Yesterday we entered the Icehouse development cycle Feature Freeze. But with the incredible growth of the OpenStack development community (508 different contributors over the last 30 days, including 101 new ones !), I hear a lot of questions about it. I’ve explained it on various forums in the past, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to write something a bit more definitive about it. Read more.
DevOps:
Chef: Important Hosted Chef Security Notice On Wednesday morning we became aware of a misconfiguration of an exception handler for the Hosted Chef Management Console that caused username and password information for a small subset of our users to be leaked via email internally at Chef. We have fixed the issue that was at the source of the exposure, and we have contacted each of the accounts that have been exposed to this issue privately. We nevertheless recommend that all users change their Hosted Chef password. Read more.
Chef: Target Spreads DevOps Love with an Internal DevOpsDays
had the pleasure of being invited to participate in Target’s internal DevOpsDays this past Friday. The team at Target wanted to replicate the wildly successful, community led series of DevOpsDays that are held through out the world. They also wanted to lay a baseline of what DevOps means inside Target, and highlight successes in that they have had in the organization. Read more.
Chef: Chef Metal 0.2 Release
Introducing Chef Metal 0.2! Chef Metal is a framework that lets you manage your clusters with Chef the same way you manage machines: with recipes. Combined with the power of Chef, Metal’s machine resource helps you to describe, version, deploy and manage everything from simple to complex clusters with a common set of tools. Read more.
Rackspace: DevOps Automation Series: Images vs. Config Management
A question that often comes up is "why should I use config management when I can just use images?" In this article, we’ll explore the differences between images and configuration management, and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each. Read more.
The Ansible Blog: Ansible 1.5 Released
Today we're releasing Ansible 1.5, which contains the work of 192 different contributors (and countless others who have helped with ideas and testing)! Thanks very much for all of you! While a major focus of 1.5 has been about giving attention to incoming tickets (and wow, being one of the top 5 projects on GitHub for number of contributors keeps us busy!), 1.5 features many new and excellent upgrades including Vault – a method of encrypting data in playbooks, and SSH pipelining, a fantastic speedup to the OpenSSH transport that all but eliminates the need for "accelerated mode". Read more.
OpenStack:
Anne Gentle: Finding an OpenStack Mentor
Last week I ran an internal “So You Want to be an OpenStack Contributor?” workshop showing the different ways to work on OpenStack. Here’s the slide show so you can see the way I approached it. As the Documentation Program Technical Lead you’d think I’d steer people straight to the documentation bug backlog, but I try to find out where interests lie before going straight to doc fixes. Definitely people should read the docs as a great start. Read more.
Doug Hellman: The Intersection of the OpenStack and Python Communities
I have been an open source developer since the early 1990s and a Python developer since the late 1990s. I became an OpenStack contributor a couple of years ago, right before the Folsom summit. One of the first areas where I started contributing was the Oslo team, in part because of my interest in how OpenStack contributors and other Python community members cross-over and interact. I’m interested in how OpenStack fits into the rest of the Python ecosystem. Last autumn, some of the statistics associated with the Havana release started me thinking even more deeply about this topic. Three of those numbers, in particular, caught my eye. Read more.
eNovance: How to use eDeploy roles with Vagrant
At eNovance, eDeploy is our in-house solution for maintaining and deploying production systems. It comes with some interesting features like the ability to do a hardware inventory just before deploying the system. This way we can detect an unexpected configuration or associate a specific configuration to a given role, for example, “storage” role for a 4TiB machine. Since the architecture can get complex and include a lot of different nodes, it’s sometime a bit complex to reproduce a given architecture. This article explains how to bootstrap some OpenStack nodes using Vagrant and libvirt. Read more.
Mark Shuttleworth: Ubuntu is the #1 platform for production OpenStack deployments
OpenStack has emerged as the consensus forum for open source private cloud software. That of course makes it a big and complex community, with complex governance and arguably even more complex politics, but it has survived several rounds of competition and is now settling down as THE place to get diverse vendors to work together on a IAAS that anybody can deploy for themselves. It is a big enough forum with sufficient independent leadership that no one vendor will ever control it (despite some fantastically impressive efforts to do so!). In short, OpenStack is what you want if you are trying to figure out how to build yourself a cloud. And by quite a large majority, most of the people who have actually chosen to deploy OpenStack in production, have done so on Ubuntu. Read more.
Mirantis: Introducing MagnetoDB, a key-value storage sevice for OpenStack
NoSQL solutions such as MagnetoDB work well in projects where you need to process a huge amount of requests and data. One well-known example is Amazon DynamoDB, which Amazon Web Services provides as a service. One important feature of DynamoDB is its easy to integrate HTTP-based API. MagnetoDB is an implementation of that API, but it is being developed as a community-driven opensource project with integration into OpenStack in mind. That means that the main distinction of MagnetoDB in comparison with other NoSQL solutions is that MagnotoDB is designed as a platform service of OpenStack itself, and is tightly integrated with other OpenStack services such as authorization, quota management, auto-scaling and monitoring. Read more.
