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square-cloudmonkey.pngThis week, we take a look at the 4.2.0 feature freeze pushback, the Apache CloudStack user survey, and new committers and PMC members for Apache CloudStack.

Major Discussions

In this section we look at major discussions that have happened on the CloudStack mailing lists. This is by no means a full summary of all discussions on the lists, but we try to hit the highlights that are relevant to the larger CloudStack community.

4.1 Releases

The first major release of Apache CloudStack since it became a top level project was released on June 5, 2013 and is available. For more information, please see the official announcement.

4.2 Feature Freeze Push Back

Due to the delays in releasing 4.1 release, it was requested by many in the community to push back the freeze date. Chip Childers called for a Vote on 5/31 to move the Feature Freeze back from 5/31 to 6/28 (Updated Schedule). The push back was approved with 19 +1 votes (full results).

CloudStack Community Survey Underway

Please let your voice and your organization be heard in this short survey. We would like to have both users of the Apache CloudStack source and Commercial derivatives, "We will be using the data in aggregate to get to know more about how it's being deployed out there." Chip Childers commented. Click Here to take the short survey.

CloudStack Planet

  • CloudStack University by Sebastien Goasguen: At Apache CloudStack we recently started an initiative to organize our content into learning modules. We call this initiative CloudStack University. Everyone is invited to participate by contributing content (slides and screencasts), suggesting new learning modules that are needed and even creating exercises and assignments. School fun ! As we were discussing the initiative on the mailing list we started by looking at our existing content: slideshares, youtube videos and thought about organizing them into a CloudStack 101 course. This is still a work in progress that requires everyones participation to make it a great resource.
  • Videographer is working with CloudStack to create videos for the project. Is your cloud one of the "Top 10 Coolest CloudStack Deployments"? Videographer Gregg Witkin and writer Jessica Tomechak are working together on videos this summer, including one that aims to show some of the most interesting real-world applications of CloudStack. They welcome your participation on this video, and suggestions for other videos you'd like to see. Check out these videos Gregg did with CloudStack just last year. Link 1, Link 2

Upcoming Events

Don't miss the CloudStack Collaboration Conference, which is coming up June 23 through June 25.

  • Just announced that Adrian Cockcroft (Director of Architecture for the Cloud Systems team at Netflix) will deliver the closing keynote at the conference with, "Dystopia as a Service" on June 25th, 2013. Adrian will discuss the new challenges and demands of living in this dystopian world of cloud-based services along with an overview of the Netflix open source cloud platform. For more info click here

New Committers and PMC Members

  • John Burwell has been invited to join the CloudStack PMC, and has accepted
  • Sailaja Mada has been invited to become a CloudStack committer, and has accepted
  • Venkata Swamy has been invited to become a CloudStack committer, and has accepted
  • Wei Zhou has been invited to become a CloudStack committer, and has accepted
  • Sangeetha Hariharan has been invited to become a CloudStack committer, and has accepted

square-cloudmonkey.png The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.1.0 release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform. This is the first major release from Apache CloudStack since its graduation from the Apache Incubator on March 20th.

Apache CloudStack is an integrated software platform that allows users to build a feature-rich IaaS. CloudStack includes an intuitive user interface and rich API for managing the compute, networking, accounting, and storage resources for private, hybrid, or public clouds.

The 4.1.0 release represents more than five months of development effort by the Apache CloudStack community. The release includes many new features and bugfixes from the 4.0.x cycle. The 4.1.0 release also marks major changes in the codebase to make CloudStack easier for developers, a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages, and completes the changeover to using Maven as a build tool.

New Features​

Some of the notable new features in Apache CloudStack 4.1.0 include:

  • An API discovery service that allows an end point to list its supported APIs and their details.
  • Added an Events Framework to CloudStack to provide an “event bus” with publish, subscribe, and unsubscribe semantics. Includes a RabbitMQ plugin that can interact with AMQP servers. Introduces the notion of a state change event.
  • Implement L3 router functionality in the Nicira NVP plugin, and including support for KVM (previously Xen-only).
  • API request throttling to prevent attacks via frequent API requests.
  • AWS-style regions.
  • Egress firewall rules for guest networks.
  • Resizing root and data volumes.
  • Reset SSH key to access VMs.
  • Support for EC2 Query API.
  • Autoscaling support in conjunction with load balancing devices such as NetScaler.

