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.