OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (December 17 – 24)

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

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

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)

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

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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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (December 3 – December 10)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – December 10, 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 (12/3– 12/9)

  • Data Tracking Graphs – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • OpenStack Compute (NOVA) Data
    • 17 Active Reviews
    • 97 Active Branches – owned by 34 people & 4 teams
    • 472 commits by 26 people in last month
  • OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT) Data
    • 5 Active Reviews
    • 41 Active Branches – owned by 19 people & 2 teams
    • 184 commits by 15 people in last month
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 53 tweets; 47 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 200
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 139 Tracked Bugs; 51 New Bugs; 7 In-process Bugs;  3 Critical Bugs; 15 High Importance Bugs;  45 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week: 135 Blueprints; 5 Essential, 20 High, 16 Medium, 14 Low, 80 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  7,267 Visits, 23,663 Pageviews, 51.04% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 30.43%; /projects 5.92%; /projects/compute 9.24%; /projects/storage 5.83%; /NovaInstall 5.21%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (November 27 – December 3)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – December 3, 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 Meeting

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (11/26– 12/2)

  • Data Tracking Graphs and Raw Data – http://wiki.openstack.org/WeeklyNewsletter
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 68 tweets; 32 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 155
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 120 Tracked Bugs; 43 New Bugs; 8 In-process Bugs;  2 Critical Bugs; 12 High Importance Bugs;  39 Bugs (Fix Committed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week: 135 Blueprints; 5 Essential, 20 High, 13 Medium, 8 Low, 89 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 7,708 Visits, 24,525 Pageviews, 52.15% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 31.89%; /projects 6.08%; /projects/compute 8.75%; /projects/storage 5.65%; /NovaInstall 4.62%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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Doc Plans for Upcoming OpenStack Releases

I’m supposed to be strategic about documentation and well, I have to say I feel a bit behind in creating specs for documentation for the upcoming OpenStack releases. Much spec planning went on at the Summit, but I was so focused on the Doc Sprint that I didn’t set any concrete doc plans for Bexar and Cactus releases. I’d like to amend that and get input from everyone in the community and beyond. Here are some ideas that go into a single blueprint for documentation. I’d love to get feedback on these plans and specifications, which we can edit on the wiki.

1. Docs site – OpenStack needs a central docs.openstack.org site that curates the content from various other sources and gives a good user experience upon landing on it. My goal is to implement this in time for Bexar (February).

2. Official docs – OpenStack needs a way to indicate that a page or site as “official OpenStack documentation” meaning that it is as accurate as we can get it and the procedures have been tested. Again I’d mark this for Bexar.

3. Versioning documentation – We are taking small steps towards a frozen release page/site. For example, you should be able to go to http://swift.openstack.org/1.0/ and get a frozen-in-time site with the developer documentation from the 1.0 release. We can get this done in time for Bexar.

4. Man pages – We need man pages created for nova-manage, nova-compute, and nova-networking. The nova-manage man page is now in the builds but needs editing. It is sourced in doc/source/man from RST files and gets built with the Sphinx docs. This could be done for Bexar.

5. Tutorials – Now that we have virtual boxes and stack on a stick in progress, we need tutorials that are meaningful and simple enough to step through while still giving an impressive demonstration of the power of OpenStack clouds. Here are some ideas for tutorials:

  1. Create a LAMP stack for a web application like WordPress – demonstrate connectivity between virtual machines, describe how to scale as your blog gets super popular (hey, we can dream, right?)
  2. Build your own CDN to serve video content
  3. Academic calculations where you spin up 10 machines for a Mathematica project only for a day or so
  4. Create a news reader application using AMPQ/RabbitMQ

I think we could have one solid, tested tutorial done in time for Bexar with the remaining set for the Cactus release. Any thoughts on how to prioritize these tutorials? Which would be in highest demand?

6. Glance docs – With the Glance implementation still ongoing for Bexar, we need to plan for install and integration docs with the Bexar release.

Let me know your priorities for upcoming releases and we’ll update the specs for the encapsulating blueprint for docs work. The Docs site is the biggest item needing design and architecture, so I’d welcome input and ideas with a heavy weighting towards “Docs site!”

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (November 20 – 26)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 26, 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 (11/19 – 11/25)

  • Coming next week:  All weekly data available on single spreadsheet with chart for each measurement
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 81 tweets; 69 re-tweets; all OpenStack total tweets 250
  • Bugs Stats for Week:  108 Tracked Bugs; 44 New Bugs; 6 In-process Bugs;  2 Critical Bugs; 12 High Importance Bugs; 0  Bugs (Fix Completed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  133 Blueprints; 5 Essential, 20 High, 13 Medium, 8 Low, 87 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 7,467 Visits, 24,566 Pageviews, 50.62% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 30.98%; /projects 6.19%; /projects/compute 9.03%; /projects/storage 6.18%; /NovaInstall 4.39%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Design Summit Event Page Launched

Two weeks ago, the OpenStack community gathered in San Antonio, TX for our first public Design Summit event sponsored by Rackspace. Over 250 attendees from 90 companies and 12 countries spent 4 days planning for the next two product releases as well as providing business development executives a chance to network and collaborate on the OpenStack ecosystem. To ensure that all community members who could not attend are given the opportunity to learn from this event, we have created a new website with all the speakers slides and videos from the General Sessions and Business Track as well as links to the Technical Track overview discussions which were recorded on Etherpad. You can access this site at http://openstack.org/events/openstack-design-summit-2010/.

Also, as the OpenStack community continues to grow, there will be plenty of opportunities to meet a community member at an event near you. To better inform you of upcoming events, we have created a new events page listing events with OpenStack speakers as well as previous events with slides (and videos) from those presentations: http://openstack.org/events/.

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