Downloads​

The official source is available from:

http://cloudstack.apache.org/downloads.html

In addition to the official source code release, individual contributors also make convenience binaries available. 4.1.0 convenience binaries should be available within a day or so of the release announcement.

Note that there is a known issue with 4.1.0 and a recent Tomcat release. This has been addressed in the convenience binaries, but is still present in 4.1.0 source release. We will be working on a 4.1.1 release that will contain that fix shortly.

CloudStack Collaboration Conference​

The CloudStack community will be gathering for its second conference this month in Santa Clara, CA. The event will start on June 23rd with a hackathon, then formal programming on June 24th and 25th. This year we’ve gotten some fantastic keynotes, including DevOps legend Gene Kim (author of “The Phoenix Project”). You can find all the details at http://www.cloudstackcollab.org/, and the schedule at http://www.cloudstackcollab.org/schedule/.

About Apache CloudStack​

Apache CloudStack is a complete software suite for creating Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Target environments include service providers and enterprises. It is used by many service providers to set up an on-demand, elastic cloud computing services and by enterprises to set up a private cloud for use by their own employees. Apache CloudStack is also available to individuals and organizations that wish to study and implement an IaaS for personal, educational, and/or production use.

Further information on Apache CloudStack can be found at cloudstack.apache.org.

square-cloudmonkey.pngThe Apache CloudStack is very near to the 4.1.0 release, and as a result we’re conducting a vote on artifacts for the 4.1.0 release right now. Because we want to make sure we have the best possible release, we’d like to invite anyone who’s interested in CloudStack to take the current release candidate for a test drive.

Chip Childers started the vote on May 28th and it will run for a minimum of 72 hours, barring any blockers. Note that a VOTE requires at least three +1 votes from PMC members to pass, but anyone can vote, and we welcome input from all members of the community - positive votes mean that a wider community has taken a look at the release and helped vet it before we make it official. And if there are technical issues that might be a –1 on the release, we’ll take a look at those regardless of whether a person is a PMC member or a member of the community speaking up for the first time.

The source release is available on dist.apache.org: https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/cloudstack/4.1.0/, and the list of CHANGES is available via our git repository.

Full testing instructions are available on the CloudStack wiki.

Please be sure to send any feedback via the VOTE thread on dev@cloudstack.apache.org. We’re looking forward to getting the 4.1.0 release out the door, come and give us a hand!

square-cloudmonkey.pngWhat's new in Apache CloudStack? This issue, we take a look at progress towards the 4.1.0 release, major discussions in the community, and the upcoming CloudStack Collaboration Conference. We also welcome three new committers to the Apache CloudStack project, Clayton Weise, Isaac Chiang, and Phong Nguyen.

As you may have noticed, we skipped the newsletter last week. Apologies about that! This week's newsletter catches up from the beginning of May.

CloudStack North America Collaboration Conference 2013!

The Apache CloudStack community is going to have its second conference in late June. If you missed the first one, or couldn't wait to do it again, you'll want to hurry up and make plans to be there!

  • CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 is being held from 23 June to 25 June in Santa Clara, CA at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
  • Register now as spots are limited! It's important to join in our yearly conference to learn and truly collaborate with the community in person. This year we are including a "Hack Day", where collaboration will be happening in a real time!
  • Are you ready to share your CloudStack vision? See the Call for Proposals if you're interested in speaking. Proposals close on May 19th.
  • We are still looking for Conference Sponsors! Have your company be part of this great event. Contact Nancy Asche at (407) 601-6228 or nancy.asche@conferencedirect.com for more details on how to get involved.

Major Discussions

Several major discussions this week, summarized below. Note that this is only a fraction of the activity in the project. For a full overview of project activity, you may want to subscribe to dev@cloudstack.apache.org.

4.1.0 Update

Chip Childers sent out an update on the latest blockers on Monday, May 13th.

Security Mailing List

To better help communicate about security related matters, announce security concerns, and determine additional security needs for CloudStack, a new mailing list security@cloudstack.apache.org is being set up and run similarly to security@apache.org. The list is only open to members of the security team, but anyone can email the list with security issues.

