Monday, July 25, 2011

CLS and OScon

NEWS: Join us on Wednesday evening at 9pm in room D135 for a BOF on Eucalyptus.

This year was my first time attending the Community Leadership Summit (CLS). The CLS runs the weekend before OScon which this year is in beautiful Portland, OR. The summit was a very nice surprise: excellent sessions, good ideas and great people. My only regrets is that I could not participate to more sessions. Everyone was extremely helpful and patient with a rookie like me: the Community Leadership Summit website is a must if you are interested in community building.

What a great way to start the week! OScon is about to start and it's time now to get ready: come and visit us at booth 714. Worried about the difficulties to install a private cloud on your machines? We will be running FastStart demo at the booth: come and see how you can can get your cloud running in minutes! Or just stop by to say hi and we may even have some nice surprise for you!

Also don't forget that the Ubuntu Cloud Days are fast approaching! Don't miss Dan and Ye talking about Eucalyptus 3 new features. They will be talking in particular about High Availability and the new ID management, but they will be answering all the questions you have about Eucalyptus.

EDIT: I did forget to add a link to pictures! Mark kindly documented the event and posted here all the pictures. You can also find the logs for the IRC class here.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Eucalyptus 3 development

Tim Cramer, our VP of engineering, very eloquently explained at the last UDS the status of our branches and the steps we are taking to improve it. With the introduction of Eucalyptus Enterprise Editions (EE), we went to a 2 branches model. The 2 branches were supposed to be identical with the differences limited to the Enterprises bits added to EE (for example SAN and VMware support). The model was meant to follow a Tic-Toc release cycle: Tic for Eucalyptus EE and Toc for Eucalyptus.


Houston: we have a problem.

At first all was good, and the weekly merge of the two branches happened without hiccups. During the development of High Availability (HA - see our roadmaps for the list of upcoming features) we found the code changes to be intrusive enough that we didn't want to work off production level branches so we started to work off a third internal branch. And here the problems started: multiple branches merge started to be a time consuming proposition, and we thus switched to use our developer's branch only.

Now we got all the elements for the perfect storm: a very ambitious release packed with exciting features that our user base asked for, three different branches that started to grow apart and an impending release for our Tic cycle. With the development happening on the internal branch, the communication with our community and in particular with our bug reporter lagged behind: we were still fixing issues, but we couldn't communicate clearly since the code fix were not visible (check our developer's corner for information on code, bugs and nightly builds), and we could not point our loyal users to the specific commit resolving the issue.


We are going back to the textbook model

The first thing that Tim decided to tackle, was to simplify this process and to revert back to a single working branch, with a plug-in mechanism for the extra Enterprise level bits. The good news is that we are well into the QA phase of our code, which mean we will reach gold status soon. We will then proceed with our last 'code drop' into our public branch: development will proceed there afterwards. The code will be unstable at first while we develop the plug-in framework, but it will stabilize quickly.

Our most ambitious release of Eucalyptus is well on its way to your data center. We listened to you for Eucalyptus 3 features set: are you ready to help us for Eucalyptus 4?