3.2.1 and the road ahead

In my older posts, I have been talking about maintainability and how I see it as a pillar for IaaS. I have been talking about the homework the Cloud Admin needs to do before deploying,  and I have been talking about the invisible work done in Eucalyptus 3.2.  Of course maintainability is not the goal of a sprint, or of a single release, but not unlike security, a  continued effort, a guiding principle. So, after only few weeks from the previous major release, welcome Eucalyptus 3.2.1.

The point release of Eucalyptus brings very important fixes. I will let you go through the release notes yourself, but I 'm very pleased about the gratuitous ARP message, and the moving if iptables-preload.   The former allow for a speedier network recovery after a Cluster Controller fail-over, and the latter makes Eucalyptus more compatibles with newer releases of linux distro. Of course there are a lot more fixes, and you can go and find your favorite one.

Ramping up QA

QA has always been the focus of our Engineering team. But as the perfectionists we are, we never rest on our laurels, and a tremendous effort has been put in extending the scope and speed of our QA. If you follow our blogs feed you have already noticed a lot of the work done. And with the good works, comes a better list of Known Issues, and warnings for corner cases we don't cover yet (if you have an EMC SAN and you use 3.2.1, it's your turn to be the corner case). The last thing we want is for our users to be surprised from unexpected behavior.

The Road Ahead

Aka Eucalyptus 3.3. The next major release of Eucalyptus will bring quite a few new features. You can check out the list of features scoped out. Of the major ones, we have Elastic Load Balancer, AutoScaling, CloudWatch, and Maintenance mode. 

We just had the end of sprint 3 status review: check out the demo yourself. So far the road ahead of Eucalyptus 3.3 is nice and clear, and we'll expect it to land on your machines by the mid/late Q2.

Edited: I don't know how to do math, since I considered a quarter to have 4 months ...