Network Guru Refactoring

Daan Hoogland has proposed refactoring the network guru. Chiradeep Vittal points out that, for major changes, we should have a functional specification (FS) in addition to an email bringing the topic up on dev@. Daan has agreed to provide one, which should help spark an intelligent discussion about the proposed feature.

Test Plan Review for Better VM Sync

Suresh Sadhu has asked for review of a QA Test Plan for "Better VM Sync" and for comments on the plan.

Feature Freeze for 4.2.0 is Coming

Animesh Chaturvedi has posted a reminder about the 4.2.0 feature freeze, along with the dashboard for tracking 4.2.0 progress.

Change Status when Features are Merged to Master

Sudha Ponnaganti reminds contributors to change the status in Jira. It's important to help folks doing QA to pick up the feature for validation.

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

Upcoming Events

If you have an event you wanted added here, please send to the marketing@cloudstack.apache.org or see how to contribute to the news below.

New Committers and PMC Members

Clayton Weise has been invited to become a committer and has accepted.

Phong Nguyen has been invited to become a committer and has accepted.

Isaac Chiang has been invited to become a committer and has accepted.

Contributing to the Weekly News

Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? Many hands make light work, but having only one editor means getting the weekly news out every week is a "best effort" activity. A healthy community publication needs several contributors to ensure weekly issues go out on time.

If you have an event, discussion, or other item to contribute to the Weekly News, you can add it directly to the wiki by editing the issue you want your item to appear in. (The next week's issue is created before the current issue is published - so at any time there should be at least one issue ready to edit.)

Alternatively, you can send a note to the marketing@cloudstack.apache.org mailing list with a subject including News: description of topic or email the newsletter editor directly (jzb at apache.org), again with the subject News: description of topic. Please include a link to the discussion in the mailing list archive or Web page with details of the event, etc.

square-cloudmonkey.pngAre you using, supporting, or helping develop Apache CloudStack? Doing interesting work around Apache CloudStack? If so, you should be speaking at the second CloudStack Collaboration Conference this June in Santa Clara. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, May 12th. You can submit talks at http://www.cloudstackcollab.com/CfP/.

The Collaboration Conference will feature tracks for users, developers, and integrators of Apache CloudStack. We’re looking for presentations that provide insight into best practices in deploying and developing Apache CloudStack. This includes supporting technologies like configuration management tools, monitoring solutions, and more.

This will be an outstanding opportunity for developers to collaborate, exchange ideas, and get work done face-to-face with other Apache CloudStack contributors to improve Apache CloudStack.

Proposals​

The program committee will be looking for presentations and workshops related to working with and developing Apache CloudStack. This includes everything from running CloudStack at scale, best practices for working with IaaS clouds, discussions about CloudStack’s architecture, proposals for feature development, and more. We’re also open to talks that go hand-in-hand with managing Apache CloudStack, like configuration management and monitoring tools.

In short, if it’s relevant to Apache CloudStack development, deployment, and integration, we’re interested in what you might have to say. For an example of what we’re looking for, check out some of the videos from last year’s event.

To submit your talk, just go to http://www.cloudstackcollab.com/CfP/ and follow the steps there.

Timeline and Deadlines​

There’s no time like the present to submit a proposal. We recommend getting your proposal in early, and feel free to ask questions about talk ideas on marketing@cloudstack.apache.org if you want tips for success! You can reach the CfP committee at planning@cloudstackcollab.org.

Dates for proposals are as follows:

  • Call for Proposals is open on April 22nd.
  • Call for Proposals closes on May 12th.
  • Notifications will go out on May 17th.
  • Confirmations will be due by May 22nd.

Travel Sponsorships​

Not sure if you can afford the airfare and lodging to attend the Collaboration Conference? Please don’t let that stop you from submitting your best proposal. We may be making a number of travel sponsorships available for speakers who have useful information to share with the Apache CloudStack community.

Code of Conduct​

The Apache CloudStack community is open to everyone. As such, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all - regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, or religion. We respect and encourage diversity at our conference.

