Skip to main content

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.

The Apache CloudStack community has been heads-down for the last week working out the remaining bugs for the 4.1.0 release. Chatter on the dev@ mailing list has been a little muted, comparatively, but there's still plenty of interest in this week's roundup of major discussions and CloudStack community activity.

This week, we look at the outstanding issues for 4.1.0, a discussion about allowing multiple API names for the same API Cmd object, how to deal with tests that expect no database, and how ticket assignment should work.

Major Discussions

Outstanding Work for the 4.1.0 Release

4.1.0 is getting close, but we're not quite there yet. Chip Childers sent out a list of outstanding work required for 4.1.0. Several of the issues are already in progress, but Chip also pointed out CLOUDSTACK-1941: Cannot delete users in the default admin account within the UI as unassigned. This is a critical issue that will need to be addressed before an RC or release can be cut.

API Name Alias

Kishan Kavala has raised a discussion about an API name alias. Kishan has a plan to enhance the name parameter "to support comma separated values. This will allow multiple API names for the same API Cmd object." John Burwell recommended using an array rather than a comma separated value, but there's been some discussion as to whether that's the best arrangement for the current code.

So far, the discussion has not come to a resolution. Folks who have an understanding of the impact or wish to comment on the feature should jump into the discussion on dev@.

Database Tests and Hitting Master

While the project works on finalizing 4.1.0, work continues on 4.2.0 and later releases in the master branch. This week there was another breakage in master, and a discussion following about database access during tests. One proposal was to disable the database before running tests, but this has been challenged as being overly complicated for developers who may be running CloudStack on their test machines and find it inconvenient to disable the db when running tests.

Preparing the Board Report

As an Incubating project, Apache CloudStack prepared a board report every three months, which would be reviewed by the IPMC and (if approved) sent up to the board as part of the Apache Incubator report.

Now that Apache CloudStack is a top-level project (TLP), it prepares its own report for the board. Chip Childers started the discussion on the mailing list with a draft of the report.

Assigning Tickets

Noah Slater raised an issue about ticket assignments:

Right now, we have people who are regularly going through JIRA and triaging tickets. This is totally fantastic, and a very valuable activity for the project. (So thank you!) But I also notice that specific individuals are being assigned to the tickets in the process.

This is a form of "cookie licking". The analogy is that if you fancy a cookie, but you're too hungry right now, you take a lick of it so nobody else can touch it. This is an anti-pattern and we should try to avoid it.

As a result, Noah suggested that we change the way that ticket assignments are handled so that people are taking tickets as they get a chance to work on them, rather than taking tickets that they plan to work on.

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

Upcoming Events

  • Open Cloud Challenges at the Data Center Expo, Paris, April 10th Open Cloud.
  • Cloud Computing at the University of British Columbia (Robson Campus), Vancouver, Canada, April 9th.
  • CloudStack Introduction and Basics - The inaugural meeting of the CloudStack NYC User Group will be Wednesday, April 10th in New York City. Sign up on Meetup.com.
  • UK/European CloudStack user group meet-up will be April 11th in London.
  • Storage in Apache CloudStack being held by the CloudStack SF Bay Area Users Group on April 30, 2013 @ Citrix Conference Center, sign up on the Meetup.com Website.
  • CloudStack Bangalore Meetup Sometime in April, date not yet announced. Watch the Meetup page for details.

Jira

  • Last week: 2 blocker bugs. This week: 2 blocker bugs, only one of which is truly a bug. (The other is a task that must be completed before release.)
  • Last week: 6 critical bugs. This week: 6 critical bugs
  • Last week: 122 major bugs. This week: 118 major bugs
  • Last week: 23 minor bugs. This week: 23 minor bugs

New Committers and PMC Members

No new committers or PMC members were announced this week. To see all current committers and PMC members, see the Who We Are page on the Apache CloudStack website.

acwn-icon.pngWelcome to the April 1 issue of the Apache CloudStack Weekly News. Don't worry, no foolishness in this issue – just a quick recap of the week's most important events.

As you recall, we officially announced that the CloudStack project was graduating from the incubator last week. Though there were no events quite of that magnitude this week, there was plenty of discussion of new features, a new Website design proposal, and Chiradeep Vittal has unveiled a new tool for testing and development called QuickCloud that will come in handy for many CloudStack contributors and users.

Major Discussions

This is a summary of some of the most interesting/important discussions on the Apache CloudStack mailing lists. (Mostly dev@cloudstack.apache.org, but not excluding discussions on marketing@ and users@, of course.) This is provided as a convenient summary for folks who are not involved in day-to-day development of Apache CloudStack – if you're working on CloudStack or would like to get involved in development, we highly recommend being subscribed to dev@cloudstack.apache.org and keeping close tabs on the list!

