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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.

acwn-icon.pngThis week, a vote on updating the project bylaws, fixing the "Tomcat situation" after 4.1, and discussions around the support lifecycle. Some respectable progress in knocking out major and blocker bugs for 4.1.0 as well. The project also welcomes two new PPMC members and three new committers.

Major Discussions

Some of the major discussions and issues that have taken place on cloudstack-dev 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!

Summary of Why Where and How Development Happens Matters

Chip Childers kicked off a thread about why it matters where and how development happens, based on a discussion that had taken place on cloudstack-private:

It's largely a re-hash of things that have already been discussed, but we wanted to get this summary moved into the dev list so that the points are available for reference. We should probably distill this into a wiki page somewhere, but that's not done quite yet (volunteer?). Keep in mind
that I've tried to pull the important parts of the conversation into this email... it was a fairly long thread of discussion and debate.
I'd suggest reading it all the way to the end to form your own understanding of why we have to be careful about how we work as a community.

The TL;DR version:

The issue that we ran into with several features being developed "outside the community" for 4.1 was a major deal, and it had several
implications. First, doing that effectively hurts our community. The other issue is related to the legal right of the project to accept the
code developed elsewhere.

Rather than summarizing it here, I'd recommend that readers spend the time to read Chip's initial email and the replies in the thread.

Using DIY System VMs

Rohit Yadav shared "that the do-it-yourself systemvm appliance feature works for me, for Xen,":

There is one catch though, VirtualBox exports VHD appliance which is said to be compliant with HyperV. I thought we may need to do something for Xen separately, so I followed and found a way. The "way" is to export a raw disk image and convert it to a VHD 1 but the problem is the VHD created from that "way" fails when vhd-util tries to scan for any dependent VHDs (parents etc.), I don't know what's the reason.

Read the rest of the thread if you have an interest in creating custom system VMs for CloudStack.

Fixing the Tomcat Situation, Post 4.1

Noa Resare has admitted being intensely frustrate with "the current tomcat situation" when working on packaging CloudStack. The current setup, says Noa, has many problems. In response, Noa has started a proof-of-concept "of a replacement for this whole mess yesterday, a few tens of lines of code setting up an embedded jetty web container. A few lines of code to parse a config file, set up logging and spawn an embedded servlet container."

Changing Project Bylaws to Modify PMC Chair Voting Process and Term

Chip kicked off a VOTE thread last week to modify the project bylaws slightly:

As previously discussed, we'd like to make a change to our bylaws to modify the method of selecting a PMC chair. We also want to add a term for the chair.

The text was clarified slightly during the vote. The vote remains open until March 5.

Support Lifetime

With the 4.1 release getting closer, David Nalley raised the topic of the support lifetime for releases. Chip proposed a model that would consist of only bug fix releases for:

  • The latest feature release of our active major version number (i.e.: 4.x)
  • The latest feature release of our last major version number (doesn't exist today, but will be 4.x when / if we bump to 5.0)

Joe Brockmeier replied with a +1, saying that with the current level of participation in the bug-fix releases "this is the most realistic approach that's good for the community."

David asked whether an end of support means an end to bug fixes and security fixes at the same time. "Wearing your enterprise software consumer hat - does a supportlifetime of approximately 12 months make sense?" Instead, David proposed "we should add a month (so that EOL is one month after 4.n+2 releases, with the understanding that 4.n is likely to only receive security fixes if any during that extra one month window.)"

The discussion continues, so developers and users that have a vested interest in the support lifetime for ACS releases would do well to follow and respond to the discussion.

API Throttling

Parth Jagirdar has started a discuss thread about API throttling. "API throttling number can be set to anything at this point. Suggestions here is to have this number set to a value that is 'greater than' number of API that can be fired by any potential action on UI." (Note, Parth then sent out a follow-up email to correct the initial subject line from [DISCUSS} to DISCUSS, but all relevant discussion has happened in the original thread. It's probably not necessary to send a follow-up in those situations and may fragment the conversation.)