By agreeing to present at the conference, you are agreeing to abide by the code of conduct. We expect all speakers and attendees to have read and understood the code of conduct, and that all presentations will meet this standard.

Questions?​

If you have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the conference planning committee by sending an email to planning@cloudstackcollab.org.

This week, we had discussions about the release cycle and whether a six-month cycle may be more appropriate. Work continued on the 4.1.0 release, and Apache CloudStack 4.0.2 was released.

Major Discussions

Several major discussions this week, summarized below. Note that this is only a fraction of the activity in the project. For a full overview of project activity, you may want to subscribe to dev@cloudstack.apache.org.

Release Cycle: Four Months, or Six?

Animesh Chaturvedi started new thread for a discussion that cropped up in the timeline thread about the four-month vs. six-month release cycle ideas. After much discussion, Animesh summed up the discussion saying:

I still see there is difference of opinion and not a clear consensus with 12 out
of 21 ( approx. 60%) preferring 6 months. But going by the argument of not
having given proper shot to 4 month cycle I will say we can keep 4.2 as a 4
month cycle and pull in all effort to make it successful. If it turns out that
we can work with 4 month schedule that's well and good otherwise we can bring
this topic again based on the results of running 4 month cycle.

4.1.0 Approaches

After clearing out a number of last-minute blockers, it looks like 4.1.0 may be just about ready to roll. Chip Childers posted on Friday that he was waiting on confirmation on CLOUDSTACK-528 and CLOUDSTACK-2194 being fixed. If those are fixed, Chip says he will "proceed with starting the VOTE thread" Monday morning, Eastern time.

Apache CloudStack 4.0.2 Released

Joe Brockmeier announced the 4.0.2 release on 24 April, along with security fixes for two security vulnerabilities.

Security Vulnerabilities in CloudStack 4.0.x

John Kinsella sent out an announcement detailing two security vulnerabilities on 24 April:

Description:
The CloudStack PMC was notified of two issues found in Apache CloudStack:

1) An attacker with knowledge of CloudStack source code could gain
unauthorized access to the console of another tenant's VM.

2) Insecure hash values may lead to information disclosure. URLs
generated by Apache CloudStack to provide console access to virtual
machines contained a hash of a predictable sequence, the hash of
which was generated with a weak algorithm. While not easy to leverage,
this may allow a malicious user to gain unauthorized console access.

Mitigation:
Updating to Apache CloudStack versions 4.0.2 or higher will mitigate
these vulnerabilities.

Credit:
These issues were identified by Wolfram Schlich and Mathijs Schmittmann
to the Citrix security team, who in turn notified the Apache
CloudStack PMC.

Exposing APIs that carry POST data

Prasanna Santhanam raised a discussion about adding the ability to send user data as POST to commands.

I'm guessing we'll have to put in additional annotations on our APIs
that support POST so that API discovery can print the methods
supported (GET/POST). Right now it's only the deployVMCmd (AFAIK). But
I expect this will need to be done for others soon.

I've included POST support for every command in marvin but that's
just brute-force. To make it more intelligent I think we should apply
it to only apis that make sense as POST (causing side-effects). But
that needs to be exposed by the api endpoint.

Enabling GitHub Pull Request Notification

A discussion was brought up on dev@ this weekend about enabling notifications for pull requests made via GitHub. David Nalley remarked that in his opinion, "there really isn't an option - if we are going to have a GitHub mirror, we also need to be able to deal with the pull requests there. Ignoring folks that submit pull requests is inappropriate."

Chip questioned the need for a GitHub mirror at all. "Not sure the value, when you consider the confusion it causes WRT the canonical source repo."

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

  • More Fun with the CloudStack API - Kirk Jantzer writes about playing with the CloudStack API and writing a tool "in an effort to make deployment of a mass amount of servers with as little effort as possible."
  • Thanks to the Apache CloudStack community! - Shane Curcuru writes about the Apache CloudStack graduation and its incubation. "The desire to get things 'right' at Apache was clear in everything the CloudStack community did, and the end result looks to be an incredibly strong project that’s quickly gathering developers from a wide variety of vendors and users. Part of this growth is about the great technology; but a lot is due to the helpful and welcoming face that the CloudStack committers put on their project."

