One

Eucalyptus has a long history of listening to our community. You asked for Eucalyptus to have a life of its own, and Eucalyptus Systems was born. You asked for a different license (GPL) and you got it. You asked for easier ways to install Eucalyptus and so we packaged Eucalyptus for the main linux distributions, we delivered UEC and we created FastStart.

We are still listening to our community. Currently we are working on the Eucalyptus 3 feature set and development process. Check our roadmap for more information
on the feature set, and stay tuned for more information about this
important release.

Our mantra is and always will be:  "Listen to our community and deliver quality software".

We always strive to get better at it. We are now in the process of redesigning the way we communicate with you. Currently we differentiate our users between customers (paying users) and community (intended here as the non-paying users). We have two web sites (www and open), two different sets of communication -- a support team,  an issue tracker, phone line 24/7 and direct emails for customers and a forum, IRC, launchpad and mailing list for community.

This setup is common enough, yet in our case it seems a bit arbitrary. Our engineers, our sales people, and our support team help community members on IRC and in the forum. Conversely we are all dedicated to help our customers. So we are in the process of removing this artificial division. Our support team is working to integrate the forum, mailing lists, and issue tracker. Our sales and marketing teams are working closely to understand the needs of our users and to provide them the information they want. Our professional services team is producing online training material. Our web team is working to tie all of the above together in a seamless and user-friendly way. And our engineering team is readying the best release of Eucalyptus yet.

Eucalyptus 3 will bring a lot of changes for our community: reconciling the various source branches into one, bringing a new plug-in architecture, and opening up the development process. Before Eucalyptus 3 is released, our two web sites will merge. We'll group information together following the cloud IT roles. Our webinars, forum posts, technical information, and documentation will be focused on delivering the best possible service to the specific IT role.

The new web site redesign, will put our community in the driver's seat. We will present updates and new design soon, and your feedback is necessary to carry on this ambitious plan.

One Eucalyptus Community.

I miss my '-g'

One thing I can say for sure: there is no time to get bored here at Eucalyptus. If you like big challenges and you have it to take them on, consider joining our team: I'm extremely pleased to say that Greg just did so.

If you are at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara or in the Bay area, come and meet Greg (or Rich or Marten or me for that matter :) at EucaSocial, or visit us at our booth (#615).

I have been knowing Greg by fame for a while, but in person for only few months, and I can say that the energy, and passion he brings to Eucalyptus are intoxicating. You may have already noticed the impulse on our community activities (from our #eucalyptus IRC channel, our mailing lists, our projects and our planet) and this is just the start!

The only downside is that I don't have anymore the exclusive '-g' at the end of emails. Welcome Greg:   I'm  thrilled to be able to work with and learn from you.

Half an hour for a Eucalyptus Dream

I hope you are enjoying the recently released Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). I recently did take it for a spin, and this blog is about my experience. Eucalyptus has been part of Ubuntu since Jaunty, and I wanted to see how well the latest available version of Eucalyptus integrates with Oneirc

And I am pleased to say that in less than 1/2 hour, you can have your Eucalyptus cloud running in Oneric! You don't believe me? Let's do it:

10:17: popped the CD for the server install into two desktops machines we had laying around:

I just did add the openssh server to the basic install;

10:31: install is done, machines rebooted. At this point I lost the monitor I was borrowing, so I switched to ssh from the comfort of my office in front of a cup of coffee. I did do a quick update and upgrade to ensure all the security patches were applied;


10:34: Time to get to the Eucalyptus install. There are nice instruction on help.ubuntu.com which I partly followed: my engineering background prevents me from following nicely written instructions ... Soo, I did
     apt-get install eucalyptus-cloud eucalyptus-cc eucalyptus-sc eucalyptus-walrus
On the second desktop I did install the node controller
     apt-get install eucalyptus-nc


10:43: got to the familiar webUI

and downloaded the admin credentials. The configure tab was missing some components. I assume the network I was using confused a bit the nice autoregistration mechanism of the UEC, so I switched to manual mode. I first de-register all components (I used the default cluster1 for the cluster name)
     euca_conf --deregister-cluster cluster1
     euca_conf --deregister-sc cluster1
and re-register with a cluster name I'm more familiar with
     euca_conf --register-cluster pippo 192.168.7.246
     euca_conf --register-sc pippo 192.168.7.246

10:46: I did register the node controller
     euca_conf --register-nodes 192.168.4.7
(yep, our network is not a /24) waited few seconds to allow the node to report and got

Phew, just under half an hour, as I promised you. In a future blog I will talk about the images I uploaded on the cloud and tested it: you can check the work we are doing on our projects.eucalyptus.com.

