Category Archives: OpenStack

OpenStack vs CloudStack? It’s about open innovation.

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Yesterday, I got a short drive in a “Kick-Ass” Fisker Karma.  As someone who converted a car to electric, it was a great treat to see the amazing quality, polish and sophistication of the Karma.  Especially since, six years ago, I had to build my own EV.  Today there is a diversity of choices ranging from the Nissan, GM, Tesla, Aptera, Fisker and others.  Yet even with all these choices, EVs are far from the main stream.

How does that relate to Cloud *aaS?  It’s all about innovation cycles and adoption.

Cloud platforms (really, IaaS software) have transformed from DIY to vibrant projects in the last few years; however, we still don’t know what the finished products will look like – we are only at the beginning of the innovation cycle.

With yesterday’s Citrix’s “CloudStack joins Apache” announcement painted as a shot against OpenStack, it is tempting to get pulled into a polarized view of the right or wrong way to implement cloud software (NetworkWorld,  JavaWorld, CloudPundit).  I think that feature by feature comparisons miss the real dynamics of the cloud market.

The question is not about features today, it is about forward velocity tomorrow.  There are important areas needing technology development (network, storage, etc) in the cloud infrastructure space.  

So the real story, expressed eloquently by Thierry Carrez, is about open collaboration and the resulting pace of innovation.  That means that I consider all the cloud platforms in the market to be immature because we are still learning the scope of the “cloud” opportunity.

The critical question is how the various cloud projects will maintain growth and adopt innovation.  Like the current generation of EVs, we must both prove value in production and demonstrate our ability to learn and improve.

The Citrix decision to submit CloudStack to the Apache Foundation underscores this point: success of projects is about attracting collaboration and innovation.

From the perspective of building innovation and attracting developers, the tension between OpenStack and CloudStack is very real.

Open Source Cloud Bootstrapping Revisised

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At the OpenStack last design conference, Greg Althaus and I presented about updates (presentation here) we were making to a Nov 2010 cloud architecture white paper.

The revised “Bootstrapping Open Source Clouds” white paper has been out for a few months so I thought it was past time to throw out a link.

I’m really pleased about this update because it reflects real world experience my team has working with customers and partners on OpenStack (and Hadoop) deployments.

Executive Summary
Bringing a cloud infrastructure online can be a daunting bootstrapping challenge. Before
hanging out a shingle as a private or public cloud service provider, you must select a platform,
acquire hardware, configure your network, set up operations services, and integrate it to work
well together. That is a lot of moving parts before you have even installed a sellable application.
This white paper walks you through the decision process to get started with an open source
cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack™ and Dell™ PowerEdge™ C servers. At the end, you’ll
be ready to design your own trial system that will serve as the foundation of your hyperscale
cloud.
2011 Revision Notes
In the year since the the original publication of this white paper, we worked with many
customers building OpenStack clouds. These clouds range in size from small six-node lab
systems to larger production deployments. Based on these experiences, we updated this white
paper to reflect lessons learned.

OpenStack’s global reach

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The global reach of OpenStack has been clear from the very first “Austin” conference where we had participants from Europe and Asia; however, non-US adoption appears to be accelerating lately.

While this post is motivated by the Dell launch of my team‘s OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution into select Europe (UK & Germany) and Asia (China) markets, it is just an indication of the overall acceleration.  This presence is bolstered by our relationships abroad (video from Martin Standtler @ Canonical).

Two weeks ago, our Essex Deploy Day gathered world wide participation that continues 24/7 on the Crowbar list and Skype channel.   Internally, I also see substantial interest and customer demand from customers and partners all over the Asia-Pacific region

I’m excited to see Dell (and the broader community) formalize international support for OpenStack.

Post Script: Hidden in that same release is some mention of our coming support for the latest  (12th!) generation of Dell servers (the R720xd and C6220).  I’m a software guy, but I have to admit that these new servers are very cool cloud nodes because they’ve got a sweet mix of fast CPU, high RAM limits and bodacious spindle counts.  These fit the hardware profile that we identified in the “bootstrapping open source clouds” white paper refresh.