Upcoming Events

Jira

Checking in on the upcoming 4.2.0 release, we have added a few bugs over the past week:

New Committers and PMC Members

No new committers or PMC members announced this week.

Contributing to the Weekly News

Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? Many hands make light work, but having only one editor means getting the weekly news out every week is a "best effort" activity. A healthy community publication needs several contributors to ensure weekly issues go out on time.

If you have an event, discussion, or other item to contribute to the Weekly News, you can add it directly to the wiki by editing the issue you want your item to appear in. (The next week's issue is created before the current issue is published - so at any time there should be at least one issue ready to edit.)

Alternatively, you can send a note to the marketing@cloudstack.apache.org mailing list with a subject including News: description of topic or email the newsletter editor directly (jzb at apache.org), again with the subject News: description of topic. Please include a link to the discussion in the mailing list archive or Web page with details of the event, etc.

square-cloudmonkey.pngWe’re pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals (CfP) for the second CloudStack Collaboration Conference is now open! The conference is being held in Santa Clara, CA from Sunday June 23 through Tuesday June 25.

The Collaboration Conference will feature tracks for users, developers, and integrators of Apache CloudStack. We’re looking for presentations that provide insight into best practices in deploying and developing Apache CloudStack.

This will be an outstanding opportunity for developers to collaborate, exchange ideas, and get work done face-to-face with other Apache CloudStack contributors to improve Apache CloudStack.

Proposals​

The program committee will be looking for presentations and workshops related to working with and developing Apache CloudStack. This includes everything from running CloudStack at scale, best practices for working with IaaS clouds, discussions about CloudStack’s architecture, proposals for feature development, and more. We’re also open to talks that go hand-in-hand with managing Apache CloudStack, like configuration management and monitoring tools.

In short, if it’s relevant to Apache CloudStack development, deployment, and integration, we’re interested in what you might have to say. For an example of what we’re looking for, check out some of the videos from last year’s event.

Timeline and Deadlines​

There’s no time like the present to submit a proposal. We recommend getting your proposal in early, and feel free to ask questions about talk ideas on marketing@cloudstack.apache.org if you want tips for success! You can reach the CfP committee at planning@cloudstackcollab.org.

Dates for proposals are as follows:

  • Call for Proposals is open on April 22nd.
  • Call for Proposals closes on May 11th.
  • Notifications will go out on May 17th.
  • Confirmations will be due by May 22nd.

Travel Sponsorships​

Not sure if you can afford the airfare and lodging to attend the Collaboration Conference? Please don’t let that stop you from submitting your best proposal. We may be making a number of travel sponsorships available for speakers who have useful information to share with the Apache CloudStack community.

Code of Conduct​

The Apache CloudStack community is open to everyone. As such, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all - regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, or religion. We respect and encourage diversity at our conference.

By agreeing to present at the conference, you are agreeing to abide by the code of conduct. We expect all speakers and attendees to have read and understood the code of conduct, and that all presentations will meet this standard.

Questions?​

If you have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the conference planning committee by sending an email to planning@cloudstackcollab.org.

square-cloudmonkey.pngAfter a successful first run in Las Vegas, we’re bringing back the CloudStack Collaboration Conference for 2013! This time we’re gathering the community in Santa Clara, California from Sunday June 23rd through Tuesday June 25th.

There’s a lot going on in the Apache CloudStack community, and you won’t want to miss the opportunity to catch up with the developers that are moving CloudStack forward, users who have successfully built production clouds, and integrators who are helping build a healthy ecosystem around the open foundation of Apache CloudStack. The conference is your opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss plans for Apache CloudStack, learn how others are using it, and to participate in workshops and sprints about CloudStack.

We will, of course, be having some quality fun time help the community get to know one another and offset all the hard work we’ve been doing to move the Apache CloudStack project to a top-level project and get the 4.1.0 release close to shipping.

Important Dates​

The Call for Papers begins on April 22nd! You can submit your proposal at CloudStackCollab.net.

  • The Call for Proposals ends on May 11th.
  • Notifications go out on May 17th.
  • Confirmations will be due by May 22nd.
  • Schedule will be announced on May 25th.

