OpenStack Weekly Newsletter – (October 30 – November 5)

 

November 5, 2010

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 5, 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].

Jim Curry “Chief Stacker” at Cloud Expo 2010

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (10/29 – 11/4)

  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 86 tweets ;  60 re-tweets ; all OpenStack  total tweets 404
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 72 Tracked Bugs; 35 New Bugs; 2 In-process Bugs; 2   Critical Bugs; 8 High Importance Bugs; 12 Bugs (Fix Completed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  127 Blueprints; 1 Essential, 2 High, 15 Medium,   4 Low, 105 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week: 4,939 Visits, 14,099 Pageviews, 55.96% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages: Home 35.65% ; /projects 7.97% ; /projects/compute  11.72% ; /projects/storage  8.53%; /community  5.42%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Architecture Board Election Results

 

The OpenStack community is proud to announce the 4 members of the newly formed Architecture Board:

  • Vishvananda Ishaya – Anso Labs (2 year term)
  • Soren Hansen – Rackspace (2 year term)
  • Chuck Thier – Rackspace (1 year term)
  • Ewan Mellor – Citrix (1 year term)

Complete voting results are available here.

Thank you to everyone who voted and all those who volunteered to be considered for the OpenStack Architecture Board. Jonathan Bryce will be discussing more about the newly formed board at the OpenStack Design Summit on Tuesday morning from 11:30 – Noon during the General Session.

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OpenStack Design Summit Business Track

 

November 1, 2010

I am pleased to announce the Design Summit Business Track held on Day 1 and 2 of the event next week. The Technical Track is being developed by the development community and will be run real-time at the event itself. Please note that last minute changes can and do occur with any event schedule so please understand that this plan is as close to final as possible.

Event registration is still open at http://openstack.org/register.

DAY 1 MORNING : General Session

General Session: The summit opening presentations provide a high level overview of the  OpenStack project from the Chief Stacker as well as the latest insight from Rackspace and NASA on their contributions and plans. It is also a pleasure to welcome Joe Tobolski to  present his views on the impact of OpenStack on enterprise computing. Finally, Jonathan Bryce offers insight into the Architecture Board, its new members, and role within  the OpenStack community. Welcome to OpenStack Design Summit and please be sure to take advantage of all the networking opportunities as well as sessions planned for your benefit.

Time Speaker(s) Topic
9:00 – 9:30 Jim Curry (OpenStack) Welcome and State of OpenStack
9:30 – 10:00 Mark Interrante (Rackspace) Rackspace and OpenStack
10:00 – 10:45 Jesse Andrews / Josh McKenty (Anso Labs) NASA Nebula
10:45 – 11:30 Joe Tobolski (Accenture) OpenStack in the Enterprise
11:30 – Noon Jonathan Bryce (OpenStack) Architecture Board Overview

DAY 1 AFTERNOON: Business of Clouds & OpenStack Community

Business of Clouds & OpenStack Community: The first half of this afternoon’s business track illuminates how cloud computing impacts business with a general overview from David Lemphers, Director of Cloud  Computing at PWC followed by a real-world consolidation example from Christian Reilly at Bechtel. The afternoon sessions provide OpenStack community discussions, describing how our open  source project is taking shape. These sessions are a chance for the community to discuss critical issues such as our trademark policy, our brand, and our community documentation.

Time Speaker(s) Topic
1:30 – 2:15 David Lemphers (PWC) Business Impacts of Cloud Deployments
2:15 – 3:00 Christian Reilly (Bechtel) Why a Major Int’l Construction Company Needs a Cloud?
3:00 – 3:30 BREAK
3:30 – 4:00 Stephen Spector (OpenStack) OpenStack Trademark Policy Proposal
4:00 – 4:30 Mark Collier / Lauren Sell (OpenStack) Building the OpenStack Brand Together
4:30 – 5:00 Anne Gentle (OpenStack) Content Stackers

DAY 2 MORNING:  Deploying OpenStack

Deploying OpenStack Series:  When you’re thinking of deploying an OpenStack Cloud there are plenty of decisions to make, from hardware purchases to software integrations. These sessions will answer questions like, “What if I just want to build a Proof of Concept… what’s the minimum recommended  configuration?  How much automation can I achieve at the bare metal level? What about networking?  How do I integrate a private OpenStack cloud into my existing IT infrastructure from directory  services to authentication?” Answer these questions and explore considerations with Martin Casado  from Nicira Networks, Joe Arnold from Cloud Scaling, and Bret Piatt from Rackspace providing  insight and guiding discussions.

