The OpenStack Stable Maintenance team is happy to announce the release of the 2013.2.2 stable Havana release. A total of 98 bugs have been fixed across all projects. These updates to Havana are intended to be low risk with no intentional regressions or API changes. Read more.
DevOps:
Ansible: Ansible Vault allows keeping encrypted data in Playbooks
Ansible 1.5, which will release in a few weeks, adds a new command-line tool “ansible-vault”, and a new /usr/bin/ansible and /usr/bin/ansible-playbook option, “--ask-vault-pass”. The idea here is pretty simple — there is often a need to keep in configuration files, for use in playbooks and templates, certain data that you don’t want to expose in source control. To give credit where credit is due, this feature isn’t *exactly* a new idea. Chef has a feature called “encrypted data bags”, for instance, though “vault” adds Ansible’s own flavor to it. Read more.
Chef: DevOps for developers w/Chef (Guest Blog Series)
In these blog posts I’d like to briefly introduce DevOps. I’ll detail the importance of good tools and how DevOps can close the gap between development and operations. I’ll explain critical aspects of DevOps as well as common misunderstandings. Finally, I’ll illustrate a lightweight tool stack including Chef. After reading this series, I hope you’ll better understand DevOps and the central role Chef can play in DevOps initiatives. Read more.
Chef: Chef Version Updates
Recently, Chef became aware of a security vulnerability in the version of libyaml we were using. We were nearing release for several of our products, and took the opportunity to do a sweep of some others. The following releases are all live at this time, and while we are unaware of any scenarios by which your Chef environments may become compromised by the issues that these releases address, we urge you to upgrade to the appropriate versions at your earliest opportunity. Read more.
Rackspace: Understanding the Chef Environment File in Rackspace Private Cloud v4.2.x Powered by OpenStack Havana
In a previous post I went through two typical Chef Environment files specific to Rackspace Private Cloud v4.1.x powered by OpenStack Grizzly with nova-network and Quantum Networking. However, with Rackspace Private Cloud v4.2.x powered by OpenStack Havana some things have changed, in particular Quantum has been renamed to Neutron. In the following post, I am going to break down each part of the Chef Environment file, including the Highly Available pieces, specific to Rackspace Private Cloud 4.2.x powered by OpenStack Havana. Read more.
OpenStack:
Opensource.com: How to contribute to OpenStack
Like any open source community, OpenStack has its local quirks when it comes to getting involved in the project. This is further complicated, in the case of OpenStack, by the fact that it's actually a collection of numerous smaller projects which are linked together via shared APIs, but which have independent objectives and developer communities. This article isn't comprehensive, by any means, but it's an attempt to show you some of the places where you can plug into the community. It's especially important to note that you don't have to be a programmer to be a valuable contributor to OpenStack. Read more.
Join-fu: Setting Up an External OpenStack Testing System – Part 1
This post is intended to walk somone through the process of establishing an external testing platform that is linked with the upstream OpenStack continuous integration platform. If you haven’t already, please do read the first article in this series that discusses the upstream OpenStack CI platform in detail. At the end of the article, you should have all the background information on the tools needed to establish your own linked external testing platform. Read more.
Sébastien Han: Ceph IO Patterns: The Bad
The second part of Ceph patterns analysis – this time about the bad ones. Read more.
Kevin Jackson: Home Rackspace Private Cloud / OpenStack Lab: Part 4
After following the first three posts, we now have a Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack running with 2 Controllers (HA) and 3 Computes. So now what? Read more.
Mirantis: OpenStack will Open Source Vendor Certifications
Here’s what many don’t understand about OpenStack: it’s not just open source cloud software, it’s a movement to commoditize infrastructure. When first launched, it disrupted the cloud software market, forcing established players like Eucalyptus, CloudStack and even VMware to reconsider their market direction. As the OpenStack community evolved, it started to commoditize poorly differentiated technologies around it – such as billing and metering systems, proprietary installers and third party platform tools. Every day more and more infrastructure companies have to answer the much-dreaded question of “how are you really different from OpenStack?” Read more.
Rackspace: The Project, The Rackspace Product And The Rackspace Service
I am frequently asked by analysts, users, the media and even other vendors about the production readiness of OpenStack, to which I affirm in the positive. There are also often questions about the differences between the various OpenStack distributions and offerings. I answer whenever possible by drawing the distinction between OpenStack as the open source project and as the products and services available to help make it a production-ready cloud platform. If you are unclear about the difference between an open source project and a product, I hope this blog post serves as a useful primer. Read more.
Red Hat: Why combine Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack? Technology Optimization Benefits
OpenStack delivers a highly scalable cloud environment for a variety of applications. But, cloud workloads present new challenges for underlying operating system platforms. The nature of the cloud is to be agile, not static. Virtual machines are quickly created and destroyed in large numbers. Storage and networking need to be flexible and highly performant. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has evolved to match the pace and unique characteristics of cloud deployments and is optimized for OpenStack in several ways. Read more.
Opensource.com: Storage policies: Coming to an OpenStack Swift cluster near you
OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) has a fairly frequent release schedule for improvements and new capabilities but naturally, there is always significant gravity around integrated releases for any OpenStack project. Even though the Havana release was very big for OpenStack Swift, with new support for global clusters, the upcoming Icehouse will be the biggest release yet for the OpenStack Swift project. The standout new capability though is storage policies, a new way of configuring OpenStack Object Storage clusters so that deployers can very specifically match their available storage with their use case. Read more.
Cloud Architect Musings: Voting Now Open For OpenStack Summit Talks: The Year Of CloudOps And Community
The general availability of Icehouse, the ninth release of the OpenStack Cloud platform, is only a few months away. Shortly after that will be the convening of the biannual OpenStack Summit in May, which will be held in Atlanta, GA. As usual, there are some great talks being proposed for the upcoming Summit and I would encourage everyone to vote for the talks that they believe should be presented. Voting will be open until Sunday, March 2nd, at 22:00 UTC. Read more.
The OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Paul Michali
An interview with Paul Michali, a Technical Lead on the OpenStack team at Cisco. Read more.
Victoria Martínez de la Cruz: Make OpenStack speak your language, join OpenStack’s i18n community!
Looking for a way to contribute to OpenStack? Coding is just one of the available options. In fact, there are several non-coding activities like design, documentation, marketing and internationalization. In the last couple of months I didn’t have enough time to get immersed in bug fixing, but I didn’t want to lose contact with all the great people I met during my internship, so I kept working on simpler bug tasks and I started contributing to the internationalization (i18n) team. Read more.
Hadoop:
Cloudera: How-to: Make Hadoop Accessible via LDAP
Hue, the open source Web UI that makes Apache Hadoop easier to use, easily integrates with your corporation’s existing identity management systems and provides authentication mechanisms for SSO providers. So, by changing a few configuration parameters, your employees can start analyzing Big Data in their own browsers under an existing security policy. In this blog post, you’ll learn details about the various features and capabilities available in Hue for integrating with likely the most popular authentication mechanism, LDAP. Read more.