OpenStack has been selected to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. Thanks to the hard work of many contributors we could join GSoC for the first time. For those who haven’ t heard about it, GSoC is a full-time internship supported by Google that offers students worldwide a stipend to start contributing with coding tasks to an open source organization. This is a great experience for both parts, as it generates a flow of new people with fresh ideas in the organization and allows students to learn and taste how is to work on a real world software development environment. Read more.
DevOps:
Apigee: API Security: the DevOps and CSO Perspectives (webcast & podcast)
APIs accelerate agility, empower developers, and enable innovative business strategies. But how do you ensure the security of your API architecture as you expose your corporate data to mobile apps, developers, and partners? Does your API security framework enable DevOps agility and a scalable security model for IT? Read more.
Apigee: Big Data Predictive Analytics in Action: Healthcare/Medicare
For healthcare payers, the Affordable Care Act can be a double-edged sword. The law, which was enacted to improve health care affordability and quality, enforces more stringent reporting rules that require payers (insurers) to monitor quality of care, performance metrics, and member satisfaction. But high performance and quality can earn healthcare payers a coveted five-star rating on their Medicare Advantage products. Not surprisingly, there’ s a big incentive to improve this rating, and maintain a high one. Predictive analytics can play a very important role in this. Read more.
Chef: DevOps for developers w/Chef. Part II – DevOps in a nutshell
DevOps is a modern way of developing software by aligning the goals, processes and tools of development and operations with one another., see “ DevOps for Developers” , 2012. Core facets of DevOps include measurement, metrics and monitoring, improving the flow of features in a holistic approach as well as improving and accelerating delivery, e.g. with automation to gain fast feedback. Automation is important! But simplify your process first prior to automation. This helps to reduce variations in the process. Variations impede successful automation. Read more.
Puppet Labs: Scaling Puppet workflows at Spotify
Erik Dalen talks about Scaling Puppet workflows at Spotify at Puppet Camp Amsterdam 2014. Watch the video.
Puppet Labs: Writing better Puppet code with Gerrit and Jenkins
Maxim Burgerhout talks about " Writing better Puppet code with Gerrit and Jenkins" at Puppet Camp Amsterdam 2014. Watch the video.
Vagrant: Feature Preview: Vagrant Share
A primary goal of Vagrant is not only to provide easy-to-use development environments, but also to make it easy to share and collaborate on these environments. With Vagrant 1.5, we're introducing a feature that will allow you to share your running Vagrant environment with anyone, on any network connected to the internet. Read more.
OpenStack:
CERN: Our Cloud in Havana
At CERN, we started our production cloud service on Grizzly in July 2013. The previous OpenStack clouds had been pre-production environments with a fixed lifetime (i.e. they were available for use with an end date to be announced where the users would move to the new version via re-creating instances with tools such as Puppet or snapshot/upload instances). With the Grizzly release, we made the service available with an agreement to upgrade in place rather than build anew. This blog details our experiences. Read more.
Dell: OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014: Please vote for our presentations!
OpenStack community members are invited to vote on presentations to be presented at the OpenStack Summit, May 12-16, in Atlanta. Please vote for Dell's submissions. Read more.
eNovance: Next OpenStack Release? It’s now time to vote for talks
Next spring again, the community is going to design our future OpenStack release. Together, developers, users and companies are building and sharing thoughts about ‘How OpenStack is going to be most scalable – the most efficient – the most Open Source Cloud that ever existed?’ eNovance is proud to be part of this community project and to be an active contributor to the code. Read more.
eNovance: Use the new asyncio module and Trollius in OpenStack
Asynchronous programming is hard. In the past, the Nova project used Tornado, then Twisted and it is now using eventlet which also became the defacto standard in OpenStack. Eventlet is not perfect, we will explain why we consider that eventlet has major flaws. We will then introduce the asyncio module of Python 3.4, how we plan to use it in OpenStack, to finish with the current status of this integration. Read more.
eNovance: Status of the OpenStack port to Python 3
Python 3 has been around for about 5 years, and we have excellent reasons to make sure OpenStack runs well on it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In this article, we’ll see what works, what doesn’t, and what you can do to help. Note that we are targetting the latest released version, Python 3.3. Read more.
