You know OpenStack is gaining momentum and recognition when your local meetup group attracts a bunch of developers and operators along with sales and marketing people from across different verticals - and that's exactly what I experienced yesterday at the first user group meetings since the Summit in Portland a few weeks ago.
Our local community seems to have grown tremendously since I have become involved. We have some really talented and intelligent people showing up to share ideas and collaborate - and Sean Roberts (@sarob) has been doing a fantastic job of developing a focus for our user groups as he works on community development for the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors. We're very lucky to be able to support three different meetup groups for beginner, intermediate and advanced users of OpenStack thanks to Sean's great efforts - along with those community members who bother to show up and get involved.
This week's Advanced meetup group was focused around a Havanna Summit review - which meant that the members who were in Portland a few weeks ago got to recap some of the more interesting projects and topics we saw. Some of those included:
Refstack.org - Refstack provides a reference architecture and testing methodology in order for a cloud provider to be able to call itself an OpenStack cloud. This is built around Agile development processes used similar to what is currently used to manage code in the OpenStack Continuous Integration systems. Providers will be required to expose an endpoint for testing purposes and must be capable of passing a series of OpenStack systems tests in order for it to be 'certified' as an OpenStack cloud provider.
DevOps requirements - We discussed the real world requirements for implementing a DevOps approach when attempting to implement infrastructure that scales - and how so many companies are incorrectly thinking that 'free' software meant that there was no cost to implement. This is something that is affecting real world companies as we spoke with one operator yesterday who went through this exact pain with his employers while implementing OpenStack over the past 6 months. Based on his estimation, his implementation of OpenStack requires additional services which will cost approximately twice what the hardware costs amortized over 3-5 years. I'm not sure if this is based on a reliable scientific calculation - but I also don't think he's far off. The same gentleman also discussed his difficulty in building out the hardware infrastructure due to a lack of reference architecture to refer to at the time he was building (see above).
Project RedDwarf - Database as a Service - Project Red Dwarf is a mysql database-as-a-service solution for OpenStack aimed at providing scalable, redundant database solutions on-demand to tenants within the cloud. Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) presented on the design he saw where mysql could be scaled as a service - somewhat similar to a popular public cloud solution's implementation of relational database services. This would be a great solution for deploying OpenStack-on-OpenStack, another huge topic at this year's summit.
There was plenty more to discuss during this meeting, but we only had the room until 5:00 PM and there was a crowd gathering outside - so we said our goodbyes (for now) and planned to meet back at the Yahoo! campus for the beginner and intermediate groups at 7:00.
I arrived back at the Yahoo! campus slightly late, and when I walked in the Intermediate group was chatting it up. We were waiting on Vinay Binnai (@vinaybannai) to come present the blueprint he has been working on with other community members regarding Firewall-as-a-Service. We discussed what a firewall as a service should be with regard to tenant networks and a number of people committed to working on the blueprint in order to move progress along on the project.
All in all, the meetups were really well-run this week. I'm looking forward to the next one on the 16th. If you can make it out to Yahoo in Sunnyvale, come join us! We meet every second Thursday and our meetups are organized at http://www.meetup.com/openstack
Oh yeah, Colin schooled me on continuous integration, a topic which is completely new to me. I'm reading Jez Humble's book "Continuous Deployment" as a result. Funny how those things work out.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
OpenStack Summit Portland 2013 - Unconference Edition
Just as the Nicira NVP session by Dan Wendlandt wrapped up, I checked out the handy OpenStack Summit schedule app on my Android platform to find that none of the upcoming sessions were of particular interest - so I headed over to check out the Unconference schedule.
What is Unconference you may ask?
Unconference was an opportunity for anyone with an OpenStack-related topic they wanted to discuss to write their name and topic in a time slot on a set of easels in the main hallway. Slots were given out to speakers on a first-come first-served basis - once the slots were all claimed the list was finalized. I was rather delighted by the list of sessions being offered. Unconference was a smorgasbord of OpenStack-related content that had some really interesting topics throughout the summit. In fact, Unconference was somewhat of a regular destination for me. Any time I couldn't find something of interest in the general sessions Unconference came through for me.