Website Re-Design Discussion

Sonny Chhen has submitted a second mock-up design for the front page of the Apache CloudStack Web site which has been met with quite a lot of enthusiasm.

Quickcloud: Zero to Cloud in Less than a Minute!

Chiradeep Vittal has developed Quickcloud, a much easier way to start up a CloudStack cloud on a single box. Chiradeep announced on March 26th that QuickCloud is in a "rough-but-ready state" for developers to try out.

EIP Across Zones

Discussion continued on Murali Reddy's proposal to enhance the EIP functionality to work at the region level. This week, Murali explained in more detail what he was thinking:

CloudStack need not have a native capability to move IP across zone. From the CloudStack core perspective, all we need is abstraction of moving IP (presented as NAT) across the zones. Then we can have specific intelligence in the plug-ins which are providing EIP service. For e.g.'Route Health Injection' is commonly used solution in distributed data centres for disaster recovery supported by multiple vendors.

Upgrade Process from 4.0.x to 4.1.0

Wido den Hollander started a discussion about how upgrades will work for 4.0.x to 4.1.0, given the package renaming taking place in 4.1.0. See the discussion on the mailing list and docs in progress on the wiki.

Proposed Features: ACL on Private Gateway and Egress Firewall Rules for SRX

Jayapal Reddy Uradi has proposed a new feature ACL on the private gateway. Says Jayapal, "Currently we do not have way to control the traffic on the private gateway. Using this feature we can configure the ingress/egress ACL on the private gateway."

Jayapal has also proposed egress firewall rules for the external firewall device, SRX.

Jenkins Upgrade

Prasanna Santhanam has pointed out a few bugs that were affecting build jobs. Jenkins.cloudstack.org has been upgraded.

Newsworthy

CloudStack's graduation garnered quite a bit of press last week! Some of the coverage:

Upcoming Events and CFPs

  • CloudStack Introduction and Basics - The inaugural meeting of the CloudStack NYC User Group will be Wednesday, April 10th in New York City. Sign up on Meetup.com.
  • UK/European CloudStack user group meet-up will be April 11th in London.
  • Storage in Apache CloudStack being held by the CloudStack SF Bay Area Users Group on April 30, 2013 @ Citrix Conference Center, sign up on the Meetup.com Website.
  • CloudStack Bangalore Meetup Sometime in April, date not yet announced. Watch the Meetup page for details.

Calls for Papers

Want to help promote Apache CloudStack? Submit a talk at one of the conferences or events listed here. (Missing an event? Please send a note to marketing@cloudstack.apache.org). Note that events are listed in order of the close of the CFP, not the order of the events themselves.

Jira

4.1.0 is still in process, but getting much closer to completion. Here's the numbers so far:

  • Last week: 3 blocker bugs. This week: 2 blocker bugs, only one of which is truly a bug. (The other is a task that must be completed before release.)
  • Last week: 6 critical bugs. This week: 5 critical bugs
  • Last week: 126 major bugs. This week: 122 major bugs
  • Last week: 22 minor bugs. This week: 23 minor bugs

New Committers and PMC Members

The Apache CloudStack project is proud to welcome two new committers this week!

  • The Apache CloudStack PMC has invited Animesh Chaturvedi to become a committer and he has accepted.
  • The Apache CloudStack PMC has invited Ilya Musayev to become a committer and he has accepted.

Please welcome our new committers!

Contributing to the Apache CloudStack Weekly News

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 to the cloudstack-dev 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.

acwn-icon.pngApache CloudStack has graduated from the Apache Incubator! The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board met on Wednesday (March 20) and voted in favor of the project's graduation from the incubator. The official announcement was released on Monday, March 25, 2013.

Of course, that's not all that's happened. in the past week. Work on the 4.1.0 release continues, with the first RC date slipping slightly due to the number of blocker bugs. The good news is that a lot of progress has been made on the blocker bugs in the past week, so things don't appear to be too far behind.

With the graduation, note that locations have changed for many resources (including the git repository) and the list address have changed as well. For instance, cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org is now dev@cloudstack.apache.org. See the full list of address here on cloudstack.apache.org.

Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? See the next section for information on how to contribute.

Contributing to the Apache CloudStack Weekly News

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 to the cloudstack-dev 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.

