Sunday, February 27, 2011

Web Team

You may have noticed small changes here and there on the web site: this is due to our newly formed Web Team. They are making working with the web site a much easier task. You may see small inconsistencies while we smooth the wrinkles (for example the latest front page addition about Cloud IT Roles doesn't look exactly like the other articles): feel free to mention all you see in our site feedback forum or you can PM me. If you have any suggestion or request or wishlist for this website, this is the time to tell us!

At first you the visible progress will be small, since the Web Team is focusing on the infrastructure of open.eucalyptus.com and our sister web site www.eucalyptus.com, then you will start seeing more obvious changes. Some of the areas of interest are the forum (making them easier to use, add badges, roles and karma, do you want avatars?), the navigability of the site (some areas are hard to reach, and some content is not well advertised, for example our Community Wiki), and we are working on boosting what's in the Learn section: if you have specific topic you would like to be covered, let us know and we will try our best to do so. Other changes will be the general look and feel: I expect those changes to be incrementally throughout the next few months.

Incidentally, I hope this will allow more time on the forum: the usual grind and a nasty flu prevented me to spend more time on the forum. Feel free to bump old thread to bring them to the front again. As usual I hope you are enjoying this site and your private cloud.

Monday, February 21, 2011

QEMU 0.14

Congratulation to the QEMU team for the release of 0.14 (see http://wiki.qemu.org/Changelog/0.14 for details). I read some juicy changes in virtio (better performance is always a juicy change): looking forward to tests or comparisons and eager to hear about new network and disk performance achievements.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

FUDcon 2011

This weekend was a first for a lot of reasons. It was my first FUDcon, it was my first BarCamp style conference, it was my first time to meet quite a few fellow from the Fedora Cloud SIG and now it is my first blog.

I did enjoy quite a bit FUDcon: the talks were very interesting, the people very friendly and it was great to put a face onto names. The organization was impeccable thanks to Robyn. Cloud computing was very alive throughout the whole conference, not as an imposed topic. but more like a pervasive grass root effort: CloudFS, Boxgrinder, SheepDog, DeltaCloud just to name a few are pushing Fedora into the Cloud.

And Eucalyptus of course. At FUDcon I presented Eucalyptus by example: I showed how we turned a rack of machines into our Eucalyptus Community Cloud (ECC), and explained how one can turn their machines into their own private cloud. FUDcon attendees are seasoned sysadmin and experiences linuxers and it didn't take much to them to understand the value that Eucalyptus brings.

Finally I had a very nice hackfest with Marek of boxgrinder fame: I think a eucalyptus plugin for boxgrinder is really just around the corner! The plan for refreshing the Fedora images we provides, got delayed until I can get some of Justin's time and brain.