Recent Stackiness

Meetup

Tomorrow is OpenStack Atlanta's second event (the first being a HackIn).  Ken Pepple is going to be talking about deploying OpenStack, something he should feel very comfortable doing, given his book as well as Internap's latest announcement :-)

There's more info about tomorrow's event at the Meetup page.

OpenStack Design Summit

In a couple weeks, a bunch of us from DreamHost are going to be heading to the OpenStack Summit and Conference in San Francisco. There's a lot of buzz about it both inside the company, in the offices of our fellow OpenStack collaborators, and in the wider open source community. With Citrix's recent announcement, Internap's deployment, Eucalyptus' approval by Amazon, there's plenty of Cloud Drama to go around. Fortunately, the focus of the Summit and Conference is on the important positives: how to improve an extraordinary piece of software and disseminating expertise. Can't wait!

GitHub Love

Last but not least, the Dev team at DreamHost has been using Github in conjunction with Launchpad in a manner similar to how the OpenStack project does it. The increased interest in open source software in our offices is starting to make its way out to our customers, and we've got a new web presence that is the first step in supporting this new direction. We're cooking up a bunch more stuff, so be sure to check in on our repos from time to time :-)

OpenStack at PyCon 2012 Sprints!

This is just a short post to give a shout out to some folks who are sprinting for OpenStack this year at PyCon. It's a small group, since the Folsom Design Summit and Conference is coming up in a few weeks.

One big surprise came last night when I got an email about Cisco's recent work with Layer 3 (blueprint) support in Quantum, and there were two Cisco folks here this morning to chat about that. Mark McClain (DreamHost) is digging deep into their work right now.

Yahoo! is remote-sprinting today, and they hope to be in the house tomorrow, to continue working on current improvements in DevstackPy. Mike Pittaro (La Honda Research), Jonathan LaCour and Doug Hellmann (DreamHost) are working with Yahoo! on that.

Mike Perez (DreamHost) is hacking on some additional improvements in Horizon for different storage backend representations. We've also chatted a bit about the latest efforts in Horizon for Quantum support (Michael Fork's work). Perez is also helping out tracking some bugs down in DevstackPy.

Special thanks to Mike Pittaro for improving the sprinting pages on the OpenStack wiki with links to previous work and discussions!

If you're keen on OpenStack and would like to dive in with some fellow hackers into the deep ends of Nova, Quantum, or Horizon, be sure to come by or pop in at #openstack-pycon on Freenode :-)

Successful Hack-In, 01 Mar 2012!

DreamHost has a new core set of cloud developers now based in Atlanta, and a new Meetup group to go with that :-) Today there was a global OpenStack Hack-In, and I just posted a summary to our Meetup discussion page, but since I desperately need to do some blogging, I'm republishing here :-) (with some minor tweaks...)

We had fun in person, there was good chatter on IRC with the Colorado and San Francisco teams, and we had a great time digging into OpenStack some more.

Technical highlights include:

• testing out development deployments of OpenStack using Vagrant (some successes, some blockers)
• testing out dev deployments of OpenStack using VirtualBox directly
• filed some bugs for issues in horizon regarding error feedback to users and how the documentation is generated
• dug into issues with logging and inconsistencies in datestamps
• uncovered some weirdness with the usage of gnu screen and hanging services/partial devstack installs due to sudo assumptions (devstack assumes a passwordless sudo, and will label an install as failed if it gets hung up on the apache log tail, waiting for a password, even if the install was successful and all the services started correctly)
• Doug Hellmann made his first commit upstream to OpenStack

On the non-technical, fun side:

• Thanks for Zenoss for the fun swag today (the Zebras are still staring at me... I think they're going to be making an appearance in ToyStory 5)
• Even more thanks to Zenoss for the offer to become an OpenStack Atlanta Sponsor (food, drinks, and swag)!
• Thanks to DreamHost for the AMAZING coffee and danishes from The Village Corner Restaurant/Basket Bakery. Seriously. That was the best coffee I have ever had. In. My. Life.
• Also, thanks DreamHost for the pizza and the sweet potato pies!

We took a couple snapshots of the event, and I'll be posting those soon on the Meetup page, but for the super-impatient, they're up on Flickr right now

http://www.flickr.com...