Major Discussions

Some of the major discussions and issues that have taken place on dev@, marketing@, and users@ in the past week. This is by no means exhaustive, if you need to be up-to-date on all development issues in the project, you'll definitely want to be subscribed to the mailing lists! Remember if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen also means that participants are expected to keep current with the mailing lists, or expect decisions to be made in their absence.

Graduation

Chip Childers announced on Wednesday that the board has passed the graduation resolution. And there was much rejoicing!

Baremetal Booted from 4.1.0

The bare metal support in Apache CloudStack 4.1.0 had a number of blockers against it that meant it was unlikely to be of release quality. A patch has been applied to disable the functionality.

System VMs Optional for QuickCloud

Chiradeep Vittal has proposed making the system VMs optional to allow a cloud to start faster.

BVT for CloudStack Check-ins

Prasanna Santhanam provided an update on the BVT work this week. Prasanna says "this work is now on the bvt branch. Since this puts together python and maven which don't seem to interact in a friendly way I'd like some help testing in other developer environments to fix possible failures."

Using Lanyrd to Track Apache CloudStack Events

On the marketing@ list, Joe Brockmeier proposed using Lanyrd to track Apache CloudStack events rather than trying to use the wiki or a static page on the Apache CMS site. You can find the events tagged with Apache CloudStack on Lanyrd's Apache CloudStack topic page and add new events to that topic. Note that an event need not be exclusively about Apache CloudStack, but should have one or more talks about Apache CloudStack at the event and/or speakers from the project.

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

  • Meeting the Hometown LUG: Joe writes about presenting a CloudStack talk for the St. Louis Linux Users Group (STLLUG) last week.

Upcoming Events

  • Apache CloudStack Introductory Webinar - Joe Brockmeier and Kirk Kosinski will be conducting an introductory Apache CloudStack webinar, "Apache CloudStack: API to UI" on Thursday, March 28th at 9 a.m. Pacific.
  • Storage in Apache CloudStack being held by the CloudStack SF Bay Area Users Group on March 28, 2013. Location TBD, sign up on the Meetup.com Website.
  • Apache Hackathon at PES Institute of Technology being held by the Bangalore Chapter of CloudStack India on March 30, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. Sign up on the Meetup.com Website.
  • Sebastien Goasguen will be at the Scotland JAVA User Group on March 27th, 2013 in Edinburgh, introducing CloudStack.
  • Sebastien Goasguen will give a lightning talk at the CloudCamp Scotland on March 28th, 2013 in Edinburgh, talking about SDN in CloudStack.
  • CloudStack Introduction and Basics - The inaugural meeting of the CloudStack NYC User Group will be Wednesday, April 10th in New York City. Sign up on Meetup.com.
  • UK/European CloudStack user group meet-up will be April 11th in London.

Jira

Excellent progress on issues in the last week. 4.1.0 is currently down to 3 blocker bugs, 10 critical, and 148 major bugs.

New Committers and PPMC Members

  • Hiroaki Kawai was invited to become a committer and has accepted.
  • Ahmad Emneina was invited to become a committer and has accepted.
  • Geoff Higginbottom was invited to become a committer and has accepted.

Mature, open source turn-key platform for delivering scalable, full-featured Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

Forest Hill, MD - 25 March 2013

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache CloudStack has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"When CloudStack first became an Apache Incubator project, it was a well-established cloud management platform, so its codebase was already mature," said Chip Childers, Vice President of Apache CloudStack. "Our work in the Incubator has focused on growing a really strong community around the code and establishing the governance practices expected of a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation."

Formerly the product of Cloud.com, which was acquired by Citrix in 2011, CloudStack was donated by Citrix to ASF and submitted to the Apache Incubator in April 2012. It is a well-established cloud management platform, already widely in production use by many organizations. It is used to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing in both private-cloud, public, and hybrid cloud environments. It has been proven to be both stable and highly scalable, underpinning production clouds more than 30,000 physical nodes, in geo-distributed environments.

Asked to comment on the importance of becoming a Top-Level Project, Childers added "CloudStack had the advantage of having many long-term, large deployments which had proven the stability and scalability of the technology. This helped us concentrate on adopting the 'Apache Way' of governance, which is well understood and open, delivering so many great pieces of software over the years."

"We know that Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the next generation of IT infrastructure, and that people will demand open standards and open governance for such an important layer in their IT stack. That is why the CloudStack project meeting the rigorous standards of ASF governance is so significant. "

When asked to comment on the Apache CloudStack community itself, Childers said: "we've managed to build a diverse, friendly and very open community around CloudStack. New members receive a really warm welcome and we make sure that all contributors are on an equal footing, whether they are writing code or helping with any other aspect of the project. Anybody thinking of getting involved in the project would quickly find what a great community we are. As well as online involvement, we've already had a global collaboration conference and there are many CloudStack groups established in many different countries. "

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.

About Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation, a US 501(3)(c) non-profit corporation, provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of over 140 open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits potential legal exposure for our project committers. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process known as The Apache Way, Apache(tm) projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.

Big news this week: Apache CloudStack has passed major milestones towards graduation, major progress on bugs against 4.1.0, discussions about integrating the Palo Alto firewall with CloudStack, and getting Eclipse and Maven to play nice for developers. Some interesting posts from members of the Apache CloudStack community as well.

Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? See the next section for information on how to contribute.

Contributing to the Apache CloudStack Weekly News

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 to the cloudstack-dev 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.

Major Discussions

CloudStack Getting Closer to Graduation

Chip Childers notified the project that the graduation resolution has passed the IPMC vote. With the votes passed, it's now up to the Apache Software Foundation board to discuss. The next board meeting is on March 20th, though it's unclear whether the IPMC vote was finalized in time for the matter to be discussed during this meeting.

Eclipse and Maven Working Together

Alex Huang wrote last week that he's made some changes to "help developers with better productivity." To put it succinctly, Alex found that there are better ways to build CloudStack using Eclipse and Maven together, and has written a script to help developers speed up their tools. The procedure and new impatient profile should be documented on the wiki soon.

Palo Alto

Will Stevens brought up a topic about integrating the Palo Alto firewall with CloudStack:

The problem I am running into right now is that Palo Alto does not allow any two interfaced to have the same IP (even if they are in different zones, vrs, vsys and vlans). This is an issue because CloudStack supports each account having their own private IP ranges and two accounts can use the same private IP range. For example, by default if you create a network with source nat and you do not specify any gateway or subnet data, it will give you 10.1.1.0/24 as an IP range. This means it will be very likely that two CloudStack accounts will be using the same private IP space.

Alex replied, "There is a mode in CloudStack that only allows non-intersecting cidrs for guest networks. It was introduced specifically because many physical network devices do not expect cidrs to intersect even when it's on different VLANs."

Stuck on a technical issue? Ask on the -dev list, and it's quite likely you'll not only get an answer – odds are someone's had the problem you've got before, and thought about a solution.

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

Security in the Cloud and the CCSK

Sebastien Goasguen wrote about security in the cloud this week, and the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK).

SELinux + KVM + CloudStack

David Nalley blogged about getting an SELinux policy to work for CloudStack because, "I really dislike advocating for people to turn off a security mechanism to get software to work. Additionally I really want some of the advantages of sVirt."

HOWTO: Using CloudStack Resources with Puppet (Part 1)

David also started writing about using CloudStack resources with Puppet. David says he's written and talked about CloudStack resources previously, but "while cheerleading and telling people it is awesome should be enough - it really doesn't tell you how to actually use it."

LDAP Authentication in CloudStack (v4.0.1)

Kirt Jantzer wrote about LDAP Authentication in CloudStack (v4.0.1) this week.

PCExtreme Case Study

Posted to the wiki this week, a case study about PCExtreme's use of Apache CloudStack: "PCExtreme Achieves Business Agility with Apache CloudStack"

Upcoming Events

Jira

Things are looking up this week, bug-wise. Bugs have dropped in all categories, and all of the blocker and critical bugs have been assigned.

New Committers and PPMC Members

No new committers or PPMC members were announced last week.

acwn-icon.pngThis week the project started the vote to determine whether the Apache CloudStack project feels ready to self-govern, discussions were held about implementing BVT (and how), and the PPMC announced its consensus for the proposed PMC chair. In addition, several technical discussions for features and processes within the project, and discussion on the -marketing list about the design of the Web site.

Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? See the next section for information on how to contribute.

Contributing to the Apache CloudStack Weekly News

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 to the cloudstack-dev 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.

Major Discussions

Some of the major discussions and issues that have taken place on cloudstack-dev, cloudstack-marketing and cloudstack-users in the past week. This is by no means exhaustive, if you need to be up-to-date on all development issues in the project, you'll definitely want to be subscribed to the mailing lists!

VOTE: Graduate Apache CloudStack from the Incubator

Chip Childers has started the vote on whether to graduate Apache CloudStack from the Incubator. The vote lasts 72 hours (vote started Monday morning). If successful, the IPMC will need to vote on the resolution and recommend graduation to the Apache Board of Directors.

