through a VPN, security groups that work in all network modes, and we hope to finally ship Hyper-V support.

We hope to have much more: a web-based serial console to access your VMs, ipv6 support, the possibility to deploy hardware in a staging area of your cloud, support for highly available block volumes through Sheepdog, instance diagnostics allowing to retrieve a history of actions on instances, the possibility to do live migration in nova-manage, iSCSI support for XenAPI… But let’s be realistic, not everything will land in time. What doesn’t make it will certainly be in the next release, Cactus, which will be released in April !

Congrats to our awesome development team for making all this possible. Those last two months have been a very fun ride for me 🙂

OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (December 17 – 24)

 

December 24, 2010

OpenStack Community Newsletter – December 24, 2010

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].

Updated OpenStack.org Event Website (http://openstack.org/events)

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (12/17– 12/23)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 12 Active Reviews
    • 99 Active Branches – owned by 37 people & 8 teams
    • 689 commits by 43 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 4 Active Reviews
    • 42 Active Branches – owned by 20 people & 2 teams
    • 168 commits by 13 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 49 tweets; 51 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 200
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  153 Tracked Bugs; 39 New Bugs; 12 In-process Bugs; 3 Critical Bugs; 20 High Importance Bugs; 66 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  140 Blueprints; 1 Essential, 14 High, 21 Medium, 13 Low, 91 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  6,617 Visits, 21,613 Pageviews, 53.20% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 30.01%; /projects 6.66%; /projects/compute 10.11%; /projects/storage 6.69%; /NovaInstall 4.01%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Design Summit Program Committee

 

December 21, 2010

As part of the planning process for the April 26-29, 2011 Design Summit in Santa Clara, CA, I am announcing the creation of a a Design Summit Program Committee. This Committee is open to any community member interested in working on the agenda for the event and will be announced on January 4th, 2011 via the Event Wiki page at http://wiki.openstack.org/Summit/Spring2011.

The Program Committee will have the following responsibilities:

  • Participation in the high level agenda organization
  • Participation in the creation of the event agenda
  • Speaker recruitment and assignment based on agenda
  • Event speaker introductions (if able to attend the event)

The agenda development process will be done in the open via an Etherpad at http://etherpad.openstack.org/DesignSummitApril2011. Having an open agenda creation process ensures that everyone’s voice is heard and given a chance to contribute to this important meeting. Please feel free to review this plan at any time and also contribute, even non-Program Committee members are encouraged to submit ideas and provide feedback.

The Program Committee contains the following members (all volunteers):

  • Stephen Spector, Community Manager
  • Thierry Carrez, Release Manager
  • Architecture Committee Member
  • OPEN SLOT
  • OPEN SLOT
  • OPEN SLOT…

As you can see, we have at least 3 OPEN SLOTS I plan to fill but am willing to have a larger Program Committee based on volunteers. If you are interested in participating on this Committee please email [email protected] as I plan to launch this Committee on January 4th to the community.

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Latest Tips for Using OpenStack

 

December 20, 2010

We’ve seen a lot of development activity in the last couple of weeks for the OpenStack Compute project. It’s a flurry of activity, though no snow flurries appear on the horizon here in Texas. It’s tough to keep up with such an active development community, so I thought I’d write up a blog post with some highlights. Hopefully you won’t think these are early release notes, but there are enough changes afoot that I wanted to get a head start.

Shiny New Bytes for OpenStack Compute

Ah, OpenStack Compute, the land of the free software cloud and the home of the brave cloud pioneers. We’ve seen many improvements lately. The previous preview release of Compute (also known as Nova) had a config file for each service. The latest and greatest code base has consolidated all configuration information into a single nova.conf file. This consolidation makes configuration much simpler, and you don’t have to wonder which config file “won” in a head-to-head matchup.

The install script for developers that Vish Ishaya composed has been folded into the source code base itself in the contrib directory. I was able to walk through it myself, as narrated in this screencast.