Planet Eucalyptus

You already know our planet, since quite a few visit it regularly and requested to add feeds (let us know if you want your feed on our planet). When you visit it, you will find a somewhat ordinary planet site, perhaps too plain if you will, but what I want to mention in this blog, is how we are handling it and how it is running 'in the cloud'.

In the previous drinking champagne blog, I mentioned we have quite a few application and services in our internal production cloud (of course powered by Eucalyptus) and planet is one of them. What we did with planet, is to make it very simple to deploy and customize it: the original work was done by Mark Atwood. In order to take advantage of the cloud we heavily relied on the meta-data service.

The meta-data service allows for instances started in the cloud (private and public clouds which follows the AWS API) to learn data pertinent to the instance itself (hence it is called meta-data). Public IP, ssh keys, storage information, instance IDs (EMIs, kernel and ramdisk) are examples of what can be retrieved. All these data are accessible at http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data, and are easily accessible from within the instance with a browser or most likely with wget or curl.

Amongst these data, the user is allowed to pass few kB of data to the instance. To do so one could use the euca2ools and in particular the euca-run-instances with the -f or -d option. The instance can then access this data at http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data: cloud-init uses it to run scripts at boot time or otherwise customize the instance and the official Amazon Linux AMI uses a port of cloud-init. Cloud-init is not yet available to all distros and earlier version of Eucalyptus suffered a bug which prevented cloud-init to work properly (instance would get delayed at boot time), so we decided to use a much simpler rc.local script to allow for a subset of its functionality. You can find information on the rc.local script we use and of other information about images on projects.eucalyptus.com. With these starter images in our production cloud, we set to host planet in an instance.

Our first attempt to run a service in the cloud, emulated the boot from EBS capability (see our issue tracker in the cloud), but this time we changed completely tack. We pushed all the planet's configuration into a Walrus bucket, then we created a script to be used when starting an instance.

You can inspect the script on projects.eucalyptus.com under the Cloud Application Architect area. The script gets all the css, ini and others needed file from a walrus bucket, installs nginx and other needed packages, and set up a cron-job to re-read the configuration files at set intervals, thus allowing for the dynamic configuration of planet. When we changed the logo, it was a matter of uploading the new css and png files, and presto! Planet got a new skin.

While this setup seems complicated at first glance, it is fairly easy: consider that it's all done with a few line of a shell script. It also allows for a easy failure recovery since restarting planet is a matter of 2 euca2ools command. If the instance were to fail we can issue:

euca-run-instances -f planet.sh -k my-ssh-key emi-F3DF1488
euca-associate-address -i i-xxxxx 173.205.188.124

and since there is no persistent data on the instance, that's all we need to do. And to apply a security update, we simply spin up a new instance with the same script (the script we use upgrades to all latest packages at start up), disassociate the public IP from the old instance and associate it to the new instance. And of course we can terminate the old planet once the elastic IP has been moved.

To customize the planet we upload the new version of the specific file to the Walrus bucket, and to do so we use a version of s3curl modified to allow for different endpoint then S3. For example to add a new feed we first get the current planet.ini:

wget http://173.205.188.8:8773/services/Walrus/planet/planet.ini

modify it, to add the new feed, and we upload it back into the bucket

s3curl --id graziano --acl public-read --put planet.ini -- http://173.205.188.8:8773/services/Walrus/planet/planet.ini

and wait for the cron-job to execute. Easy, isn't it?

We have few more scripts which we use for our production services on projects.eucalyptus.com and if you have a similar script you want to share, let us know and we'll add it, or do a git-hub merge request. The recipes are ready to go, just add Eucalyptus to it.

FLOSS Podcast

Today, Aaron Newcomb and Simon Phipps of FLOSS weekly, graciously hosted me on their podcast. They asked me about Eucalyptus, covering the basics (what is cloud computing, what is Eucalyptus) and then quickly going deeper into the internals of Eucalyptus, our development processes, and our community engagement. Very interesting ground was covered, ranging from cathedral vs. bazaar to the age old question of vi vs. emacs.

Check out the podcast. If you have questions about Eucalyptus that were not covered, you can always ask us directly.

Drinking Champagne

Some call it eat your own dog food but we prefer the alternative (check the wikipedia article if you don't know), and so we want to give you the latest experience in running our services into Eucalyptus, or, in other terms, how we have been drinking our own Champagne.