OpenStack Austin: What we’d like to see at the Design Summit

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Last week, the OpenStack Austin user group discussed what we’d like to see at the upcoming OpenStack Design Summit. We had a strong turnout (48?!).

  1. To get the meeting started, Marc Padovani from HP (this month’s sponsor) provided some lessons learned from the HP OpenStack-Powered Cloud. While Marc noted that HP has not been able to share much of their development work on OpenStack; he was able to show performance metrics relating to a fix that HP contributed back to the OpenStack community. The defect related to the scheduler’s ability to handle load. The pre-fix data showed a climb and then a gap where the scheduler simply stopped responding. Post-fix, the performance curve is flat without any “dead zones.” (sharing data like this is what I call “open operations“)
  2. Next, I (Rob Hirschfeld) gave a brief overview of the OpenStack Essex Deploy Day (my summary) that Dell coordinated with world-wide participation. The Austin deploy day location was in the same room as the meetup so several of the OSEDD participants were still around.
  3. The meat of the meetup was a freeform discussion about what the group would like to see discussed at the Design Summit. My objective for the discussion was that the Austin OpenStack community could have a broader voice is we showed consensus for certain topics in advance of the meeting.

At Jim Plamondon‘s suggestion, we captured our brain storming on the OpenStack etherpad. The Etherpad is super cool – it allows simultaneous editing by multiple parties, so the notes below were crowd sourced during the meeting as we discussed topics that we’d like to see highlighted at the conference. The etherpad preserves editors, but I removed the highlights for clarity.

The next step is for me to consolidate the list into a voting page and ask the membership to rank the items (poll online!) below.

Brain storm results (unedited)

Stablity vs. Features

API vs. Code

  • What is the measurable feature set?
  • Is it an API, or an implementation?
  • Is the Foundation a formal-ish standards body?
  • Imagine the late end-game: can Azure/VMWare adopt OPenStack’s APIs and data formats to deliver interop, without running OpenStack’s code? Is this good? Are there conversations on displacing incumbents and spurring new adoption?
  • Logo issues

Documentation Standards

  • Dev docs vs user docs
  • Lag of update/fragmentation (10 blogs, 10 different methods, 2 “work”)
  • Per release getting started guide validated and available prior or at release.

Operations Focus

  • Error messages and codes vs python stack traces
  • Alternatively put, “how can we make error messages more ops-friendly, without making them less developer-friendly?”
  • Upgrade and operations of rolling updates and upgrades. Hot migrations?

If OpenStack was installable on Windows/Hyper-V as a simple MSI/Service installer – would you try it as a node?

  • Yes.

Is Nova too big?  How does it get fixed?

  • libraries?
  • sections?
  • make it smaller sub-projects
  • shorter release cycles?

nova-volume

  • volume split out?
  • volume expansion of backend storage systems
  • Is nova-volume the canonical control plane for storage provisioning?  Regardless of transport? It presently deals in block devices only… is the following blueprint correctly targeted to nova-volume?

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/filedriver

Orchestration

  • Is the Donabe project dead?

Discussion about invitations to Summit

  • What is a contribution that warrants an invitation
  • Look at Launchpad’s Karma system, which confers karma for many different “contributory” acts, including bug fixes and doc fixes, in addition to code commitments

Summit Discussions

  • Is there a time for an operations summit?
  • How about an operators’ track?
  • Just a note: forums.openstack.org for users/operators to drive/show need and participation.

How can we capture the implicit knowledge (of mailing list and IRC content) in explicit content (documentation, forums, wiki, stackexchange, etc.)?

Hypervisors: room for discussion?

  • Do we want hypervisor featrure parity?
  • From the cloud-app developer’s perspective, I want to “write once, run anywhere,” and if hypervisor features preclude that (by having incompatible VM images, foe example)
  • (RobH: But “write once, run anywhere” [WORA] didn’t work for Java, right?)
  • (JimP: Yeah, but I was one of Microsoft’s anti-Java evangelists, when we were actively preventing it from working — so I know the dirty tricks vendors can use to hurt WORA in OpenStack, and how to prevent those trick from working.)