We’ve also had a Racker, Wayne Walls, test and contribute an installation script for OpenStack that is available in the contrib directory as well. With it, you can install a cloud controller on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with prompts for creating the configuration needed for the database, network, and so on, ready for production environments. I’ve walked through it and it is handy.

New Tricks for OpenStack Object Storage

For OpenStack Object Storage, a freshly-landed new feature removes limits on object size – you can retrieve objects larger than 5 GB now. On upload, you still upload in smaller-than-5 GB chunks, but the system “glues” them together to make larger objects for download. You can still use chunks if it makes more sense for your system, and download them in parallel if you don’t want to stream a ton of data in one chunk. This large object support is available in the trunk only, not as a package yet, so we’ll keep testing and cooking it in order to prepare it for the Bexar release in February. There’s a great story of how this feature came into being at The Story of an OpenStack Feature at Programmer Thoughts, John Dickinson’s blog.

Exciting times for OpenStack!

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (December 10 – December 17)

 

December 17, 2010

OpenStack Community Newsletter – December 17, 2010

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].

Japan OpenStack User Group

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (12/10– 12/16)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 20 Active Reviews
    • 98 Active Branches – owned by 35 people & 5 teams
    • 523 commits by 29 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 8 Active Reviews
    • 44 Active Branches – owned by 20 people & 2 teams
    • 168 commits by 13 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 42 tweets; 69 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 250
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  143 Tracked Bugs; 52 New Bugs; 7 In-process Bugs; 3 Critical Bugs; 15 High Importance Bugs; 53 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  138 Blueprints; 4 Essential, 16 High, 20 Medium, 14 Low, 84 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  8,262 Visits, 26,101 Pageviews, 56.98% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 31.84%; /projects 6.63%; /projects/compute 9.67%; /projects/storage 7.03%; /NovaInstall 4.34%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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Community Manager on OpenStack 2011

 

December 14, 2010

As we approach the end of 2010, I would like to take a moment to thank all the people around the world who are driving open source cloud computing from a plan to reality in an incredibly short amount of time. It was only 5 months ago, that Rackspace and NASA announced the formation of OpenStack:

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”

Whether you measure the incredible growth of OpenStack by the number of partners or the developers taking part, this growth is a result of the power of the open source computing movement as well as the generous support of Rackspace and NASA in launching this public software project.

Looking forward to 2011, I see incredible opportunities and challenges for the OpenStack community as we deliver technology for enterprise public and private clouds that rival proprietary cloud offerings. Thus, I have created three high level goals for the community as a way to measure our success and ensure that our focus remains on the target as we are bombarded by distractions. I have also suggested a few measurements to track along the way and am always open to community suggestions for areas to measure and monitor.

OpenStack 2011 Goals

1) Production Ready Software – Transform the private and public cloud software marketplace by delivering massively scalable, secure, and reliable open source technology.

Measurements – Release of Bexar, Cactus, and D product (planning).

2) Conquer the World – Drive the OpenStack message to the far reaches of the world to maximize community potential, find new customers, and establish OpenStack as the de facto standard for open source cloud computing.

Measurements – Creation of 10 new User Groups, OpenStack representation at events in Asia, South America, Europe, North America, and Africa, document over 50 OpenStack deployments in production/testing environments.

3) Welcome to the Community – Scaling the community in terms of developers, testers, documentation, users, partners, and cloud computing technologists is critical to the continued success of the OpenStack project. New members bring new ideas and opportunities for OpenStack to address customer needs and wants.

Measurements– 20% increase in the number of active developers, OpenStack Design Summit events in North America and Asia, 25 new global partners.

While 2010 has been exceptional, 2011 provides unbelievable opportunities for the OpenStack community and our technology as we establish ourselves as a mainstream cloud computing solution for the enterprise-computing marketplace. The passion within the OpenStack community is contagious and I am thrilled to play a small part in our revolution.

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