Inktank: Multisite Storage with Inktank Ceph Enterprise
Support for multi-site operations is one of the most sought after Ceph features. If you’re an enterprise, you may want to store your data in multiple locations to ensure business continuity in the case of a regional outage. If you’re a service provider deploying a public object storage service, multiple sites can help provide the lowest possible latency to your users. We recommend a few different approaches for multi-site operation with Inktank Ceph Enterprise, each with their own characteristics and applicable use cases. This document discusses these options and explains the use cases they serve best. Read more.
Jamie Lennox: Client Session Objects
Keystoneclient has recently introduced a Session object. The concept was discussed and generally accepted at the Hong Kong Summit that keystoneclient as the root of authentication (and arguably security) should be responsible for transport (HTTP) and authentication across all the clients. The majority of the functionality in this post is written and up for review but has not yet been committed. I write this in an attempt to show the direction of clients as there is currently a lot of talk around projects such as the OpenStack-SDK. Read more.
Mirantis: Awesome Proposals for the Spring OpenStack Summit
Mirantis (and our friends at Cloudscaling) has submitted a variety of great session abstracts, from my discussion on updating the OpenStack Mission Statement to disrupt large player competitive barriers and keep the stack open for innovation to Randy Bias’ walkthrough of hybrid cloud landmines to avoid when architecting applications. Below, we’ve summarized each talk and provided a link to its page on the voting site. You get to shape the OpenStack Summit agenda by voting up the sessions that you’d like to see. Read more.
Mirantis: Mirantis Spring OpenStack Summit Proposals, Part 2
On Friday we brought you part 1, a selection of proposals Mirantis is putting forward for the Spring OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, along with a complete list of titles. Today we wanted to share more details on some of those additional titles. Read more.
Mirantis: Building test environments with OpenStack
According to last October’s OpenStack user survey, QA test environments are one of the top ten workloads running on OpenStack clouds. In this post, I’ll describe how staging environments are built, and explore ways that OpenStack can make this process easier and more efficient. Read more.
Mirantis: Trusted Cloud computing with Intel TXT: The challenge
In today’s connected environments, attacks on compute infrastructure are ubiquitous. Major players have been compromised by hackers and malware, with damages inflicted both to their reputation and their business. Protecting the infrastructure from external and internal threats is an important part of operating production grade cloud environments. Read more.
Opensource.com: Crowdsourcing the OpenStack Summit agenda
The OpenStack Foundation recently launched their voting tool for rating presentation proposals for the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, May 12-16. While the chairs for each track make the final decisions about which presentation topics make the cut, voting is a great way for the community to get involved and participate in the agenda-setting process. Listing all the talks would be difficult, but in keeping with the theme of our Beginners in Open Source Week, here are a few that might appeal to beginners. Read more.
Piston: Piston OpenStack 3.0: One Step Closer to Every Server in the World
From day one, my co-founders and I set out to deliver the world an enterprise-grade OpenStack software that was secure, free of vendor lock-in, and easy to use. And with this week’s launch of Piston OpenStack 3.0, we continue to make good on that promise. Read more.
Rackspace: Inside My Home Rackspace Private Cloud, OpenStack Lab, Part 3: Installing A High Availability Rackspace Private Cloud With Chef Cookbooks
In the first two posts I covered the basics: what hardware is involved and the basic network services that form the basis of my Rackspace Private Cloud install. In this post, I set up Rackspace Private Cloud to give an OpenStack environment consisting of highly available Controllers running as a pair with services such as the OpenStack APIs, Neutron, Glance and Keystone and three compute servers allowing me flexibility to do some testing. Read more.
Rackspace: Software Defined Networks in the Havana Release of OpenStack
Software Defined Networks (SDN) are a key technology in enabling users of cloud environments to build a wide variety of virtual environments. The OpenStack network project, Neutron, has been growing at a rapid pace to the point that the OpenStack user can build virtual machines (VM) into various flexible network implementations. This can present a challenge to OpenStack administrators who may not have a clear understanding of the technologies that OpenStack uses to create these virtual networks. This is the first in a series of articles that will look closely how OpenStack Neutron implements these virtual networks. Through the course of these articles we will look in detail how virtual networks are created in Neutron, how data in different networks in kept separate and security features built into the security group functionality. Read more.