Harvesting The Grapes

As with many enterprise companies, it is the responsibility of internal IT to deploy and maintain software tools, products and services that are a vital part of the company's day-to-day operations. The list of products and services is ever-growing and so the following is hopelessly incomplete, yet it can give you an idea of what we use:

Issue Tracker

this was one of our first service to deploy. We even have an article on how it came to be; 

Web Sites

we have 2 main web sites and internally we call them www and open and hopefully they are covering all your needs for private clouds; 

Downloads

as an open source company, the way to downloads Eucalyptus is very important to us, and we are always finding ways to improve it. We are in the process of spinning up a service on its own to handle this, so stay tune for the launch of downloads.eucalyptus.com; 

Starter Images

all of our 25,000 and counting Eucalyptus clouds need images to be turned into instances to be useful. We provide starter images which we are in the process of refreshing and making even more useful: we will be launching the EMIs service very soon with newer images, mechanism to customize them at run times and more documentation; 

Euca Projects

we recently launched Euca Projects: it is a young sites but it already has very interesting projects and documentation. We for sure used it when we needed to change the ECC logo; 

LDAP directory

we internally use an LDAP directory as the keystone for our identity management system. We always look for ways to improve our users experience and single-sign-on ranks pretty high in our list: we have plan to make LDAP the basis for our single-sign-on to all our services;

Internal wiki and more

we do have internal wiki, internal repositories and other services which are rely upon by the different departments. 

The First Glass 

In summary, we have important services with very different SLA associated with them (critical to nice to have it running), we have about 1 TB of very important data associate with it (with various level of backups and data retention policies), a handful of hostnames and IPs associate with the instances and different network and security requirements. We happen to hear about this new wonderful technology called private cloud early on, so we have all (or almost all) of the above running on our Eucalyptus-powered internal cloud, which unimaginatively we called it production cloud. We have various team working on the different services (the web-team, the support-team, engineering, sales, professional services ets ...) and Eucalyptus accommodate all of them nicely. To have fine control some team employs their own Cloud Application Architect (see cloud IT roles), while others rely on our Tech-team for the job, and the IT-team is our Cloud Administrator. The services are compartmentalized into their own security group and cloud account, they use their own Walrus buckets and EBS volumes, thus separating nicely the security concerns and the possibility of a rogue application bringing down all our infrastructure.

Refining The Process

Eucalyptus follow AWS semantics and offers the instances the Metadata Service which allow the instance to capture information about its creation, ownership and more, Amongst the data available to running instance, there is the user data: this data is passed at run-time (euca-run-instances time to be more precise) and it is up to the instance to use it. Our new instances (the EMIs projects mentioned above) will have a very simple mechanism which allows for them to execute any script passed as user-data. We are converting all of our services to be restarted using script to be passed as user-data: in a nutshell the script will download the specific configuration and data from Walrus buckets, and/or will be mounting their own EBS volume when needed, install and configured the wanted service. You can already see some of them on Euca Projects: the idea is very simple and it makes for a much simplified handling of our services. We already have planet, redmine (projects), databases and we will be adding the scripts for our web server soon.

Rebuilding the Engine while Racing

All of the above helped us tremendously early this week when a disk started to act up. One of our main server (the front-end for production cloud) had one disk starting to go bad, causing all sorts of issues. While Eucalyptus really helps in the IT menial tasks, it is clearly not a substitute for proper planning. Our server was still running on a single big disk (the project to update it keeps getting a lower priority over more fun activities) so this issue had the potential to have a huge impact and long downtime for a number of our services. Our IT-team got in overdrive and in the span of 1 day, planned the move: instances were moved off EBS volumes, Walrus backup were temporarily suspended, and the Eucalyptus Cloud Controller was shut down, while we were migrating the data to a secure location. Since we didn't have our SAN ready for action, we decided to go for a RAID5 temporary solution to give us more time to plan for the next big expansion. Externally, there was a less than a minute downtime for services using EBS (we needed to migrate the data to ephemeral and switch over). The instances with our precious services kept running while we serviced the front end machine and all was well when we restarted the Cloud Controller. Eucalyptus rediscovered the running instances, took ownership of them, and few minutes after, all the state was properly restored. We had another brief downtime when we moved the data back to EBS (for the services using them).

