Why I will go to CCC13 in Amsterdam ?

Aside from the fact that I work full-time on Apache CloudStack, that I am on the organizing committee and that my boss would kill me if I did not go to the CloudStack Collaboration conference, there are many great reasons why I want to go as an open source enthusiast, here is why:

It's Amsterdam and we are going to have a blast (the city of Amsterdam is even sponsoring the event). The venue -Beurs Van Berlage- is terrific, this is the same venue where the Hadoop summit is held and where the AWS Benelux Summit was couple weeks ago. We are going to have a 24/7 Developer room (thanks to CloudSoft) where we can meet to hack on CloudStack and its ecosystem, three parallel tracks in other rooms and great evening events. The event is made possible by the amazing local support from the team at Schuberg Philis, a company that has devops in its vein and organized DevOps days Amsterdam. I am not being very subtle in acknowledging our sponsors here, but hey, without them this would not be possible.

On the first day (November 20th) is the Hackathon sponsored by exoscale. In parallel to the hackathon, new users of CloudStack will be able to attend a full day bootcamp run by the super competent guys from Shapeblue, they also play guitar and drink beers so make sure to hang out with them :). Even as cool is that the CloudStack community recognizes that building a Cloud takes many components, so we will have a jenkins workshop and an elasticsearch workshop. I am big fan of elasticsearch, not only for keeping your infrastructure logs but also for other types of data. I actually store all CloudStack emails in an elasticsearch cluster. Jenkins of course is at the heart of everyone's continuous integration systems these days. Seeing those two workshops, it will be no surprise to see a DevOps track the next two days.

Kicking off the second day -first day of talks- we will have a keynote by Patrick Debois the jedi master of DevOps. We will then break up into a user track, a developer track, a commercial track and for this day only a devops track with a 'culture' flavor. The hard work will begin: choosing which talk to attend. I am not going to go through every talk, we received a lot of great submissions and choosing was hard. New CloudStack users or people looking into using CloudStack will gain a lot from the case studies being presented in the user track while the developers will get a deep dive into the advanced networking features of CloudStack including SDN support -right off the bat-. In the afternoon, the case studies will continue in the user track including a talk from NTT about how they built an AWS compatible cloud. I will have to head to the developer track for a session on 'interfaces' with a talk on jclouds, a new GCE interface that I worked on and my own talk on Apache libcloud for which I worked a lot on the CloudStack driver. The DevOps track will have an entertaining talk by Michael Ducy from Opscode, some real world experiences by John Turner and Noel King from Paddy Power and the VP of engineering for Citrix CloudPlatform will lead an interactive session on how to best work with the open source community of Apache CloudStack.

After recovering from the nights events, we will head into the second day with another entertaining keynote by John Willis. Here the choice will be hard between the storage session in the commercial track and the 'Future of CloudStack' session in the developer track. With talks from NetApp and SolidFire who have each developed a plugin in CloudStack plus our own Wido Den Hollander (PMC member) who wrote the Ceph integration the storage session will rock, but the 'Future of CloudStack' session will be key for developers, talking about frameworks, integration testing, system VMs...After lunch the user track will feature several intro to networking talks. Networking is the most difficult concept to grasp in clouds (IMHO). The storage session will continue with a talk by Basho on RiakCS (also integrated in CloudStack) and a panel. The dev track will be dedicated to discussions on PaaS, not to be missed if you ask me, as PaaS is the next step in Clouds. To wrap things up, I will have to decide between a session on metering/billing, a discussion on hypervisor choice and support, and a presentation on the CloudStack community in Japan after Ruv Cohen talking about trading cloud commodities.

The agenda is loaded and ready to fire, it will be tough to decide which sessions to attend but you will come out refreshed, energized with lots of new ideas to evolve your IT infrastructure, so one word: Register

And of course many thanks to our sponsors: Citrix, Schuberg Philis, Juniper, Sungard, Shapeblue, NetApp, cloudSoft, Nexenta, iKoula, leaseweb, solidfire, greenqloud, atom86, apalia, elasticsearch, 2source4, iamsterdam, cloudbees and 42on

CloudStack Google Summer of Code projects

Google Summer of Code is entering the final stretch with pencil down on Sept 16th and final evaluation on Sept 27th. Of the five projects CloudStack had this summer, one failed at mid-term and one led to committer status couple weeks ago. That's 20% failure and 20% outstanding results, on par with GSoC wide statistics I believe.

The LDAP integration has been the most productive project. Ian Duffy a 20 year old from Dublin did an outstanding job, developing his new feature in a feature branch, building a jenkins pipeline to test everything and submitting a merge request to master couple weeks ago. With 90% unittest coverage, static code analysis with Sonar in his jenkins pipeline and automatic publishing of rpms in a local yum repo, Ian exceed expectation. His code has even been already backported to the 4.1.1 release with the CloudSand distro of CloudStack.

The SDN extension project was about taking the native GRE controller in CloudStack and extend it to support XCP and KVM. Nguyen from Vietnam has done an excellent job quickly adding support for XCP thanks to his expertise with Xen. He is now putting the final touches on KVM support and building L3 services with OpenDaylight. The entire GRE controller was re-factored to be a plugin similar to the Nicira NVP, Midonet and BigSwitch BVS plugin. While native to CloudStack this controller brings another SDN solution to CloudStack. I expect to see his merge request before pencil down for what will be an extremely valuable project.

While the CloudStack UI is great, it was actually written has a demonstration of how the CloudStack API could be used to build a user facing portal. With the "new UI" project, Shiva Teja from India used boostrap and Angular to create a new UI. Originally the project suggested to use backbone but after feedback from the community Shiva switch to using Angular. Shiva's effort are to be commended as he truly worked on his own with in-consistent network connectivity and no local mentoring. Shiva is a bachelor student and had to learn bootstrap, angular and also Flask on his own. It must have been paying off since he is interviewing with Amazon and Goole for internships next summer. His code being independent of the CloudStack code has been committed to master in our tools directory. This creates a solid framework for other to build on and create their own CloudStack UI.

Perhaps the most research oriented project has been the one from Meng Han from Florida. This was no standard coding projects as it required not only to learn new technologies (aside from CloudStack) but also required investigation of the Amazon EMR API. Meng had to implement EMR in CloudStack using Apache Whirr. Whirr is a java library for provisioning of virtual machines on cloud providers. Whirr uses Apache jclouds and can interact with most cloud providers out there. Meng developed a new set of CloudStack APIs to launch hadoop clusters on-demand. At the start she had to learn CloudStack and install it, then learn the Whirr library and subsequently create a new API in CloudStack which would use Whirr to coordinate multiple node deployments. Meng's code is working but still a bit short from our goal of having a AWS EMR interface. This is partly my fault has this project could have required more mentoring. In any case, the work will go on and I expect to see an EMR implementation in CloudStack in the coming months.

All students faced the same challenge, not a code writing challenge but the OSS challenge and specifically learning the Apache Way. Apache is about consensus and public discussions on the mailing list. With several hundreds participants every month and very active discussion, the shear amount of email traffic can be intimidating. Sharing issues and asking for help on public mailing list is still a bit frightening. IRC, intense emailing, JIRA and git are basic tools used in all Apache project, but seldom used in academic settings. Learning these development tools and participating in a project with over a million line of code was the toughest challenge for students and the goal of GSoC. I am glad we got five students to join CloudStack this summer and tackle these challenges, if anything it is a terrific experience that will benefit their own academic endeavor and later their entire career. Great job Ian, Meng, Nguyen, Shiva and Dharmesh, we are not done yet but I wish you all the best.