CDMI

Swift API is an evolving de facto open alternative to S3… CDMI is SNIA standards track.  Should Swift API become CDMI compliant?  Should CDMI exist as a shim… a la the S3 stuff.

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day: First Steps to Production

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One March 8th, 70 people from around the world gathered on the Crowbar IM channel to begin building a production grade OpenStack Essex deployment. The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in two physical locations: the Nokia offices in Boston and the TechRanch in Austin.

My objective was to enable the community to begin collaboration on Essex Deployment. At that goal, we succeeded beyond my expectations.

IMHO, the top challenge for OpenStack Essex is to build a community of deploying advocates. We have a strong and dynamic development community adding features to the project. Now it is time for us to build a comparable community of deployers. By providing a repeatable, shared and open foundation for OpenStack deployments, we create a baseline that allows collaboration and co-development. Not only must we make deployments easy and predictable, we must also ensure they are scalable and production ready.

Having solid open production deployment infrastructure drives OpenStack adoption.

Our goal on the 8th was not to deliver finished deployments; it was to the start of Essex deployment community collaboration. To ensure that we could focus on getting to an Essex baseline, our team invested substantial time before the event to make sure that participants had a working Essex reference deployment.

By the nature of my team’s event leadership and our approach to OpenStack, the event was decidedly Crowbar focused. I feel like this is an acceptable compromise because Crowbar is open and provides a repeatable foundation. If everyone has the same foundation then we can focus on the truly critical challenges of ensuring consistent OpenStack deployments. Even using Crowbar, we waste a lot of time trying to figure out the differences between configurations. Lack of baseline consistency seriously impedes collaboration.

The fastest way to collaborate on OpenStack deployment is to have a reference deployment as a foundation.

Success By The Numbers

This was a truly international community collaborative event. Here are some of the companies that participated:

Dell (sponsor), Nokia (sponsor), Rackspace, Opscode, Canonical, Fedora, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Nicira, Enstratus, Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Purdue University, Orbital Software Solutions, XepCloud and others.

PLEASE COMMENT here if I missed your company and I will add it to the list.

On the day of the event, we collected the following statistics:

  • 70 people on Skype IM channel (it’s not too late to join by pinging DellCrowbar with “Essex barclamps”).
  • 14+ companies
  • 2 physical sites with 10-15 people at each
  • 4 fold increase in traffic on the Crowbar Github to 813 hits.
  • 66 downloads of the Deploy day ISO
  • 8 videos capture from deploy day sessions.
  • World-wide participation

For over 70 people to spend a day together at this early stage in deployment is a truly impressive indication of the excitement that is building around OpenStack.

Improvements for Next Deploy Day

This was a first time that Andi Abes (Boston event lead), Rob Hirschfeld (Austin event lead) or Jean-Marie Martini (Dell event lead) had ever coordinated an event like this. We owe much of the success to efforts by Greg Althaus, Victor Lowther and the Canonical 12.04/Essex team before the event. Also, having physical sites was very helpful.

We are planning to do another event, so we are carefully tracking ways to improve.

Here are some issues we are tracking.

  • Issues with setting up a screen and voice share that could handle 70 people.
  • Lack of test & documentation on Crowbar meant too much time focused on Crowbar
  • Connectivity issues distributed voice
  • Should have started with DevStack as a baseline
  • more welcome in the comments!

Thank you!

I want to thank everyone who participated in making this event a huge success!

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day & Meetup (3/8)

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We, the Dell OpenStack team, think we’ve got everything ready for people to start hacking on Essex deployments today.  The event has been growing in size and scope.  For example, Fedora is also spending the day focused on Essex deployments.

Our plan is to have a coordination & training session at the top of every hour.  We’ll record the sessions so that you can pickup the thread even if you miss some of the session.  We’re using the Crowbar Github for event details.