Rackspace: Software Defined Networks in the Havana Release of Openstack – Part 2
In the first article in this series we looked at a simple OpenStack setup with one controller node, one compute node and one network node. Two tenants had been created with two simple networks. In this article we will turn our attention to the network paths for each of the three VMs that were created. The diagrams in the first article will be useful in understanding this discussion. Read more.
Rackspace: Advancing The Open Cloud Movement
OpenStack continues to grow and reach impressive milestones, confirming that our commitment to an open standards-based cloud was the right technological and philosophical choice for Rackspace and our customers. This week, we’re expanding upon that openness by joining a new open project – Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry Foundation. The goal of Cloud Foundry is to create portability across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technologies, including OpenStack, AWS and Vmware. Read more.
Rackspace: Taking OpenStack For A Spin: Using The Rackspace Private Cloud Sandbox
Late last year, we released Rackspace Private Cloud (RPC) 4.2.1, which is based on the Havana release of the OpenStack cloud platform. Along with this RPC release, Rackspace also made available version 1.0 of the Rackspace Private Cloud Sandbox, a virtual appliance that runs an all-in-one single node RPC VM that allows anyone to quickly spin up a small OpenStack environment for test and demonstration purposes. This virtual appliance is distributed as an OVA package and can be imported and used in Oracle VM VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, VMware Player or VMware Workstation. The Sandbox was a direct result of your feedback. You said you wanted to be able to experiment with RPC or to demonstrate the OpenStack Horizon dashboard to colleagues or managers; however, you did not want to have to spend time installing a Chef server and running through a full RPC install for these tasks. So in response, the RPC Product team created the RPC Sandbox so you can get a small OpenStack-based cloud environment up and running in minutes on your laptop or workstation. Read more.
Red Hat: OpenStack Summit Session Voting Closes Soon – Your Vote Counts!
With the voting polls open for the past week, the OpenStack Foundation is collecting votes for all sessions at this Spring’s OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. Red Hat is doing its part to contribute as many innovative and useful session to the agenda. With a variety of sessions submitted, from low-level discussions on network routing and storage, all the way through real-world success stories that share experiences and lessons learned with deploying an OpenStack cloud, we’ve got a great lineup to offer you. Read more.
SUSE: SUSE Cloud 3 Now Available, Based on OpenStack Havana Release
SUSE today announced the general availability of SUSE Cloud 3, the next version of the original enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. SUSE Cloud 3 provides customers with greater flexibility to cost effectively deploy private clouds with existing virtualized data centers by delivering full support for VMware vSphere® through integration with VMware vCenter Server™. Read more.
SwiftStack: Great Swift Sessions to Vote-up for OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014
The polls are now open for you and your friends to exercise the power of the vote. The Icehouse release in May ’14 will be the biggest ever in terms of new capabilities for OpenStack Object Storage. So it is only fitting that a such large number of sessions are in the running for inclusion in the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta this May. Sessions are proportional to the popularity and buzz of OpenStack Swift. Read more.
TelekomCloud DevOps team: Ceph Performance Analysis: fio and RBD
With this blog post we want to share insights into how the Platform Engineering team for the Business Marketplace at Deutsche Telekom AG analyzed a Ceph performance issue. Ceph is used for both block storage and object stroage in our cloud production platform.
XLCloud: How we plan to manage autoscaling using the new notification alarming service of Ceilometer
In this post, I'd like to describe how we plan to use the new alarming capabilities offered in Heat and Ceilometer to be notified of stack state changes resulting from an autoscaling operation. Indeed, with Icehouse, it will be possible to specify an new type of alarm whereby you can associate a user-land defined webhook with an autoscaling notification. Read more.
Hadoop:
Cloudera: Apache Hadoop 2.3.0 is Released (HDFS Caching FTW!)
Hadoop 2.3.0 includes hundreds of new fixes and features, but none more important than HDFS caching. The Apache Hadoop community has voted to release Hadoop 2.3.0, which includes (among many other things) iIn-memory caching for HDFS, including centralized administration and management, groundwork for future support of heterogeneous storage in HDFS and simplified distribution of MapReduce binaries via the YARN Distributed Cache. Read more.