I figured out that Room A104 was my next destination as I wanted to see Mirantis present on Savanna - Hadoop as a Service on OpenStack. I walked into a packed room with standing room only, found my place over against the side wall and tuned in to hear what the Mirantis team had to say about their new project. The back of the room filled up with other attendees and Mirantis team members smiling proudly - and rightfully so, these guys are doing some really interesting things with OpenStack. By the time they were ready to start, the room was as packed as could possibly be. I don't think Mirantis expected this much hoopla over Hadoop as a Service.
I figured out that Room A104 was my next destination as I wanted to see Mirantis present on Savanna - Hadoop as a Service on OpenStack. I walked into a packed room with standing room only, found my place over against the side wall and tuned in to hear what the Mirantis team had to say about their new project. The back of the room filled up with other attendees and Mirantis team members smiling proudly - and rightfully so, these guys are doing some really interesting things with OpenStack. By the time they were ready to start, the room was as packed as could possibly be. I don't think Mirantis expected this much hoopla over Hadoop as a Service.
Before we get too far, lets just put it out there - I'm weary about calling everything 'X' as a Service on OpenStack. Sure you can call it 'X-as-a-service' but isn't that the whole idea of addressing a pool of resources and shouldn't everything be made available as a service that's available in a service catalog? I would have put this up as my own Unconference topic had I gotten to the easel early enough - and it probably isn't the last you'll see of this subject from me - but I digress.
The developers went through a 20 minute presentation on the features of Savanna, talked about the future road map a little bit and then they did something that defied all odds - a live demo which actually worked! The Mirantis team was able to demonstrate how the Savanna GUI integrates fairly simply with the OpenStack Horizon dashboard as a plugin. In the interface, the user can easily pick the base snapshot image on which to base their Hadoop deployment, type in a number of worker and tracker nodes and away OpenStack goes building out the requested Hadoop environment.
Just a few minutes later, the presenter from Mirantis logged into the tracker node and submitted a job to the cluster to calculate Pi - a job that it did with relative ease and kicked back the result in what seemed like almost no time at all. I was fairly amazed at how quickly the Hadoop cluster was stood up with a name node, a tracker node and 5 worker nodes - from the first provisioning steps to running a job in under 10 minutes.
After the demonstration the floor was opened up to questions and comments - of which there were plenty. Interest in Savanna was high and there seemed to be a number of developers from other projects watching this one closely. After the tasty preview offered in this session, I'm looking forward to seeing more of what Savanna can do in future releases. During the conference, it was announced that Hortonworks, Red Hat and Mirantis will be working on this project jointly, so I would expect to see some really amazing developments in the not-so-distant future.
Keep up-to-date on the Savanna project at http://www.savanna.mirantis.com
Keep up-to-date on the Savanna project at http://www.savanna.mirantis.com
Friday, April 26, 2013
OpenStack Summit Portland 2013 - A Week in Review, Day 1 Part 1
It's been just over a week since leaving the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon and what a crazy week it has been so far. Prior to the OpenStack Summit, I can honestly say that the amount of cloud opportunities I discussed on a regular basis - well, let's just say they weren't that regular....
In the past week, I have had so many opportunities to discuss private cloud with our customers, and I am becoming very optimistic about the opportunities being presented to me. I came home with a ton of enthusiasm for OpenStack clouds and I'm just keeping that momentum going. That said, I'm going to provide a detailed review of my OpenStack Summit experience here over multiple posts. This is, in part, to share my love and joy for the OpenStack community and what I experienced in Portland - and also for my own selfish joy of getting to re-live the experience all over again.
I arrived in Portland late on Sunday night and flew in on a plane that was full of stackers. After a horrible night of sleep thanks to being in a hotel right along the 1st. street train line, I decided to walk into the city and get myself a green smoothie for breakfast before walking across the Steel Bridge and just over a mile to the convention center. It was a nice morning out, and I like the idea of walking around a city I haven't been in to get a feel for it. I used Yelp to find Kure, ordered myself a delicious green monster for breakfast and walked on over to the convention center.