Note that we have a limited number of speaking slots for this event, and we’ve had overwhelming response to our previous CfP. It’s highly unlikely the CfP will be extended, so submit today!

  • The Conference Hack Day will be on June 23rd.
  • The Conference talks and planned sessions begin on June 24.
  • The Conference ends on June 25th.

Location and Pricing​

The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 will be at the Santa Clara Convention Center, less than 5 minutes away from the San Jose International Airport (SJC).

Early-bird registration will be $97 if you register before May 24th. The general registration after May 24th will increase to $149, so register today.

We encourage attendees to stay at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara to participate in after-hours events with the Apache CloudStack community. Book your room today to take advantage of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 special rate of $199.00 per night. There are a limited number of rooms available at this rate, so book early!

See the registration page for more information.

Sponsoring

Sponsorship opportunities are available for the CloudStack Collaboration Conference. If you’d like to see the sponsorship prospectus or ask about sponsoring, contact Nancy Asche for more information.

See you in California!

We’re excited about getting the CloudStack community together again, and we hope you’ll join us! Don’t miss out, register today!

The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.0.2 release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform. This is a minor release in the 4.0.0 branch, which contains fixes for 40 bugs.

Apache CloudStack is an integrated software platform that allows users to build a feature-rich IaaS. CloudStack includes an intuitive user interface and rich API for managing the compute, networking, accounting, and storage for private, hybrid, or public clouds. The project entered the Apache Incubator in April 2012, and graduated in March 2013.

The 4.0.2 release includes fixes for a number of issues, including two minor security vulnerabilities (CVE–2013–2756 and CVE–2013–2758), problems displaying storage statistics, a fix for the SSVM HTTP proxy, support for CentOS 6.4, and other fixes.

Downloads​

The official source code releases can be downloaded from:

http://cloudstack.apache.org/downloads.html

In addition to the official source code release, individual contributors have also made convenience binaries available on the Apache CloudStack download page.

About Apache CloudStack​

Apache CloudStack is a complete software suite for creating Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Target environments include service providers and enterprises. It is used by many service providers to set up an on-demand, elastic cloud computing services and by enterprises to set up a private cloud for use by their own employees. Apache CloudStack is also available to individuals and organizations that wish to study and implement an IaaS for personal, educational, and/or production use.

Further information on Apache CloudStack can be found atcloudstack.apache.org.

square-cloudmonkey.pngThis time around, we have two release VOTEs in progress, which means that 4.1.0 is just about out the door. The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 has been announced for June 23rd through 25th. You'll also want to check in on the discussions about the length of the release cycle, Chip Childers and David Nalley appearing on FLOSS Weekly, and much more.

A lot has happened since the last issue of the CloudStack Weekly News, and not just because the community's been busy - we missed getting last week's issue out. Sorry about that! If you'd like to see consistent weekly delivery, check the end of the newsletter to see how you can help.

Major Discussions

In this section, we summarize some of the more interesting discussions taking place in the CloudStack community. While we try to pull out the discussions that are "don't miss" discussions to anyone who's involved in using or contributing to CloudStack, it's a really good idea to make sure you're subscribed to the mailing lists and follow along.

Release Schedule

Animesh Chaturvedi started a discussion last week about the release schedule for 4.2.0, trying to nail down the specific dates for feature freeze, docs freeze, etc. That was accompanied by a question of whether we should consider a six-month cycle. Ultimately, no resolution was reached on the schedule.

Animesh has started a new thread to discuss the release cycle.

Easier Simple Installs

David has started a conversation on dev@ about the ease, or lack thereof, of installing CloudStack. David says, "what I want to do is get rid of sections 2-4 of the quick install guide, and replace it with - 'run this one or two lines worth of commands' (http://s.apache.org/runbook)." David describes what he'd like to see:

The all-in-one installation process I'd like to see:

Install your host OS Install an meta-RPM/Deb that either (installs everything, or alternatively configures a repo - or just installs the repo and the stuff I need to install with) Run a command that activates one of these config tools - configures the machine, installs the packages I need, and gets me to the point where I'm ready to login and go through the beautiful new user gui setup stuff.

No further comments on this so far.

