Head in the Clouds

This coming Sunday (June 23rd) we’ll be getting together at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference for hack day, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Santa Clara Convention Center.

The hack day is being run using the BarCamp/unconference format – meaning that the sessions will be chosen Sunday by the folks who show up. Sessions might run an hour or all day, depending on how much interest there is and how much needs to be done.

Have an idea for a session? A topic you want to lead or see discussed? Add it to the Hack Day at CCC13 page on the CloudStack Wiki. It is, of course, a wiki: so edit boldly!

Don’t let the “hack day” moniker fool you – non-development topics and sessions are more than welcome. Giles Sirett has proposed a marketing session, and we’ll likely have at least one documentation session as well. If it’s CloudStack-related, it’s fair game.

Pleased to see that we’ve got a pretty good selection of sessions already proposed, but we can always do with more. If you have an idea, put ‘er up and show up Sunday ready to jam with the rest of the CloudStack community!

On my recent trip to Japan, I discovered during a CloudStack presentation that one of the Japan CloudStack User Group members, Takuma Nakajima, had written an auto installation script.
This script does more than just 'yum install cloud*' it actually handles the configuration of the host. Sadly all of the directions were in Japanese, and when I first tweeted about the existence, I quickly received a request for documentation in English, and during LinuxCon Japan, Satoshi Shimazaki and Takuma Nakajima translated the README

This really is a quick and simple way to get started with CloudStack - simply pass in the arguments for what you wish to have setup, and let it do all of the hard work.

Over the last couple weeks I have been using exoscale, a swiss public cloud provider based on CloudStack. They just launched after a beta testing phase that I had the chance to be part of. Their offering is primarily aimed at developers. The folks at Exoscale were kind enough to give me couple "gift cards" during the CloudStack Geneva meetup and I was able to get going. Together with PCExtreme, Leaseweb, and iKoula they are one more European public cloud provider in production with Apache CloudStack that I know of.

Their cloud is almost straightforward: two data centers in Geneva and Vernier, with hardware hosted by Equinix. They run Apache CloudStack 4.0.2, the latest release and use KVM hypervisors on Ubuntu based servers. One customization that they made and that I am aware of is that they patched CloudStack to output logs using logstash and use Kibana for visuzalization. They offer CentOS 6.4 and Ubuntu 12.04/13.04 64 bit templates with instance types from 512MB with 1 core to 32 GB with 8 cores. Their development and operations team is relatively small for such an offering but they are backed by the Veltigroup a leading IT provider in Switzerland, which gives them a 20 person team for support. Their developers are seasoned IT infrastructure enthusiasts who participate in the DevOps, openBSD, Clojure and Pallet community. The lead developer, Pierre-Yves Ritschard, formerly with paper.li, recently participated in DevOps Days Paris and has contributed a Clojure client to CloudStack: clostack. They are embracing open source, not only by using it, but also by contributing to the various communities that make up the foundation of Cloud services.

While CloudStack comes with a powerful and efficient Web UI, exoscale decided to create their own UI and integrate it with a ticketing, monitoring and billing system that they developed. It reinforces the fact the CloudStack API is extremely rich and that the default UI was actually designed as a proof of concept rather than something that all users should use. The UI will please developers by its simplicity and straigthforward ease of use. From talking to them, I know they they will soon open source the python client they developed to build the UI backend. Pierre Yves told me it resembled a little bit my toy UI that uses Flask and builds a REST wrapper on top of the CloudStack API. See a snapshot of an instance view below:

What do you do when you go to LinuxTag the premier Open Source conference in Berlin Germany ? You give a talk, you hand out tee-shirts at the CloudStack booth, you explain Cloud computing and you hack a CloudStack driver for SaltStack while patching libcloud.

The talk: Talking about Clouds is nice and all, but after many years and many talks, I shamelessly admit that it gets a little old. So lately I have been working on BigData, both as a backend to CloudStack (think Ceph, Riack CS, Gluster) and as a workload to a cloud. I am talking about using Apache Whirr or Apache Provisionr incubating to deploy "one-click" hadoop clusters on public clouds. It is a long story that I will keep for another post as I am trying to write this before going to bed. but check out the slides and keep an eye on pallet and exoscale.

The booth: An open source booth is ..well a booth. I came with my pop-up banner, table cloth, tee-shirts, post-cards, USB stick/bottle openers, it feels a little bit like a traveling sales man, not that I would know but I imagine it like this. I have to explain that the 2 and 3 XL shirts will shrink quite a bit and will fit perfectly people's M or L frames. Then I point at the banner to showcase the magnificient CloudStack UI, I explain that there is an API server behind it. Sometimes I launch devcloud and do a live demo to bring them to their knees, sometimes I have to ask for help on IRC to answer a question, and sometimes a german developer wants to trade a tee-shirt against illegal substances not to be named. Life in the fastlane let me tell you. But that's what it's like to build a community, it is very much an evangelization process.

The summer is going to be full with CloudStack events and talks in Europe.

• Bucharest JUG next week May 30th:
  http://www.bjug.ro/editii/12.html
  
• Open Cloud Day Zurich, June 11th:
  https://www.ch-open.ch/events/aktuelle-events/open-cloud-day-2013/
  
• Build a Cloud Day, Amsterdam June 13th:
  http://bacdamsterdam.eventbrite.com
  
• Build a Cloud Day, Paris, June 19th:
  http://bacdparis.eventbrite.com
  
• London CloudStack meetup, July 4th:
  http://www.eventbrite.com/event/6727182183#
  
• Dublin CloudStack meetup, July 10th
  In the works, stay tuned
  
• RMLL, Brussells, July 6th-11th
  Agenda to be released soon, a CloudStack talk and a tutorial has been accepted.
  http://2013.rmll.info/en/
  

Choose your event, let's meet, brainstorm and build a great community