Opensource.com: Poll: The potential for OpenStack in the enterprise
Big things are in store for OpenStack this year. The community is growing, now at almost 14,000 people from more than 130 countries. The next version, Icehouse, is scheduled to be released on April 17, followed by the next OpenStack Summit in May. But what will this lead to? Read more.
Rackspace: Inside My Home Rackspace Private Cloud, OpenStack Lab, Part 4: Neutron
So after following the first three posts, we now have a Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack running with two Controllers (HA) and three Computes. So now what? Well the first thing we need to do is get our hands dirty with the OpenStack Networking component, Neutron, and create a network that our instances can be spun up on. For the home lab, I have dumb unmanaged switches – and I take advantage of that by creating a Flat Network that allows my instances access out through my home LAN on the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. Read more.
Red Hat: Is OpenStack for You?
As product manager and OpenStack evangelist you may think that the standard response to the question “Is OpenStack for You” is unequivocally “Yes!”. Well, that’s not necessarily the case here. To help bring clarity to the question, we’ve developed a webinar that tackles the “when (and when not) to” use OpenStack. Read more.
Sean Dague: Why you should be reviewing more OpenStack Code
Icehouse 3 is upon us, and as someone that is on a bunch of core review teams, it means a steady drum beat of everyone asking how do they get core reviewers to review their code. My standard response has been “make sure you are also reviewing code”. Read more.
Sebastien Han: Don't Burn Down Your OpenStack Cloud
Managing an OpenStack public cloud can be tough and building it properly is even harder. You can not predict the workload of your platform, customers do what they want (yes they pay for this!). So yes, cloud performance are often unpredictable! Recent studies showed that while running a long-standing benchmark on several cloud platforms, they experienced a performance drop-down of 40% (yes this crazy). However, there are some simple facilities in OpenStack that allow you to have a better control of the resources that you offer to your customers/users. Read more.
Solinea: Optimizing Nova Compute Host utilization with OpenStack
For about three years, I have been talking with businesses that want to deploy OpenStack. Some have questions about what distribution they should use, some want to know about multi-cloud management, others are wondering how to best manage their clouds once they are installed -- the list of questions is certainly long. One common theme that I have heard however, “Don’t worry we have the hardware under control, so we are in good shape there.” I understand the efficiency goals here, hardware is always the longest lead time for any infrastructure project. There are however some inherent complexities that will arise when deploying a software solution like OpenStack. Getting the hardware right for an OpenStack cloud deployment is not always as obvious as it seems. I wanted to take some time to explore how to approach the hardware you are going to use when you deploy OpenStack -- specifically, nova compute node hardware. Read more.
The OpenStack Blog: OpenStack Upstream Training in Atlanta
The OpenStack Foundation is delivering a training program to accelerate the speed at which new OpenStack developers are successful at integrating their own roadmap into that of the OpenStack project. If you’re a new OpenStack contributor or plan on becoming one soon, you should sign up for the next OpenStack Upstream Training in Atlanta, May 10-11. Participation is strongly advised also for first time participants to OpenStack Design Summit. Read more.
Hadoop:
Cloudera: New Hue Demos: Spark UI, Job Browser, Oozie Scheduling, and YARN Support
Hue, the open source Web UI that makes Apache Hadoop easier to use, is now a standard across the ecosystem — shipping within multiple software distributions and sandboxes. One of the reasons for its success is an agile developer community behind it that is constantly rolling out new features to its users. Read more.
Cloudera: A Guide to Checkpointing in Hadoop
Checkpointing is an essential part of maintaining and persisting filesystem metadata in HDFS. It’s crucial for efficient NameNode recovery and restart, and is an important indicator of overall cluster health. However, checkpointing can also be a source of confusion for operators of Apache Hadoop clusters. In this post, I’ll explain the purpose of checkpointing in HDFS, the technical details of how checkpointing works in different cluster configurations, and then finish with a set of operational concerns and important bug fixes concerning this feature. Read more.
Datameer: Cost is Not the Only Driver for Big Data Investment in Financial Services Companies
In a recent CIO journal report, 75% of executives said the need for improved cost performance was the most important driver of Big Data investment. In addition to cost, our customers indicate the leading drivers for big data investments include the need to outperform competitors, identify fraud, meet regulatory compliance. Despite popular belief, the big data challenge these firms face is not about managing large volumes of data. Instead, the challenge lies in integrating many sources of data. Read more.
Mirantis: Improving Data Processing Performance with Hadoop Data Locality
One of the major bottlenecks in data-intensive computing is cross-switch network traffic. Fortunately, having map code executing on the node where the data resides significantly reduces this problem. This technique, called “data locality”, is one of the key advantages of Hadoop Map/Reduce. In this article, we’ll discuss the requirements for data locality, how the virtualized environment of OpenStack influences the Hadoop cluster topology, and how to achieve data locality using Hadoop with Savanna. Read more.