Here’s what RDO engineers have been writing about in the last week.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Three Flavours of Infrastructure Cloud, by Zane Bitter

A curious notion that seems to be doing the rounds of the OpenStack traps at the moment is the idea that Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds must by definition be centred around the provisioning of virtual machines. The phrase ‘small, stable core’ keeps popping up in a way that makes it sound like a kind of dog-whistle code for the idea that other kinds of services are a net liability. Some members of the Technical Committee have even got on board and proposed that the development of OpenStack should be reorganised around the layering of services on top of Nova.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog72

Isn’t Atomic on OpenStack Ironic, don’t you think?, by Steven Dake

OpenStack Ironic is a bare metal as a service deployment tool. Fedora Atomic is a µOS consisting of a very minimal installation of Linux, kernel.org, Kubernetes and Docker. Kubernetes is an endpoint manager and container scheduler, while Docker is a container manager. The basic premise of Fedora Atomic using Ironic is to present a lightweight launching mechanism for OpenStack.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog73

Fedora Cloud Images Available Today! by Rich Bowen

The Fedora Project has released Fedora 21 today, and it includes two images of interest to RDO users who want have the latest and greatest Fedora to run in their cloud.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog74

Cloud-init and the case of the changing hostname, by Lars Kellogg-Stedman

I ran into a problem earlier this week deploying RDO Icehouse under RHEL 6. My target systems were a set of libvirt guests deployed from the RHEL 6 KVM guest image, which includes cloud-init in order to support automatic configuration in cloud environments. I take advantage of this when using libvirt by attaching a configuration drive so that I can pass in ssh keys and a user-data script.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog75

The Fedora Project has released Fedora 21 today, and it includes two images of interest to RDO users who want have the latest and greatest Fedora to run in their cloud.

The Fedora Project, as part of the Fedora.Next initiative, decided to pursue three sesparate release variants – cloud, server, and workstation. Of special interest to RDO users, the Cloud Working Group has an OpenStack-ready release with a base Fedora instance that’s tailored for the cloud, and an “Atomic” host that is tailored specifically for running Docker containers.

Head over to the Get Fedora Cloud Download page, and you’ll find uncompressed qcow2 images for general purpose cloud compting, and the streamlined Atomic host.

The default images are 64-bit, but you can also find a 32-bit qcow2 general purpose image if you need a 32-bit instance for some reason.

Have questions about the Fedora Cloud images? Ask on the Fedora Cloud mailing list or ask in #fedora-cloud on Freenode.

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last two weeks. Last week, I was in Budapest at ApacheCon Europe, and so missed doing this post.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Delivering Public Cloud Functionality in OpenStack, by John Meadows

When it comes to delivering cloud services, enterprise architects have a common request to create a public cloud-type rate plan for showback, chargeback, or billing. Public cloud packaging is fairly standardized across the big vendors as innovations are quickly copied by others and basic virtual machines are assessed mainly on price.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog63

Faster rebuilds for python virtualenv trees, by Daniel P. Berrangé

When developing on OpenStack, it is standard practice for the unit test suites to be run in a python virtualenv. With the Nova project at least, and I suspect most others too, setting up the virtualenv takes a significant amount of time as there are many packages to pull down from PyPI, quite a few of which need compilation too.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog64

Creating a Windows image for OpenStack, by Lars Kellogg-Stedman

If you want to build a Windows image for use in your OpenStack environment, you can follow the example in the official documentation, or you can grab a Windows 2012r2 evaluation pre-built image from the nice folks at CloudBase.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog65

Dynamic Policy in Keystone, by Adam Young

Ever get that feeling that an epiphany is right around the corner? I spent a good portion of the OpenStack summit with that feeling. I knew that it would not be earth shattering, or lead me to want to rewrite Keystone, but rather a clarification of how a bunch of things should fall together. The “click” happened on the second to last day, and it can be summarized in a few key points.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog66

Simplifying and Accelerating the Deployment of OpenStack Network Infrastructure, by Valentina

The energy from the latest OpenStack Summit in Paris is still in the air. Its record attendance and vibrant interactions are a testimony of the maturity and adoption of OpenStack across continents, verticals and use cases.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog67

Empowering OpenStack Cloud Storage: OpenStack Juno Release Storage Overview, by Sean Cohen

The OpenStack 10th release added ten new storage backends and improved testing on third-party storage systems. The Cinder block storage project continues to mature each cycle exposing more and more Enterprise cloud storage infrastructure functionalities.