We’ve made substantial progress in the last week on code that’s shifting: Ubuntu 12.04 support and getting the base Essex 4 operational.  I’ve also spun ISOs to help with the deploy – unlike previous versions, this one is just Crowbar core.  You’ll need to use the new barclamp import feature to add the OpenStack bits because we’re expecting those to change more frequently.

Please join us online today!

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day 3/8 – Get involved and install with us

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My team at Dell has been avidly tracking the ups, downs, and breakthroughs of the OpenStack Essex release.  While we still have a few milestones before the release is cut, we felt like the E4 release was a good time to begin the work on Essex deployment.  Of course, the final deployment scripts will need substantial baking time after the final release on April 5th; however, getting deployments working will help influence the quality efforts and expand the base of possible testers.

To rally behind Essex Deployments, we are hosting a public work day on Thursday March 8th.

For this work day, we’ll be hosting all-day community events online and physically in Austin and Boston.  We are getting commitments from other Dell teams, partners and customers around the world to collaborate.  The day is promising to deliver some real Essex excitement.

The purpose of these events is to deliver the core of a working OpenStack Essex deployment.  While my team is primarily focused on deploys via Crowbar/Chef, we are encouraging anyone interested in laying down OpenStack Essex to participate.  We will be actively engaged on the OpenStack IRC and mailing lists too.

We have experts in OpenStack, Chef, Crowbar and Operating Systems (Canonical, SUSE, and RHEL) engaged in these activities.

This is a great time to start learning about OpenStack (or Crowbar) with hands-on work.  We are investing substantial upfront time (checkout out the Crowbar wiki for details) to ensure that there is a working base OpenStack Essex deploy on Ubuntu 12.04 beta.  This deploy includes the Crowbar 1.3 beta with some new features specifically designed to make testing faster and easier than ever before.

In the next few days, I’ll cut a 12.04 ISO and OpenStack Barclamp TARs as the basis for the deploy day event.  I’ll also be creating videos that help you quickly get a test lab up and running.  Visit the wiki or meetup sites to register and stay tuned for details!

OpenStack Essex Events (Austin & Boston 3/8, WW Hack Day 3/1, Docs 3/6)

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The excitement over the OpenStack Essex release is building!  While my team has been making plans around the upcoming design summit in SF,  there is more immediate action afoot.

Tomorrow (3/1), numerous sites are gathering around a World Wide Essex Hack Day on 3/1.  If you want to participate or even host a hack venue, get on the list and IRC channel (details).

My team at Dell is organizing a community a follow-up OpenStack Essex Install Day next week (3/8) in both Austin and Boston.  Just like the Hack Day, the install fest will focus on Essex release code with both online and local presence.  Unlike the Hack Day, our focus will be on deployments.  For the Dell team, that means working on the Essex deployment for Crowbar.  We’re still working on a schedule and partner list so stay tuned.  I’m trying to webcast Crowbar & OpenStack training sessions during the install day.

The hack day will close with the regularly scheduled 3/8 OpenStack Austin Meetup (6:30pm at Austin TechRanch).  The topic for the meetup will be, …. wait for it …., the Essex Release.  Thanks go to HP and Dell for sponsoring!

It’s important to note that Anne Gentle is also coordinating an OpenStack Essex Doc Day on 3/6.

To recap:

Wow… that should satisfy your Essex cravings.

Austin OpenStack Meetup: Keystone & Knife (2/20 notes via Greg Althaus)

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I could not make it to the recent Austin OpenStack Meetup, but Greg Althaus generously let me post his notes from the event.

Background

Matt Ray talks about Chef

Matt Ray from Opscode presented some of the work with Chef and OpenStack. He talked about the three main chef repos floating around. He called out Anso’s original cookbook set that is the basis for the Crowbar cookbooks (his second set), and his final set is the emerging set of cookbooks in OpenStack proper. The third one is interesting and what he plans to continue working on to make into his public openstack cookbooks. These are an amalgamation of smokestack, RCB, Anso improvements, and his (Crowbar’s).