Developing a Storage Backup Object Store Plugin Framework

Min Chin has proposed a storage backup object store plugin framework that would "allow CloudStack to systematically manage and configure various types of backup data stores from different vendors, like NFS, S3, Swift, etc." Specifically, Min says:

With this new plugin framework, we would like to achieve following functionalities:

1. Support different object store providers in a uniform and pluggable fashion.
2. Enable region wide object backup using S3-like object store.
3. Provide pluggable data motion strategies to handle data transfer from one data store to another data store.
4. Provide a scalable cache storage framework while moving data between primary storage and backup storage for certain hypervisor needs.
5. Support flexible combinations of primary storage, secondary storage and hypervisors, such as (NFS, NFS, Xen), (NF3, S3, Vmware), (ISCSI, Swift, KVM), ..., etc.

The FS is on the wiki, and Min says in a follow-up that there's a plan to "provide a sample plugin implementation" for the work.

With regards to compatibility concerns, Edison Su responds that existing APIs "can still be wired to new code" so that they continue to work, but "we can mark them as deprecated in the API document." Edison also notes that it can co-exist with the existing deployments and upgrades from pre-4.2.0 versions to 4.2.0 if the feature is accepted.

VOTEs for 4.1.0 and 4.0.2

After a couple of false starts, it looks like the third time is the charm for the 4.0.2 release. Joe Brockmeier started the third voting round on Saturday 20 April, and it has quite a few +1 (binding) votes so far. Unless -1'ed by Tuesday morning, it will be ready for release.

Chip has also started the first vote for 4.1.0, which will be open for 72 hours - assuming no show-stopping defects are found, and it garners at least 3 +1 PMC votes. Note that everyone in the CloudStack community is encouraged to test out the release candidate and cast a vote, regardless of whether the vote is "binding" or not. More testing is always better, and an informed -1 from a non-PMC member isn't going to be ignored when deciding whether to release or not.

Domain Admin Limitations

Pranav Saxena has raised a discussion about the limitations for DOMAIN admins, and wonders "why hasn't the domain -admin been given the privilege of creating sub-child domains himself? Are there any concerns/threats because of which the current architecture doesn't serve this purpose?" Alena Prokharchyk responds that there may be a feature request matching Pranav's concerns and suggests checking its status. This might be a good feature/improvement to see in 4.2.0 if there's not already work afoot.

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

  • To REST or not to REST: Sebastien tackles the question, "is the CloudStack API RESTful?" The short answer is "the CloudStack API is RESTlike but not RESTful since it is only based on the GET method. Being an http based API that can return JSON does not make it a RESTfull API. This should not be seen as negative criticism but just a clarification." Read the rest for the full scoop.

Upcoming Events

If you want to check in on events related to Apache CloudStack, see the Lanyard Page for the Apache CloudStack topic.

Jira

With the 4.0.2 and 4.1.0 VOTES in process, it's time to start looking at bugs against 4.1.1 and 4.2.0.

At the moment, bugs against 4.1.0 haven't been re-assigned to 4.1.1. This means that the bug counts for 4.1.1 are much lower than they should be. Taking into account the actual number of bugs, we're looking at one blocker bug, two critical bugs, 114 major bugs, and 25 minor.

For 4.2.0, we have:

New Committers and PMC Members

  • Bruno Demion was invited to become a committer and has accepted.
  • Go Chiba was invited to become a committer and has accepted.
  • Prasanna Santhanam was invited to become a PMC member and has accepted.

Please join us in congratulating all of the new committers and PMC members!

Contributing to the Weekly News

Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? Many hands make light work, but having only one editor means getting the weekly news out every week is a "best effort" activity. A healthy community publication needs several contributors to ensure weekly issues go out on time.

If you have an event, discussion, or other item to contribute to the Weekly News, you can add it directly to the wiki by editing the issue you want your item to appear in. (The next week's issue is created before the current issue is published - so at any time there should be at least one issue ready to edit.)

Alternatively, you can send a note to the marketing@cloudstack.apache.org mailing list with a subject including News: description of topic or email the newsletter editor directly (jzb at apache.org), again with the subject News: description of topic. Please include a link to the discussion in the mailing list archive or Web page with details of the event, etc.