Here is a quick overview of some of these key features.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog68

Co-Existence of Containers and Virtualization Technologies, by Federico Simoncelli

Lately there has been a growing interest in Linux containers solutions such as Docker. Docker provides an open and standardized platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. The application images can be safely held in your organization registry or they can be shared publicly in the docker hub portal for everyone to use and to contribute to.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog69

Distributed group management and locking in Python with tooz, by Julien Danjou

With OpenStack embracing the Tooz library more and more over the past year, I think it’s a good start to write a bit about it.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog70

What’s coming in Kilo for Glance, Zaqar and Oslo? by Flavio Percoco

As usual, here’s a write up of what happened last week during the OpenStack Summit. More than a summary, this post contains the plans we discussed for the next 6 months.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog71

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last two weeks. Last week, I was at OpenStack Summit, and missed doing this post.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Hiding unnecessary complexity, by Flavio Percoco

How deep does someone need to go to consider something as learned? When does the required knowledge to do/learn X ends? Furthermore, I’m most interested in what we - as developers or creators of these abstractions that will then be consumed - can do to define this.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog51

Red Hat, Nuage Networks, OpenStack, and KISS, from RedHatStack

The reality is that IT is serious money – IDC estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) market alone will hit $7.1 trillion by 2020! But a lot of that money is due to the IT industry practice of “lock-in” – trapping a customer into a proprietary technology and then charging high costs, in some instances up to 10X cost, for every component For some reason, customers object to having to pick one vendor’s approach, being subject to limitations – whether technological or otherwise, paying high markups for every incremental extension, then having to pay high switching costs for the next solution at end of life in five years or less.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog52

Software Factory enters Beta and is released as an Open Source Project, from the eNovance blog

Today, eNovance by Red Hat is releasing the first beta version of the Software Factory project.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog53

Non-opinionated software can’t exist, by Flavio Percoco

I don’t believe there’s such a thing like “non opinionated” software and I think we should all be more careful when we communicate what the goals of our projects are. The later may not be new to you, probably not even the former but yet, I keep hearing the former everywhere and I keep seeing the later being ignored.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog54

Three Reasons Why OpenStack has Matured, by David H. Deans

The OpenStack Summit, taking place in Paris, France this week, will be a turning point for those of us that study market development activity within the cloud computing infrastructure marketplace. I attended my first OpenStack Summit earlier this year, in Atlanta, Georgia. During the event conference sessions, I was immediately engaged by the apparent enthusiasm and energy of the other attendees.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog55

OpenStack, Paris Summit: Day One Insights, by David H. Deans

Depending on your point of view, there are different ways to assess the progress of the evolving OpenStack project. Yesterday, I profiled “three reasons” why I believe there are encouraging signs that demonstrate how OpenStack has matured — and I gave an example of existing application case studies, as a key indicator.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog56

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 5 Now Available, by Maria Gallegos

Earlier this week, we announced the release of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 5. Customers can use this recent release to move towards open hybrid cloud working alongside existing infrastructure investments, and allowing for workload portability from a customer’s private cloud to Amazon EC2, or the reverse, if desired.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog57

OpenStack Summit – Why NFV Really Matters, by David H. Deans

I’ve been following the news releases and other storylines that have emerged from the ongoing proceedings at the OpenStack Summit in Paris, France. Some key themes have surfaced. In my first editorial, I shared reasons why the market has matured. In my second story, I observed how simplification via automation would broaden the addressable market for hybrid cloud services.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog58

Leveraging Existing Identity Sources in OpenStack Clouds, by Nathan Kinder

This week, I gave a presentation at the OpenStack Summit in Paris about integrating Keystone with existing identity sources.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog59

OpenStack 2015 – The Year of the Enterprise?, by Nir Yechiel

If 2014 was the year of the “Superuser”, then clearly the year 2015 seems to be about the “Year of the Enterprise“. The big question is: are we ready for enterprise mass adoption?