The Day After

The only casualty of this process was an instance that got accidentally terminated. It was a Cloud Operator error and we have taken steps to avoid it in the future (no more watching action movies when doing major upgrades!). In case you missed the announcement, Eucalyptus 3 is coming fast, and it will make it even easier to handle the situation like the one we encountered: HA is part of Eucalyptus 3, and moving a Eucalyptus component will be much easier to do while keeping the cloud running. Amongst the lessons learned, I would say remember to listen to the Cloud Architect when planning your deployment: having some services depending on a single disk is always a bad idea, not matter how many backups you have in your vault. Share with us your Eucalyptus or cloud experience

Eucalyptus Projects

We are proud to announce the availability of projects.eucalyptus.com. You have been asking how to participate more actively and this is our response: to create a single place where you can organize and coordinate the various efforts centered around Eucalyptus. The site is powered by redmine and the idea here is to host projects to allow interested parties to communicate and coordinate easily. Our community is very diverse, and so are the contributions we received. We decided then to create few top level projects around the roles involved with private clouds (for more info read more on Cloud IT roles): these top-level projects should allow to navigate quickly toward the wanted area of interest. So, based on the kind of contributions we have seen, these are 5 top level projects:

• Projects for Cloud Administrator customization of Eucalyptus, or documentation on particular Eucalyptus installations, scripts and code to help maintain and install;
• Projects for Cloud Application Architect projects related to images and instances running in Eucalyptus, for example howtos for creating images, or recipes to customized instances;
• Projects for Cloud Architect best practices documents, deployments guides;
• Projects for Cloud Developer projects for extending or modifying Eucalyptus, or for tools working with Eucalyptus;
• Projects for Teaching and Learning Eucalyptus documentation, course material, small class projects to help to teach cloud computing. of course these are just suggestions.

There is one project not relates to IT roles (as defined above), the Teaching and Learning Eucalyptus: we felt the need to give it its own area to it because of the prominence of Eucalyptus into Universities and schools as a teaching tool, and we hope to collect material to ease the creation of courses on private clouds and Eucalyptus in particular.

Figure 1 On the left you can see the my account page on open.eucalyptus.com, while on the right you can see the registration page for project.eucalyptus.com. Make sure you use the same ID and email. We will be moving to a single sign-on process and this step will ensure a smooth transition. 


Projects has been created for you, so if cannot find a project of your liking, contact us, propose a new project and we'll add it! To be started with a project is very easy:

• create an account on open.eucalyptus.com;
• create an account on projects with the same ID and email or let us know you want to be on projects and we'll do it for you (check Figure 1);
• find the project you are interested in, start filing bugs and contacting the people already working on it;
• if you have an interesting idea, contact us to create a new project for you. 

The site is very young, but we already have interesting projects available: most of these early projects are used internally by us (for example the projects site is hosted on a Eucalyptus cloud and we have scripts to regenerate it on demand, as well as planet Eucalyptus).

Eucalyptus 3 is here! Eucalyptus 3 is here! Eucalyptus 3 brings new exciting features (check our roadmap) which you have requested and we are sure quite a few projects will be based on these new features (HA, boot from EBS, EIAM and more). It will also bring a new development model: this is the first step as described in the blog. So get ready with your cool brand new Eucalyptus project.

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.

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?

UDS-O

The past week I was at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next release: Oneiric Ocelot. This is not my first UDS, and yet the incredible energy form the Ubuntu community never cease to pleasantly surprise me: there are always more interesting session to attend to then time available. And it was great to meet old and new friends and put faces to IRC name and emails. UDS-O was in beautiful Budapest, even though I didn't have time to visit it: I did save the time to head over my homeland, Italy, as soon as I could.

UDS-O was truly cloud-enabled, with a cloud track running all the time. There were sessions on IaaS (eucalyptus, openstack), PaaS (hadoop, appscale) and how to deploy infrastructure both virtual and physical (puppet, orchestra, ensemble). It is an exciting time to see how open source owns the cloud space: there are market leaders in all segments and I'm thrilled to see how Eucalyptus lead the way since its inception and still leads the way with the announcement of the 3.0 release.

Ubuntu gave us a prominent spot at the plenary session to introduce to the developer community the upcoming features in Eucalyptus 3.0, plus sessions to plan for the 3,0 integration. Ocelot is also pushing the 'green computing' idea with a new redesigned PowerNap service with possible integrations using NUT for ups and pdu. Openstack will also join Eucalyptus into Ubuntu main: with it all the clouds needs, from laptop-size to rackspace-size will be satisfied. We are working with openstack to provide an easy way to migrate from Eucalyptus to openstack and vice-versa.

UDS had parallel tracks with Linaro, and indeed ARM is making headway into the server market: it will be very interesting to see ARM's impact in cloud space. We are indeed working with a Google Summer of Code project to allow for ARM emulation and to ARM image testing within Eucalyptus.