Time Speaker(s) Topic
8:00 – 8:45 Bret Piatt (OpenStack) Deploying OpenStack: Background
8:45 – 9:30 Martin Casado (Nicira Networks) Deploying OpenStack: Networking Considerations and Future Directions
9:30 – 10:00 BREAK
10:00 – 10:45 Bret Piatt (OpenStack) Deploying OpenStack: Compute
10:45 – 11:30 Joe Arnold (Cloudscaling) Deploying OpenStack: Object Storage

DAY 2 AFTERNOON: Extending OpenStack Community & Getting to Work

Extending OpenStack Community & Getting to Work: Presentations from Cloudscaling and Cloudkick provide a view on how service providers and user groups can work with the OpenStack community to benefit all involved. The business track concludes with a call to action from Jim Curry with key take-aways from  these two days of sessions along with a short “next action” list of activities for attendees to start getting things done. Finally, let’s discuss the current OpenStack governance policy so that community members have an opportunity to mold the existing plan. At the end of day two, we’ll send you off to the unleash OpenStack community energy and build open standard clouds.

Time Speaker(s) Topic
1:30 – 2:15 Andrew Shafer (Cloudscaling) OpenStack and Service Providers
2:15 – 3:00 Alex Polvi (Cloudkick) OpenStack User Groups
3:00 – 3:30 BREAK
3:30 – 4:00 Jim Curry (OpenStack) Call to Action: ENGAGE
4:00 – 4:30 Mark Collier (OpenStack) OpenStack Governance Discussion

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (October 23 – 29)

 

October 29, 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].

Stackup at UDS 2010

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (10/22 – 10/28)

  • MONTHLY Data for all of October will be released next week with week by week data for tracking purposes
  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack  151 tweets ; 149 re-tweets ; all OpenStack 2,460 total tweets
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 66 Tracked Bugs;  37 New Bugs; 1 In-process Bugs;    1 Critical Bugs;  8 High Importance Bugs;  5 Bugs (Fix Completed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week:  75 Blueprints; 1 Essential,  2 High,  16 Medium,   5 Low, 51 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  17,794 Visits, 42,187 Pageviews, 70.56% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages : Home 41.10% ; /projects 11.46% ; /projects/compute 18.18% ; /projects/storage 13.03%; /community 5.93%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS


2010 Architecture Board Elections

 

Starting on Monday, November 1, OpenStack willl be holding the community elections for the OpenStack Architecture Board. We have posted a list of twelve nominees on the wiki. You can visit the wiki page to see the list and read a little about each of the candidates:

http://wiki.openstack.org/2010ArchitectureBoardElections

The voting is open to everyone who has signed the Contributor License Agreement and is a member of one of the OpenStack Launchpad projects. We will be making use of Condorcet Voting Service (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html) for the election. Those who have signed the Contributor License Agreement and are a member of one of the OpenStack Launchpad projects will be receiving an email on Monday with a link to the online voting system. We will leave the polling open for 48 hours and then announce the results.

As explained on the Governance page of the wiki, there are four seats up for election. After we close the polling, the four candidates who received the most votes will begin serving either a one or two-year term.

Thank you to all the candidates for volunteering for this effort! If any of you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

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Content Stacks

 

October 28, 2010

Yep, content does stack, and I wanted to describe some of the content stacks we have going now. It’s like pimp my ride, where’s the noun and where’s the verb?

Stacking Up

The OpenStack community has embraced technical content and the surrounding community is hungry for more. We’ve had great contributions from community members. A couple of highlights to me are the enthusiasm and friendly lines of questioning by David Pravec (alekibango on IRC), plus his outlines in Etherpad have been excellent starters for Nova manuals. He also feels passionately that we are creating manuals, not guides, providing exact information rather than just guidance. We also had Stephen Milton (grizzletooth on IRC) step up and take the Swift All In One page and test it on multiple servers, providing a brand new multi-server installation and deployment page that we’re still drafting. A student in Florida, Eric Dorman (Orman on IRC), who is studying security in the clouds, is writing security documentation for OpenStack. This turnout encourages me so much, thanks all.

We’ve got a Documentation page that stores the collection of pages we’ve started and outlines the plans for what pages need to be written. I really liked this blog post, Two months writing docs for Open Atrium and Managing News – lessons learned! and borrowed the outline ideas from there. It confirmed my thinking that there are a lot of expectations for technical documentation for completeness, and this outline, once it’s filled in, would bring a sense of “completeness” to the OpenStack documentation.

The nova.openstack.org and swift.openstack.org sites should be freshly outfitted with Google Analytics by the end of this week. We should have Google Analytics integrated in the wiki soon as well. This integration will give us ideas about which pages are often viewed, what searches bring people to the site, and the paths they take once they’re on the wiki for example.

One work area that has surprised me a bit is the use of Etherpad to write drafts and collaborate with a small group before putting the information on the wiki or in RST. We’ve coded Etherpad pages in RST so it’s a simple copy/paste to get the RST in the Sphinx build. I understand the feeling that writing drafts on the wiki feels like working on the document on the operating table with its guts hanging out. So having a more private collaborative area like Etherpad seems to bridge the gap between wiki page drafts and early, early drafts.

