Big Data:
Cloudera: The Truth About MapReduce Performance on SSDs
In the Big Data ecosystem, solid-state drives (SSDs) are increasingly considered a viable, higher-performance alternative to rotational hard-disk drives (HDDs). However, few results from actual testing are available to the public. Recently, Cloudera engineers did such a study based on a combination of SSDs and HDDs, with the goal of determining to what extent SSDs accelerate different MapReduce workloads, as well as the optimal configurations for getting the best performance on each workload. Read more.
Solinea: The Rise of Commodity Big Data
Cloud computing adoption is starting to accelerate in the enterprise. There are a number of driving forces, including more mature technology, upgraded enterprise skills, realistic total cost of ownership (TCO) models and a growing number of use cases that fit more and more into the cloud value proposition. Of these use cases, Big Data analytics is becoming the dominant justification for implementing cloud. Read more.
DevOps:
Chef: DevOps for developers w/Chef, Part III
DevOps brings together concepts from Agile, Lean, Theory of Constraints, Kanban, good practices e.g. from ITIL, and just common sense. DevOps is not about what to do, it’s about the how. Sooner or later you’d probably like to catalogue and rollout DevOps. The DevOps matrix comes in handy with that distinguishing among four different areas. Figure 2 shows the DevOps area matrix approach, which is based on and extends Patrick Debois’ approach. Read more.
Chef: Writing Libraries in Chef Cookbooks
One of the most useful extensions available to Chef cookbook authors is the ability to write and use any arbitrary Ruby code as a library. These libraries are often no more than a few lines long, but can also be as simple or as sophisticated as you want. Once written, the methods in the library can be re-used by recipes within any cookbook that depends on it. In this blog post, I’ll give you a quick tour of the library functionality in Chef and also explain how to shell out safely to the operating system to execute arbitrary commands.Read more.
Docker: Introducing execution drivers and libcontainer in Docker 0.9
Today we are happy to introduce Docker 0.9. With this release we are continuing our focus on quality over features, shrinking and stabilizing the core, and providing first-class support for all major operating systems. In addition to dozen of bugfixes, Docker 0.9 includes 2 major improvements: execution drivers and libcontainer.Read more.
Ravello: The DevOps Fear Factor
DevOps is all the rage, with a lot of great stories out there about startups and larger web companies, such as Netflix, and the tremendous benefits they gain from it. Read more.
Vagrant: Vagrant 1.5 and Vagrant Cloud
Vagrant 1.5 is now available! This is a new major release that adds some incredible new features to Vagrant. We've also obsessed over stability, so we expect this to be the most stable release, as well. We're also announcing Vagrant Cloud, a place for sharing, discovering, and creating Vagrant environments. Vagrant Cloud today is a place for managing boxes and Vagrant Share. In the future, it'll continue to grow into a much broader vision we have. Read more.
OpenStack:
Ben Nemec: Things I Thought I Knew
It's been a humbling week for me. Which is good because it means I'm learning things, but I will admit it would be nice to not find out I'm completely wrong about quite so many things in such a short span of time. I figured I would share what I've learned so it might be useful to someone else, because evidently it wasn't obvious to me. Read more.
CERN: Enable Cinder-multi-backend with an existing Ceph backend.
CERN IT is operating a 3 PetaByte Ceph cluster and one of our use-cases is to store our OpenStack volumes and images. For more details on Ceph cluster, Dan van der Ster's presentation is available at the following link. This post will show you how we enabled the multi-backend in Cinder. We dealt with the migration of our Ceph volume to the new volume type. And finally we will look at the quality of service we want to enable on our newly created volume type. Read more.
Cloudbase: OpenStack Windows instances, Puppet and Heat
Putting together OpenStack and Puppet is a great way to satisfy almost any deployment scenario. There are a lot of resources on the web about how to set up such an infrastructure, but mostly Linux related. The main goal of this blog post is to provide a reference on how to deploy the Puppet agent on a Windows instance using either plain simple Nova metadata or a Heat template, in both cases based on Cloudbase-Init. Read more.
Docker: Docker will be in OpenStack Icehouse
The preferred mechanism orchestrating Docker in OpenStack is via Heat, rather than treating Docker as a form of hypervisor in OpenStack Nova. Our initial path towards enabling the use of Docker in OpenStack was to create a driver for Docker in OpenStack Compute (Nova), which enabled a Docker container to be used as if it were a virtual machine. Read more.
John Bresnahan: OpenStack, Vagrant and Docker
I recently tried to set up OpenStack with docker as the hypervisor on a single node and I ran into mountains of trouble. I tried with DevStack and entirely failed using both the master branch and stable/havana. After much work I was able to launch container but the network was not right. Ultimately I found a path that worked. This post explains how I did this. Read more.
Kyle Mestery: OpenDaylight Integration with OpenStack has merged into Icehouse!
As OpenStack marches towards it’s Icehouse release this spring, some work I’ve been doing has finally merged upstream. This week, both the OpenDaylight ML2 MechanismDriver and devstack support for OpenDaylight merged upstream. This was a huge effort which spans the efforts of many people. This was the first step in solidifying the integration of OpenDaylight with OpenStack Neutron, and we have many additional things we can do. Read more.
Mirantis: Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 is Now Available for Download
This past Friday March 7, 2014, we released Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 for download, including hardened packages for the OpenStack 2013.2.2 release, along with a set of fixes and improvements we think you’ll find useful. You can read up on the details of Mirantis OpenSack in the release notes, but we wanted to highlight some key features and fixes in this version. Read more.
Opensource.com: Want an IT job? Learn OpenStack
Whether you love living in the cloud or still cling to your desktop applications whenever possible, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that the cloud is where computing is headed. And if you’re seeking to keep your skills relevant to the IT jobs of today, and tomorrow, understanding the technology that underlies cloud services is critical. Fortunately, the cloud offers many opportunities for using open source software up and down the stack. If being on the cutting edge of cloud infrastructure interests you, it’s probably time to take a look at OpenStack. OpenStack is the engine that makes scalable, rapid, and secure deployments of computing power, networking, and storage possible in a modern datacenter. And it’s open source technology, which means anyone can dive right in and get started. Read more.
Opensource.com: Bridging the gap between OpenStack and Python
Consistency—a necessity when it comes to any large-scale, open source project. Sharing source code and libraries between the different components of OpenStack is critical to its rapid evolution and fast-paced development. The Oslo program is what holds it all together and brings consistency to OpenStack. We wanted to learn more about Oslo and what is does for OpenStack. So we asked the program lead to share his thoughts. Read more.
Rackspace: Inside My Home Rackspace Private Cloud, OpenStack Lab, Part 5: Adding Extra Compute Nodes
The first four of these posts covered setup and installation of my home lab, including the networking, PXE booting Ubuntu and installation of Rackspace Private Cloud. I ended up with two Controllers in HA and three Computes. In this post I show how easy it is to add two extra Compute nodes to the lab.Read more.
Red Hat: An Icehouse Sneak Peek – OpenStack Compute (Nova)
Today I’ll be giving a sneak peak to just some of the changes made in one of the two projects that made up the original OpenStack release and today is still one of the largest – showing no signs of the innovation slowing down – OpenStack Compute (Nova). OpenStack Compute is a cloud computing fabric controller, a central component of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system. It is responsible for managing the hypervisors on which virtual machine instances will ultimately run and managing the lifecycle of those virtual machine instances. This list is by no means exhaustive but highlights some key features and the rapid advances made by the contributors that make up the OpenStack community in a six month release cycle. Read more.
The OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Ryan Brady
An interview with Ryan Brady, a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat primarily working on the TripleO project for OpenStack. Read more.