Branch Stability Status

Sudha Ponnaganti posted a report to the -dev mailing list about branch stability for QA testing:

4.1 Branch:
*Xen and VMWare are blocked with the following two issues. KVM is working fine (agent issue-1469 has been fixed by Hugo).
CLOUDSTACK-1252
Failed to download default template in VMware
CLOUDSTACK-1470
Xen - unhandled exception executing api command: deployVirtualMachine

Master:
There are no blockers now on Master / 4.2. Below are the only blockers and you
can continue to use older templates to make progress on master till new one gets
hardened.
CLOUDSTACK-1462
Used Master Branch System VM Template: Volume of System VM Failed to Create on
the XenServer due to IOError

Summary of IRC Meeting for 27 February 2013

The ASFBot shot a summary of the weekly IRC meeting to the -dev mailing list. If you missed it or need a reminder of what happened, check it out.

Report from the Doc Sprint on Friday

Joe sent out a short report about the doc sprint that took place on Friday, March 1st. Another is planned for Friday, March 8th.

CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community

Provisionr - Automated Deployment of Massive Infra in the Clouds

David reported on a talk at ApacheCon North America about Andrei Savu's demo of "software that Axemblr had been working on around deploying pools of interrelated virtual machines called Provisionr."

ApacheCon North America Report: Troubleshooting CloudStack

Joe Brockmeier wrote a report on two talks at ApacheCon North America by Kirk Kosinski on troubleshooting CloudStack. The talks covered common networking issues and how to use log files to troubleshoot CloudStack.

Cloud Talks from ApacheCon North America

Mark Hinkle has put up a post about Cloud talks at ApacheCon North America with links to presentations.

Upcoming Events

  • Doc Sprint (IRC): The doc team is running another sprint on Friday, March 8th from 16:00 to 23:00 UTC (that's 08:00 to 15:00 Pacific time, 11:00 to 18:00 Eastern in the USA) in #cloudstack-dev. All CloudStack contributors who have an interest in making the docs awesome are encouraged to attend and help out. See the wiki for more info.

Jira

Big bug-fixing week for Apache CloudStack! The community knocked out 5 blocker bugs, 3 critical bugs, 9 major bugs, and 3 minor bugs. Still plenty of work left to do before 4.1.0 is ready for prime-time, though.

It's worth noting that the doc sprint helped quite a bit, bringing the total number of docs bugs for 4.1.0 to 44 (down from 64 just two weeks ago). Of the remaining bugs for 4.1.0, 80 are currently unassigned, down from 99 last week.

New Committers and PPMC Members

A big week for new committers and PPMC members.

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.

This week, interesting discussions on the Java version(s) to be supported by CloudStack, updates on translation, and database changes. Also discussion on the next CloudStack Collaboration Conference, and more. Work on 4.1.0 continues, and there's much to be done before it's ready to ship.

Major Discussions and Issues

Some of the major discussions and issues that have taken place on cloudstack-dev 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!

Schedule Reminder

Chip Childers has sent out a friendly reminder about the schedule:

Thursday is the last day of this
phase of QA / bug-fix work. We defined it as:

2013-02-28
Docs Completion Target (except release notes and translations) (Docs
may be included in the release after this date, after consensus on
each addition that the inclusion does not reduce release quality).

Release Branch moves to limited updates only (only commits allowed
in would be release blockers fixes, translation updates, etc...)

I'd like to get as many bugs resolved as possible (as well as ensure
that the blockers that Sudha has shared this morning are addressed as
quickly as possible).

After Thursday, we're going to want to move to a very limited amount of
change within the 4.1 branch. Given that, now's the time to knock down
the blockers... but also as many of the other priority bugs as
possible.

If you have 4.1 bugs on your plate, please be sure to try to either resolve them or at least triage/report status.

CloudStack Collaboration Summit

Mark Hinkle started a discussion about the next CloudStack Collaboration Conference, offering to work on a proposal for an event in the spring and fall. Lots of folks have expressed interest, and suggested holding the spring event in Europe rather than North America. The discussion hasn't been resolved yet, so no dates or location have been announced as of yet.