Doc Sprint

I’m shaping the agenda for the upcoming Doc Sprint the last two days of the OpenStack Design Summit. All times are Central Standard (GMT -6). Here’s how it’s looking:

Thursday Nov. 11

9:00-10:00 Attend Install Fest and install environment, update install
instructions
10:00-10:30 Training in either wiki or RST as needed, plan writing
assignments
11:00-12:00 Write
12:00-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:00 Community Manager Stephen Spector to talk about documentation
recognition
2:00-4:00 Write
4:00 End of day check-in (IRC and/or con call)
6:00 Don’t forget the party is Thursday night, all doc contributors are
welcome! Buses will depart the Weston Centre lobby at 6:00.

Friday Nov. 12

9:00-12:00 Write
12:00 Mid-day check-in (IRC and/or con call)
12:00-1:30 Lunch
1:30-4:00 Write

The check-in at the end of the day enables us to connect with remote contributors, switch writing assignments, ask questions and so on. If you’re planning to participate remotely, please let me know so I can accommodate your needs. We’ll be on the #openstack IRC channel all day, and we can use a conference call or Skype if you’d like to listen in on Spector’s talk.

Official Content Stack

One of the goals for this quarter is to find a way to distinguish “official” documentation from “ongoing, in testing” documentation. Whether it’s a badge on a page or a whole new URL such as docs.openstack.org, I’d love your thoughts on how to indicate when a doc is tested, vetted, and official. I have ideas and examples but the community opinion matters and has weight in the decision, so please offer your ideas. You can email me at anne at openstack dot org, find me on IRC as annegentle, or find me on Twitter @annegentle.

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Announcing The OpenStack 2010.1 “Austin” Release

 

October 25, 2010

By now, most of you have heard that yesterday we released the inaugural version of the OpenStack Cloud Computing Platform. The OpenStack project is comprised of two major subprojects, OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage.

Where is it?

OpenStack Compute:
Nova Cloud Computing Fabric
Glance Image Registry and Delivery Service

OpenStack Object Storage:
Swift

What’s new?

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

Multi-hypervisor support: Compute now supports KVM, QEMU, User-Mode Linux and Xen, are supported through libvirt and XenServer is supported by a nifty abstraction and plug-in contributed by Citrix.

API changes: In addition to the EC2, Compute has added a native OpenStack API that is based on the Rackspace Cloud Servers API. We are excited to have an API that we can extend. We also added support for EC2 Security Groups.

Image registry and delivery service: We have added the Glance project, which is an image registration and discovery service (Parallax) and an image delivery service (Teller). These services are used in conjunction by Open Stack Compute to deliver images from object stores, such as OpenStack’s Object Storage service, to Nova’s compute nodes. Glance can be used to serve images for Compute, but is not enabled by default in this release.

Networking Model: OpenStack Compute now supports two network models on compute nodes; VLANs with DHCP, and flat with either static IP pools or DHCP.

Scheduler: We added a base scheduling service to Openstack Compute that we will extend in future releases.

WSGI: In an effort to reduce the number of dependencies in OpenStack Compute and create a standard API layer with reusable components, we’ve decided to use WSGI. As a part of this we ported our current EC2 API code from Tornado to WSGI.

Rename server support: We added support for rackspace style user-friendly names, and renaming if running instances compute.

Code refactoring: OpenStack Compute completely refactored the ORM. The result is a much simpler code that is easier to understand. We also refactored the networking code for simplicity.

SQL support: A big part of the ORM refactor was the addition of support for SQLAlchemy Database toolkit. This will allow people to make use of existing SQL infrastructure when deploying OpenStack Compute. The refactor also removed support for redis. This should not be seen as a judgement about redis. We will visit re-adding support for nosql data stores during the next two release cycles.

OpenStack Object Storage (Swift)

Stats system: OpenStack Object Storage add a stats system that processes the logs generated by the system to produce per-account hourly summaries of system usage.

ACL’s and public containers: Object Storage added the ability for users to set ACL’s and grant public access to containers.

Metadata access: Object Storage now supports API access to account and container metadata.

Rate limiting: Rate limiting was extending from just supporting errors returned, to allowing requests to be slowed down and supporting stair stepped rate limits based on container size.

WSGI refactor: WSGI support was improved and pulled into middleware.

Shared improvements

Documentation: We started the release with almost no documentation and our wonderful technical writer, Anne, managed to create documentation from a constantly moving code base. Please visit the [wiki.openstack.org] and have a look.