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog60

Horizon topics during Kilo development summit, by Matthias Runge

The past Kilo development summit had the following things for Horizon covered.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog61

What’s coming in Kilo for Glance, Zaqar and Oslo?, by Flavio Percoco

As usual, here’s a write up of what happened last week during the OpenStack Summit. More than a summary, this post contains the plans we discussed for the next 6 months.

… read more at http://tm3.org/blog62

We’re pleased to announce the availability of RDO packages for OpenStack Juno, for EL7 (RHEL7 and CentOS7) and Fedora 20.

Fedora 21 is still in development and running RDO Juno on Fedora 21 is not recommended at this time. A separate announcement will be made when RDO Juno on Fedora 21 is ready.

You can get started with RDO Juno via the process described in the Quickstart - http://rdoproject.org/Quickstart - and the various packages are available at https://rdo.fedorapeople.org/openstack-juno/

As always, if you have questions, you can bring them here, to the rdo-list mailing list, or to the IRC channel - #rdo on freenode.irc.net.

Thanks for being part of the RDO community!

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last week.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Building Docker images with Puppet by Lars Kellogg-Stedman

I like Docker, but I’m not a huge fan of using shell scripts for complex system configuration…and Dockerfiles are basically giant shell scripts.

I was curious whether or not it would be possible to use Puppet during the docker build process. As a test case, I used the ssh module included in the openstack-puppet-modules package.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog45

Delivering the Complete Open-Source Cloud Infrastructure and Software-Defined-Storage Story by neilwlevine

The OpenStack summit in Paris not only marks the release of Juno to the public but also the 6 month mark since Red Hat acquired Inktank, the commercial company behind Ceph. The acquisition not only underscored Red Hat’s commitment to use open source to disrupt the storage market, as it did in the operating system market with Linux, but also its investment in OpenStack where Ceph is a market leading scale-out storage platform, especially for block.

… Read more at http://tm3.org/blog46

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last week.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Who can sign for what? by Adam Young

In my last post, I discussed how to extract the signing information out of a token. But just because the signature on a document is valid does not mean that the user who signed it was authorized to do so. How can we got from a signature to validating a token? Can we use that same mechanism to sign other OpenStack messages?

… More at http://tm3.org/blog42

LinuxCon/KVMForum/CloudOpen Eu 2014 by Kashyap Chamarthy

While the Linux Foundation’s colocated events (LinuxCon/KVMForum/CloudOpen, Plumbers and a bunch of others) are still in progress (Düsseldorf, Germany), thought I’d quickly write a note here.

… More at http://tm3.org/blog43

OpenStack Instance HA Proposal by Russell Bryant

In a perfect world, every workload that runs on OpenStack would be a cloud native application that is horizontally scalable and fault tolerant to anything that may cause a VM to go down. However, the reality is quite different.

… More at http://tm3.org/blog44

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last week.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

libvirt blockcommit: shorten disk image chain by live merging the current active disk content by Kashyap Chamarthy

When using QCOW2-based external snapshots, it is desirable to reduce an entire disk image chain to a single disk to retain performance and increase while the guest is running. Upstream QEMU and libvirt has recently acquired the ability to do that. Relevant git commits for QEMU (Jeff Cody) and libvirt (Eric Blake).

… more at http://tm3.org/blog39

Fedora packaging workshop by Matthias Runge

On 17th and 18th this month, we’ll have a local Linux conference here. As part of this, I’ll give a short introductory workshop on packaging. The following series of posts helps me, to sort things for me and to provide a short reference for others and myself as well.

… more at http://tm3.org/blog40

Mentoring others and yourself by Flavio Percoco

Mentoring is one of the things I enjoy the most doing. I don’t consider myself the ultimate expert on things but I’ve definitely gone through enough things that had led me to become a mentor on different technical areas.

… more at http://tm3.org/blog41

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last week.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Wherein our hero attempts to build his own OpenStack Keystone RPMs, by Adam Young

I have a Devstack setup. I’ve hacked the Keystone repo to add some cool feature. I want to test it out with an RDO deployment. How do I make my own RPM for the RDO system?

This is not a how to. This is more like a police log.