PPMC Will Recommend Chip Childers as Chair

In conjunction with the graduation discussion, the CloudStack PPMC has reached consensus on recommending Chip Childers as chair, once the project graduates. See How the ASF Works: Roles for more on roles within Top Level Projects (TLPs).

Meet Cato_Fong

If you haven't already, Prasanna Santhanam invites everyone to meet Cato_Fong, a handy IRC bot that keeps an eye on the Jenkins builds for the project. Says Prasanna, "if the build is broken and the executor on builds.a.o has not yet queued the job be prepared to be ambushed by Cato_Fong!"

Syslog Enhancements

Anshul Gangwar has revived a discussion from December about using log4j to send syslog messages. See the FS on the wiki, and join in the discussion on the -dev mailing list if you have anything to add.

Getting Rid of KVM Patchdisk Raises Discussion of New System VM Programming Model

Marcus Sorensen started a discussion last week about getting rid of the patchdisk that KVM creates on primary storage when bringing up a VM. Marcus says, "This patch disk has been bugging me for awhile, as it creates a volume
that isn't really tracked anywhere or known about in cloudstack's database. Up until recently these would just litter the KVM primary
storages, but there's been some triage done to attempt to clean them up when the system vms go away. It's not perfect. It also can be
inefficient for certain primary storage types, for example if you end up creating a bunch of 10MB luns on a SAN for these."

Later in the discussion, Edison Su responded to Marcus' approach to handling the issue. Edison says "we put a lot of logic into init scripts inside system VM, which has unnecessarily complicated the system VM programming." Ultimately, Edison suggest that we may need "to start working on a new system VM programming model now? Better to just put a Python daemon inside system VM, and provide restful API through link local IP address(or private IP if it's vmware), then mgt server or hypervisor agent code can just send commands to the Python daemon through HTTP, instead of SSH."

Build Verification Test (BVT) for CloudStack Checkins

Alex Huang proposed building a BVT system to "ensure that checkins do not break the master branch."

After a fair amount of discussion, Chip Childers responded, saying that the first step to getting Gerrit is "for us to agree to using it and to be able to clearly articulate why. Without being able to explain our issue, we'll be questioned about jumping to a tool-based solution by the infra team."

The entire discussion is worth a read for anyone involved in day-to-day CloudStack development. (Indeed, one hopes that all developers have paid close attention to this thread, not only the handful of active voices who have jumped into the discussion.)

Proposal to Refactor Appliance Building Code Under tools/appliance

Rohit Yadav has proposed to "fix/refactor devcloud appliance building scripts from tools/devcloud/sr to tools/appliance" and "to create a new devcloud that has all the build tools, IDE and possibly a lightweight desktop environment or tiling window manager."

Incremental Build

Edison points out that Maven 3 doesn't support incremental builds, "so it takes a long time (4-7 minutes) to make a build" even with small changes in the source code. Animesh Chaturvedi points out a tool that might help add incremental build support to Maven, but there was no enthusiasm for changing tools away from Maven after the effort that went into switching from Ant.

Marketing: Website Discussions

There's been a fair amount of discussion this week about improving the Apache CloudStack Web site. Sebastien Goasguen started the discussion on March 5th, pointing to a site that he found "simple, yet modern." The discussion has moved on to work on the sitemap and flow of the site.

No firm proposals or decisions have come out of the discussion as of yet.

There's also discussion about the elevator pitch and top N features of CloudStack that should be on the landing page.

LDAP Setup Assistance

Kirk Jantzer came to the -users list looking for help in setting up LDAP. Ilya Musayev shared an earlier note to -dev about using Microsoft's Active Directory (LDAP) working with CloudStack, and Kirk reported that he was able to get it working by adding users with dummy passwords.

System VM Templates

Following a discussion on -users, Chip noted that 4.1.0-incubating will use the same system VM templates used by 4.0.0-incubating and CloudStack releases from Citrix prior to its donation to Apache. However, Chip adds, "we're working on an automated system VM build process that should be part of 4.2.0-incubating (allowing us to refresh the image that's used)."

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

  • David Nalley wrote about efficient use of CloudStack using Puppet.

Upcoming Events

Jira

The number of issues for 4.1.0 has crept back up in the last week, likely because QA had been blocked from testing by some bugs previously - with those out of the way, QA is able to find more issues in the release.

Note that some of the issues are also less dire than they seem: CLOUDSTACK-1584 is a blocker for release, but it's only to ensure that an important task (adding links to the documentation for downloads) is completed before the release.

New Committers and PPMC Members

No new committers or PPMC members were announced last week.