I want to offer a special thanks to everyone who helped us reach this exciting stage in the future of OpenStack. Whether you wrote code, tested, wrote docs, tweeted, designed t-shirts, defended us in blog posts, or just attend IRC meetings and gave us your opinion, all of you were instrumental in getting this release out the door. I hope to work with all of you for many more.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

Rick Clark Chief Architect, OpenStack

OpenStack “Austin” Release is Out

 

October 22, 2010

We made it — at least to the starting gate!  We’re pleased to announce the ‘Austin’ code release of OpenStack Compute and Object Storage.  This first release is a result of the hard work of the development community and the active support of more than 35 corporate partners over the last three months.  While Object Storage is ready for production, this first release of Compute is intended primarily for testing and limited deployment.

We know many of you are eager to try the OpenStack release.  You can download it at http://www.openstack.org/projects/compute/ and OpenStack Object Storage at http://www.openstack.org/projects/storage/. You can find living and breathing documentation on the wiki at http://wiki.openstack.org/Documentation. You can get support through the new mailing lists at http://wiki.openstack.org/MailingLists and the #openstack channel on IRC. We’re ready to assist adopters and contributors both, so please join us.

The OpenStack community will determine the roadmap for the next two releases, starting with the ‘Bexar’ release scheduled for January, at the next public Design Summit, November 9-12, in San Antonio, Texas. We encourage you to register today:  http://www.openstack.org/register.

As part of the growth and transformation of OpenStack.org, we’re working on improvements to enhance community participation, technology education, and developer participation. I encourage you to visit our updated web site at http://OpenStack.org. Plus, our community wiki is thriving at http://wiki.openstack.org. Your participation and feedback to the OpenStack community are essential components in our success.

Thanks for your support, commitment and hard work!  If you have suggestions for improvement, ping me or the team.  We want to know what you think and how we can improve at all times.

Keep stacking!

Jim Curry
Chief Stacker

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OpenStack Weekly Newsletter (Oct 16 – 22)

 

OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 22, 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].

Mark Collier at OpenStack Central

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS (10/15 – 10/21)

  • Twitter Stats for Week:  #openstack 64 tweets ; 95 re-tweets
  • Bugs Stats for Week: 164 Tracked Bugs; 36 New Bugs; 6 In-process Bugs;   3 Critical Bugs;  22 High Importance Bugs;   83 Bugs (Fix Completed)
  • Blueprints Stats for Week: 73 Blueprints; 10 Essential, 2 High, 16 Medium, 5 Low, 40 Undefined
  • OpenStack Website Stats for Week:  7,665 Visits, 17,345 Pageviews, 64.98% New Visits
    • Top 5 Pages :  Home 44.74% ; /projects 10.35% ; /projects/compute 14.91% ; /projects/storage 10.05%; /community 8.35%

OPENSTACK IN THE NEWS

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OpenStack Design Summit Business Track Coming into Focus

 

October 18, 2010

Registration for the Nov 9 – 12, 2010 continues to move along nicely as more and more  technologists, business leaders, and developers from companies such as Accenture, Bechtel, BMC Software, Canonical, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, Cisco Systems, Citrix, Disney, Korea Telecom, NASA, NTT, PWC, Rackspace, and Samsung to name just a few are already registered. I strongly encourage you to consider attending this event and register soon as we do have a 300 attendee quota based on facility maximums. Registration is at http://openstack.org/register.

The Business Track is taking shape nicely and I want to provide an early preview to further peak your interest in this event.

DAY ONE
– General Session: Hear from Jim Curry, Chief Stacker of OpenStack and Rick Clark, Chief Architect
of OpenStack on the status of OpenStack and its associated technologies. NASA and Accenture are also
scheduled to present during the General Session.

– Afternoon Session: Hear from David Lemphers of PWC on the business of deploying cloud solutions as
well as guest speakers from other leading cloud vendors enagaging with OpenStack. The OpenStack marketing team will also present the latest on the Trademark Policy and discuss the OpenStack brand and how the community can work together to gain further momentum for the brand.

DAY TWO
– Morning Session: Planning and OpenStack deployment is the focus of the morning sessions. Various
speakers and discussion groups are being assembled to fulfil the agenda and ensure attendees are
educated properly in the requirments of deploying the various OpenStack technologies.

– Afternoon Session: Integrating OpenStack with existing IT solutions is the focus of the afternoon
sessions. It is critical that the OpenStack solution play in not only the open source sandbox but
also Enterprise solutions for maximum customer flexibility and enablement. Again, this track is
being planned at this time.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • Jim Curry, Chief Stacker OpenStack
  • Rick Clark, Chief Architect OpenStack
  • Soo Choi, Anso Labs
  • Joe Tobolski, Infrastructure Lab Lead, Director of Development, Accenture Technology Labs
  • David Lemphers, Director Cloud Computing, PricewaterhouseCoopers

If you are interested in speaking at this Design Summit or have something unique to offer the community around the proposed Business Track plan please contact [email protected]. The community is always interested in hearing from as many members as possible.

See everyone in a few weeks in San Antonio.openstack.org

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