QA Scrum Meeting Minutes

The QA Scrum meeting minutes for 18 February 2013 sent to the mailing list.

Weekly IRC Meeting Minutes

The minutes for the weekly CloudStack meeting have been posted to the list. Note that the community has a weekly meeting every Wednesday at 17:00 UTC in #cloudstack-meeting on Freenode.

Supported Java Version?

Wido den Hollander noted that the master branch wouldn't build on his systems over the last few days. The culprit? Seems to be that some changes have snuck in that want a later version of Java than is in Ubuntu 12.04.

No decision has been reached so far, but there is a case to be made that changing the Java version is a significant disruption to users.

Translation Update

Sebastien Goasguen has sent out an update

Discussion on Database Changes

Last week Rohit Yadav had a Google+ hangout with Alex and Abhi to discuss future of database deployment and upcoming work on creating a new tool called DatabaseCreator that will make database deployments easier. It was decided and enforced on 4.1 and master branch that:

  • create-schema.sql ought not be changed from the version 4.0 schema
  • Any new additions should go into their correct upgrade paths, for 4.2 that would mean schema-410to420.sql and schema-410to420-cleanup.sql
  • It would do rolling upgrade from 4.0, this was enforced in DatabaseUpgradeChecker

Once DatabaseCreator is implemented correctly for 4.2 release, a sysadmin will have power to work on their own upgrade strategies. The workflow would be:

  • System admin uses the tool to take a db dump, upgrade the database, at this stage the new database should be backward compatible with old db.
  • Next all CloudStack management servers are upgraded.
  • The tool is called again to do sanity checks and cleanup any db schema.
Development on DIY SystemVM templates

This week Rohit Yadav and Chiradeep were finally able to configure a veewee project so systemvm template can be built on one's own box using veewee and VirtualBox, Rohit also created a systemvm building jenkins job. The source code exists in tools/appliance and has a README for folks to get started. The default template is based on Debian Wheezy but anyone can change the definition.rb, preseed.cfg and postinstall.sh script to fork their own systemvm templates based on Ubuntu, Fedora etc.

Rohit shared a post with the issues and challenges of setting an automated jenkins build job that would create systemvm appliances and export them to various virtual disk image formats. Using his approach anyone should be able to replicate an automated appliance build job.

Upcoming Events

Jira

The count of bugs for 4.1.0 has actually increased since last week. The overall tally of blocker and critical bugs has increased, with two additional blocker bugs and four more critical bugs (though perhaps not the same bugs as last week). A lot of work is needed to get 4.1.0 into shape before we will be able to release.

Of the remaining bugs for 4.1.0, 99 are currently unassigned.

New Committers and PPMC Members

No new committers or PPMC members announced this week.

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.

Another busy week on -dev. This week, discussions on whether to graduate to a TLP, the whens and hows of merging, database changes for 4.1 and master, and documentation.

Also worth noting, we now have a marketing mailing list. To sign up and participate in promoting Apache CloudStack, please subscribe to the mailing list (cloudstack-marketing-subscribe@incubator.apache.org) and help out!

Major Discussions and Issues

Some of the major discussions and issues that have taken place on cloudstack-dev 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!

QA Scrum Meeting Minutes

The QA Scrum meeting minutes for 12 February 2013 sent to the mailing list.

IRC Meeting Minutes

Summary of the weekly IRC Meeting for 13 February 2013.

Note that last week's meeting went in reverse alpha-order, but it was largely agreed during the meeting that we should have an agenda for the meeting. Please submit agenda items by Wednesday at 16:00 UTC.

Graduation to a Top-Level Project (TLP)?

Is Apache CloudStack ready to leave the incubator? Chip Childers raised the discussion on the -dev list on February 13th.

My general impression is that we have come a long way as a community since CloudStack entered the incubator. While there are still rough edges for us to work through over time, we are dealing with our problems quite well as a community. The simple reason that I believe we are in a position to ask to graduate, is that we are no longer getting value from the incubation process! That's a good thing, because it means that we have managed to learn quite a bit about the ASF processes, rules, methods and preferences.