… More at tm3.org/blog34

History of APIs for spawning processes in libvirt without involving the shell, by Daniel P. Berrangé

Libvirt has an interesting history when it comes to the spawning of child processes, for a long time eschewing all use of the standard C functions system and popen, instead preferring to use fork+exec via some higher level wrappers of our own design. There were a number of reasons for this decision, some obvious, some not so obvious:

… More at tm3.org/blog35

Usage of the libvirt virCommand APIs for process spawning, by Daniel P. Berrangé

The previous blog post looked at the history of libvirt APIs for spawning processes, up to the current day where there is a single virCommand object + APIs for spawning processes in a very flexible manner. This blog post will now look at the key features of this API and how it is used in practice.

… More at tm3.org/blog36

Network Function Virtualization – The Opportunity for OpenStack and Open Source, by Mark McLoughlin

This week’s launch of OPNFV is a good opportunity to think about a simmering debate in the OpenStack developer community for a while now – what exactly does NFV have to do with OpenStack, and is it a good thing?

… More at tm3.org/blog37

Here’s the blog posts that came out of the RDO community last week.

If you’re writing about RDO, or about OpenStack on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, and you’re not on my list, please let me know!

Zaqar’s path going forward, by Flavio Percoco

Long time since I wrote my last post about Zaqar (ex Marconi) and I thought this one should be a summary of what has happened and what will, probably, happen going forward.

Let me start by sharing where Zaqar is in OpenStack.

… More at tm3.org/blog25

Zaqar’s pools explained, by Flavio Percoco

Now that I’ve dedicated time to explain what Zaqar’s path going forward is (Zaqar being a messaging service akin to SQS/SNS), I can move on and spend some time diving into some of Zaqar’s internals. For this post, I’d like to explain how Zaqar’s pools work.

… More at tm3.org/blog26

What’s new in OpenStack Juno, by Rich Bowen

OpenStack is on a six-month release cycle, with each release given a code name starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet. On October 16th, OpenStack Juno will be released, with several new projects, and lots of new features.

Here’s a few of the things you can expect in the next release of OpenStack. This isn’t intended to be comprehensive – just a taste of some of the things that are coming.

… More at tm3.org/blog27

Journey of IPv6 in OpenStack, by Sridhar Gaddam

In this post, I would like to share my views on how IPv6 support has evolved in OpenStack with references at appropriate places to where you will be able to find more information. I will try to first cover what is available in IceHouse, then review what has been merged in Juno and then talk about what is brewing for Kilo.

… More at tm3.org/blog28

Free webinar on the Heat orchestration service, by Maria Gallegos

On Tuesday, September 30, we will presenting a Taste of Red Hat Training webinar dedicated to Heat, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform orchestration service that allows you to run multiple composite cloud applications.

… More at tm3.org/blog29

OpenStack Board Meeting – 2014-09-18, by Russell Bryant

Board meetings are open with the exception of the occasional Executive Session for topics that really do need to be private. I attended the meeting on September 18, 2014. Jonathan Bryce has since posted a summary of the meeting, but I wanted to share some additional commentary.

… More at tm3.org/blog30

PTLs and Project Success in OpenStack, by Russell Bryant

We’re in the middle of another PTL change cycle. Nominations have occurred over the last week. We’ve also seen several people step down this cycle (Keystone, TripleO, Cinder, Heat, Glance). This is becoming a regular thing in OpenStack. The PTL position for most projects has changed hands over time. The Heat project changes every cycle. Nova has its 3rd PTL from a 3rd company (about to enter his 2nd cycle). With all of this change, some people express some amount of discomfort and concern.

… More at tm3.org/blog31

OpenStack Summit Paris: Agenda Confirms 22 Red Hat Sessions, by Jeff Jameson

As this Fall’s OpenStack Summit in Paris approaches, the Foundation has posted the session agenda, outlining the schedule of events. With an astonishing 1,100+ sessions submitted for review, I was happy to see that Red Hat and eNovance have a combined 22 sessions that are included in the weeks agenda, with two more as alternates.

… More at tm3.org/blog32

Integrating custom code with Nova using hooks, by Lars Kellogg-Stedman

Would you like to run some custom Python code when Nova creates and destroys virtual instances on your compute hosts? This is possible using Nova’s support for hooks, but the existing documentation is somewhat short on examples, so I’ve spent some time trying to get things working.

… More at tm3.org/blog33