The line for registration seemed to go on forever - until I figured out I was in the wrong line. I found the right line and got checked in by a team of guys with iPads running some custom app. I wonder if it was powered by Nova Compute? After some wait, my badge printed, I was handed my OpenStack hoodie (which has become like my security blanket) and off I went to my first day of sessions.
First up was "Getting from Grizzly to Havana: A Dev Ops Upgrade Pattern" which was very well presented by Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) from Dell. But first, an interlude - Rob started off by having the group record the chorus to his upcoming hit parody of Pawn Shop based on OpenStack (http://t.co/rX8V8WqMAc) .... Then he went on to talk about Dell's Crowbar management toolkit which can be used to manage an OpenStack deployment on Dell reference hardware. Since I had been asked this question earlier by a customer, my favorite takeaway from that session was "Upgrading from Essex to Grizzly is probably not a good idea." The real focus of the session was on using the layered DevOps approach to managing infrastructure as being a key component to upgrading. In a layered methodology, configurations are applied first to bare hardware, then at an operating system level and, at each step, additional custom configurations can be applied. This allows for a more granular approach to managing infrastructure and all of its components using a organized, systematical approach which is much simpler to manage than using legacy methodology. More focus is spent on delivery of platforms and applications, which is where real business value is realized.
Today, we don't have a clear upgrade path as OpenStack moves from one release to the next, but the need for this type of support has a tremendous effect on OpenStack's acceptance in the enterprise. I've been working on a variety of these solutions, and I just find that there are features in one platform that others are lacking - and vice versa. What if you have a truly commodity infrastructure? Which tool set do you invest in? This will all be discussed later in a session by Jason Cannavale from Rackspace...
In the past week, I have had so many opportunities to discuss private cloud with our customers, and I am becoming very optimistic about the opportunities being presented to me. I came home with a ton of enthusiasm for OpenStack clouds and I'm just keeping that momentum going. That said, I'm going to provide a detailed review of my OpenStack Summit experience here over multiple posts. This is, in part, to share my love and joy for the OpenStack community and what I experienced in Portland - and also for my own selfish joy of getting to re-live the experience all over again.
I arrived in Portland late on Sunday night and flew in on a plane that was full of stackers. After a horrible night of sleep thanks to being in a hotel right along the 1st. street train line, I decided to walk into the city and get myself a green smoothie for breakfast before walking across the Steel Bridge and just over a mile to the convention center. It was a nice morning out, and I like the idea of walking around a city I haven't been in to get a feel for it. I used Yelp to find Kure, ordered myself a delicious green monster for breakfast and walked on over to the convention center.
The line for registration seemed to go on forever - until I figured out I was in the wrong line. I found the right line and got checked in by a team of guys with iPads running some custom app. I wonder if it was powered by Nova Compute? After some wait, my badge printed, I was handed my OpenStack hoodie (which has become like my security blanket) and off I went to my first day of sessions.
First up was "Getting from Grizzly to Havana: A Dev Ops Upgrade Pattern" which was very well presented by Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) from Dell. But first, an interlude - Rob started off by having the group record the chorus to his upcoming hit parody of Pawn Shop based on OpenStack (http://t.co/rX8V8WqMAc) .... Then he went on to talk about Dell's Crowbar management toolkit which can be used to manage an OpenStack deployment on Dell reference hardware. Since I had been asked this question earlier by a customer, my favorite takeaway from that session was "Upgrading from Essex to Grizzly is probably not a good idea." The real focus of the session was on using the layered DevOps approach to managing infrastructure as being a key component to upgrading. In a layered methodology, configurations are applied first to bare hardware, then at an operating system level and, at each step, additional custom configurations can be applied. This allows for a more granular approach to managing infrastructure and all of its components using a organized, systematical approach which is much simpler to manage than using legacy methodology. More focus is spent on delivery of platforms and applications, which is where real business value is realized.
Today, we don't have a clear upgrade path as OpenStack moves from one release to the next, but the need for this type of support has a tremendous effect on OpenStack's acceptance in the enterprise. I've been working on a variety of these solutions, and I just find that there are features in one platform that others are lacking - and vice versa. What if you have a truly commodity infrastructure? Which tool set do you invest in? This will all be discussed later in a session by Jason Cannavale from Rackspace...
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