Marcus Sorensen agreed that there are rough edges but, "the incubation process itself may not teach us anything further about these things, and they're just things we need to iron out over time."

David Nalley wrote:

I don't see us actively receiving any benefit from continuing in incubation. We are far from perfect, but the project seems to be policing itself. So I am not seeing a huge incentive to staying.

There are also some downsides to remaining in incubation. First there's the label 'incubation' that follows almost everything we do, and is potentially off-putting to potential community members. Second as a community there are a number of things we can't do for ourselves, and thus have to ask permission or for help - this includes votes on releases, creating new user accounts, etc. I think of this as the overhead of being in the incubator.

Discussion on Database Changes and Merges

Rohit Yadav put out the word that there were database changes ahead for the 4.1 branch and master.

Rohit also brought up a merge for database schemas for 4.1.0 and pointed to the current differences in the database schema for 4.1 over 4.0.

Documentation for 4.1

Sebastien Goasguen started a thread on documentation for 4.1, which is a must-read for anyone working on docs.

How to Treat Broken Builds

David Nalley expressed some frustration with the community's reaction to broken builds.

In general it seems we don't care, and this makes it more difficult to fix problems. Jenkins reporting a broken build (be it a broken run of RAT, failure to compile, failure of a unit test, building docs, etc.) should be our Andon cord. We should all stop commits that aren't fixing the broken build. To illustrate why this is a problem, RAT failures started occurring recently, this keeps us from testing whether CloudStack builds, because each build is conditioned on the successful completion of the test before it. That in turn keeps apidocs from building, which keeps marvin from building, which keeps documentation from building. We essentially are blind until it gets fixed.

Marcus Sorensen asked if there was a Jenkins report committers could subscribe to in order to avoid the problem. David replied, "Yes there are - the commits mailing list receives the notifications from both jenkins.cs.o and builds.a.o. ... You can subscribe by sending an email to cloudstack-commits-subscribe@incubator.apache.org."

Wait Before you Merge!

How long should you wait until you merge into master or a branch? Chip Childers brought this up in response to a merge that was announced on February 12th and then committed on February 13th. This discussion raised the fact that there's not a formal merge process documented. Chip volunteered to take a crack at the document and asked for help "in getting it in shape to reflect consensus on the topic."

Android and iOS CloudStack Clients

Abhinandan Prateek asked about the utility of a Android and/or iOS client for CloudStack. David pointed out that an Android client called Cumulus exists that is "pretty useful as an end-user, but less so as an admin."

Pranav Saxena replied that there was already some work underway off-list on a client using PhoneGap, and it might be possible to collaborate. (Ed. Note: This is why you should bring ideas to the list sooner rather than later, so there's not a wasted effort when two or more community members have the same idea and try to implement it separately.)

New Dependency on OWASP ESAPI for Java

Likitha Shetty announced a new dependency on the OWASP ESAPI for Java in master.

Upcoming Events

Jira

Bug count for 4.1.0 hasn't significantly decreased since last week, though major bugs have dropped slightly while there's been an increase of blocker and critical bugs.

Of the remaining bugs for 4.1.0, 95 are currently unassigned. Doc bugs are by far the largest component needing help, with 64 bugs remaining.

New Committers and PPMC Members

David Nalley announced that Likitha Shetty has been asked to become a committer, and Likitha has accepted. Please join us in congratulating Likitha!

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.

The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.0.1-incubating 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 more than 30 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.

The 4.0.1-incubating release includes fixes for a number of issues, including a minor security vulnerability (CVE-2012-5616), problems adding KVM hosts, fixes to documentation, and more. Please see the CHANGES file in the release for a full list of issues that are fixed in this release. As a bugfix release, no new features are included in 4.0.1-incubating, and it should be a simple upgrade from 4.0.0-incubating.

Downloads

The official source code release can be downloaded from:

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

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

Incubating

Apache CloudStack is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.