He then demoed his knife plugin (slideshare) to build openstack virtual servers using the Openstack API. This is nice and works against TryStack.org (previously “Free Cloud”) and RCB’s demo cloud. All of that is on his github repo with instructions how to build and use. Matt and I talked about trying to get that into our Crowbar distro.

There were some questions about flow and choice of OpenStack API versus Amazon EC2 API because there was already an EC2 knife set of plugins.

Ziad Sawalha talks about Keystone

Ziad Sawalha is the PLT (Project Technical Lead) for Keystone. He works for Rackspace out of San Antonio. He drove up for the meeting.

He split his talk into two pieces, Incubation Process and Keystone Overview. He asked who was interested in what and focused his talk more towards overview than incubation.

Some key take-aways:

  • Keystone comes from Rackspace’s strong, flexible, and scalable API. It started as a known quantity from his perspective.
  • Community trusted nothing his team produced from an API perspective
  • Community is python or nothing
    • His team was ignored until they had a python prototype implementing the API
    • At this point, comments on API came in.
  • Churn in API caused problems with implementation and expectations around the close of Diablo.
    • Because comments were late, changes occurred.
    • Official implementation lagged and stalled into arriving.
  • API has been stable since Diablo final, but code is changing. that is good and shows strength of API.
  • Side note from Greg, Keystone represents to me the power of API over Code. You can have innovation around the implementation as long all the implementations have a fair ground work to plan under which is an API specification. The replacement of Keystone with the Keystone Light code base is an example of this. The only reason this is possible is that the API was sound and documented.  (Rob’s post on this)

Ziad spent the rest of his time talking about the work flow of Keystone and the API points. He covered the API points.

  • Client to Keystone, Keystone to Client for initial auth token
  • Client to Middleware API for the services to have a front.
  • Middleware to Keystone to verify and establish identity.
  • Middleware to Service to pass identity

Not many details other then flow and flexibility. He stressed the API design separated protocol from actions and data at all the layers. This allows for future variations and innovations while maintaining the APIs.

Ziad talked about the state of Essex.

  • Planned
    • RBAC (aka Role Based Access Control)
    • Stability
    • Many backends
  • Actual
    • Code replacement Keystone Light
    • Stability
    • LDAP backend
    • SQL backend

Folsum work:

  • RBAC
  • Stability
  • AD backend
  • Another backend
  • Federation was planned but will most likely be pushed to G
    • Federation is the ability for multiple independent Keystones to operate (bursting use case)
    • Dependent upon two other federation components (networking and billing/metering)

OpenStack Boston Meetup 2/1 covers Quantum & Foundation

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My team at Dell was in Beantown (several of us are Nashua based) for an annual team meeting so the timing for this Boston meetup.  Special thanks to Andi Abes for organizing and Suse for Sponsoring!!

We covered two primary topics: Quantum and the OpenStack Foundation.

In typing up my notes from the sessions, I ended up with so much information that it made more sense to break them into independent blog posts. Wow – that’s a lot of value from a free meetup!eetup was ideal for us. While we showed up in force, so did many other Stackers including people from HP, Nicira, Suse, Havard, Voxel, RedHat, ESPN and many more! The turnout for the event was great and I’m taking notes that Austin may need to upgrade our pizza and Boston may need to upgrade their cookies (just sayin’).

The Quantum session by David Lapsley from Nicira talked about the architecture and applications of Quantum. I think that Quantum is an exciting incubated project for OpenStack; however, it is important to remember that Essex stands alone without it. I believe this fact gets forgotten in enthusiasm over Quantum’s shiny potential.

The OpenStack session by Rob Hirschfeld from Dell (me!) talked about the importance of governance for OpenStack and how the Foundation will play a key role in transitioning it from Rackspace to a neutral party. There are many feel-good community benefits that the Foundation brings; however, the collaborators’ ROI is driver for creating a strong foundation. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that fact and using it to create a more sustainable OpenStack.