The intense week is not over, and plans were laid down: time to get 3.0 into Ubuntu. Are you ready?

Roadmap!

This summer Eucalyptus 3.0 will be released. I even said it to Barton George while at the OpenStack summit. You can check out the new features on our roadmap: heck, you can even vote on your favorite upcoming feature! Hopefully we listened to all or at least most of the comments and suggestions we received:

• LDAP integration: we had quite a popular forum thread asking for it. You got it. And for good measure we added AD integration too;
• HA. Eucalyptus 2.0 already introduced the capability of restarting single components without loosing state, but now we removed the single point of failure altogether. We are still working on trying to make the configuration as easy as possible;
• boot from EBS. Another popular request: should I add anything more?
• windows support: we are adding native guest windows support to 3.0. This should simplify quite a bit the setup of installation which needs it. 

We are planning an IRC Q/A session before the end of June, to introduce all these new features. Of course you don't need to wait that long to vote our new poll and tell us what do you think of the upcoming features! And if your demands were not listened to this time, let us know, or better yet, let us know if you want to work on them.

Ubuntu Cloud Days

If you want to learn more about Cloud Computing check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudDays. On the 23rd and 24th of March there will be a 2-day IRC session discussing UEC/Eucalyptus and other cloud related topics. I will be leading the last session on the 24th (IRC nickname obino). Come and share with us your cloud experience. The UEC is powered by Eucalyptus. Ubuntu customized the Eucalyptus UI to match its release colors, and added an auto-discovery and auto-registration mechanism to simplify the deployment of Eucalyptus on Ubuntu clusters. In addition, Ubuntu added an image store, allowing a wealth of prepackaged images to be deployed with a click of a button. To learn more about UEC/Eucalyptus and cloud computing, join us on IRC for the Ubuntu Cloud Days.

Addendum Mar 24th, 2011 Thanks to all who participated at my session! The whole 2 days had very interesting sessions: thanks to Ahmed Kamal (check out is blog) for organizing it! If you missed it, you can find the IRC logs at: 
http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/03/24/%23ubuntu-classroom.html http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/03/23/%23ubuntu-classroom.html

The Rise of Cloud Administration?

/. recently saw an interesting post about The Decline and Fall of System Administration. One of the arguments for this (perceived? real?) phenomenon is that server virtualization makes it easier to re-image or restart a server rather than troubleshooting it when a problem arises.

At Eucalyptus Systems we create and think Cloud Computing, so it is natural for me to question if Cloud Computing is involved at all in the above discussion. As you know virtualization != cloud (see Learn and Rich's blog). On the other hand, Cloud Computing makes it even easier to restart a virtual server (one euca-reboot-instances away available to all Cloud Users). So are IaaS and Eucalyptus partly responsible for the fall of System Administration?

It's interesting to note that just before the slashdot post, we published our thoughts on IT roles in the era of the Cloud (see Cloud IT Roles). With our article fresh in my mind, I set myself to answer the above question. In the Cloud IT Roles article, there are quite a few roles that have the capacity or the ability to work with instances (or "virtualized server" in the parlance of the original post). For example the Cloud User can start and stop instances at will, as can the Cloud Application Architect and of course the Cloud Administrator. 

The depth of knowledge required to perform these roles is not the same, but also different are the consequences of their decisions (i.e. reboot an instance vs troubleshooting). The impact of a Cloud Administrator's decision to reboot key components of the cloud infrastructure (and following the original post down the path of a lengthy reinstall), can be substantial since all Cloud Users and End Users of that installation might lose access to their resources for a significant amount of time and may possibly lose unsaved work. Contrast this with the decision of a Cloud User to reboot her own instance, the effect of which is most likely felt by just one person—the Cloud User herself. Then there is the middle of the road example, where a Cloud Application Architect responsible for an application decides to reboot the instance(s) hosting the application. In this case, all End Users dependent on that application will be impacted by the decision, but no other application or part of the IT structure will be touched.

It is my opinion that while more people will have access to 'admin' account and capabilities, the Cloud will naturally enforce (limit) the impact of their decision to the resources allocated to them. In this respect, while a Cloud User is technically a super user of the instances she starts, if she uses images created by a Cloud Application Architect, she doesn't need to have the skills of a System Administrator. In this scenario, it seems perfectly normal to reboot (restart) a server since the Cloud Application Architect will have designed the images to be rebootable without loosing data or having any adverse effect. In short, the roles implied in Cloud Computing delineate clearly their own skills and responsibilities.

So is this the Decline and Fall of System Administration or the Rise of Cloud Administration?

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.

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.

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.