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?