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In the past week, the 4.0.1-incubating release passed its VOTE on the general@incubator.apache.org list, work continued on 4.1.0, and there were active discussions on using Gerrit, cloud-init, and whether memory usage has increased following the adoption of the Spring framework.

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!

Gerrit proposed as review mechanism

Alex Huang kicked off a discussion about using Gerrit. David Nalley pointed out that many of the problems Alex looks to solve with Gerrit are "social/cultural problems" that a technical solution alone won't fix.

Hugo Trippaers also voiced concerns about implementing Gerrit, saying that "a formal process like Gerrit" isn't necessary.

The committer status is granted based on the trust we put in a certain individuals to take care of the CloudStack project, for me that included taking the responsibility that any contributions are up to spec. I want to trust my fellow committers that they know what they are doing and i don't feel the need to second guess that by wanting to look over their code before they can commit it.

Cloud-init vs. homegrown scripts

David Nalley raised a question from the Ghent Build-a-Cloud-Day about "whether or not to package the SSH key reset and password reset utilities, or whether we should focus our PW/SSH efforts on cloud-init."

Wido den Hollander voiced support for cloud-init, saying "We want CloudStack to be accepted by more and more users and they probably want to use cloud-init. cloud-init has cool Puppet and Chef plugins as well which make it very
easy to get it all up and running."

Chiradeep Vittal says he likes cloud-init, but worried that adopting cloud-init would be "hurting the investment of existing CloudStack users who have built hundreds of templates with the extant scripts."

Wido says that "the scripts should keep working" but preferred to avoid packaging the homegrown scripts and encouraging new users/new setups to go with cloud-init.

Chip says that "I'm in agreement that the existing scripts would need to remain as a supported option for quite some time. I consider things like that to actually be related to our semver version numbering, although it's not specifically our CS query API, it's a similar interface expectation."

Changes to CPU and memory overcommit feature

Abhinandan Prateek forwarded a note from Bharat Kumar about changes to the way capacity is calculated in CloudStack.

I have made changes to the way capacity is calculated in CloudStack ,
please review and comment.

I will illustrate this with an example.

let us say we have a host with
Actual Total capacity=4GB ram,

and the overcommit ratio be 2.

Current way
Total capacity= 4*2= 8GB.
Values after deploying 4 VMs with 1GB in service offering.
Allocated per vm =1GB.
Used=4GB
Available=8-4=4GB

now if we decrease the overcommit ratio to 1
Total Capacity = 4*1=4GB.
used Capacity = 4GB.
Available = 4-4=0. (implies 100% usage. can also go to more than 100%)

JVM Memory usage increased with latest master

The latest master is consuming nearly 900MB of memory, according to Koushik Das.

There's some discussion as to the cause of this, and CLOUDSTACK-1168 ("Memory usage is very high") has been created. If you're testing master/4.1 and run into this problem, it'd be helpful to update the ticket with your experience and the environment you're seeeing the issue in.

Blockers to run automated tests

Sudha Ponnaganti brought up a couple of issues on February 8th that are blocking automated testing. CLOUDSTACK-1216 has been fixed, CLOUDSTACK-1200 (Unknown column 'vm_instance.disk_offering_id' in table vm_instance, db exception shown in MS log) is still unresolved.

CloudStack 4.0.1-incubating passes VOTE

Joe Brockmeier announced on Friday that the first point release from the CloudStack 4.0 branch has passed its vote on general@incubator.apache.org with +1 votes from Jim Jagielski, Olivier Lamy, and Alex Karasulu. No -1 or +0 votes were cast.

The release has been pushed to the mirrors and will be announced on Tuesday, February 12.

ACS 4.1 Release Schedule Reminder

Chip Childers sent out a reminder about the release schedule for CloudStack 4.1.0 on Monday.

2013-02-28 is the end of our test phase, and should be the end of the doc finalization for the release.

We'll shift into a mode where the 4.1 branch should only be updated by me after that date (after you ask for a cherry-pick for a critical bug or translation update).

Chip also noted that there are 15 features/improvements listed as "open" for 4.1, and asked that the reporter/assignee update to "In Progress" or move the target release to 4.2 or Future, as appropriate.

Upcoming Events

John Kinsella has announced the first Bay Area CloudStack Meetup to be held in San Jose on February 20th.

Jira

Status for 4.1 as of Monday, 11 February - by priority:

Of the remaining bugs for 4.1.0, 103 are currently unassigned.

New Committers and PPMC Members

No new committers or PPMC members were 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 in Apache CloudStack land! Javelin has been merged with master, the 4.1 branch has been created, and the 4.0.1-incubating release has passed its second round vote to go on to the IPMC vote.

Major Discussions and Issues

Javelin Merged

The Javelin branch has been merged into master by Kelven Yang. Kelven has noted that developers should increase the amount of memory available to the JVM if running the management server under Maven:

For linux/Mac users

MAVEN_OPTS="-XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Xmx2g"
export MAVEN_OPTS

For Windows users

Add similar settings to windows environment settings (via Windows control panel)

4.1 Branch Created

Following the Javelin merge, Chip Childers has created the 4.1 branch, and has asked committers "to respect the feature and improvement freeze in that branch. Bug fixes, doc updates and other release stabilization activities are obviously expected." Chip also says that committers should continue committing directly to the 4.1 branch until code freeze. (Code freeze, excepting fixes for blocker bugs and so forth, is on February 28th.)

If you're a non-committer and wish to send in a patch against 4.1.0, send in a patch built against the 4.1 branch. Chip says:

Committers taking these fixes should also consider applying them to master. If there are conflicts in master (which may happen, as there were a
couple of code-base refactoring activities, like switching packages from com.cloud to org.apache.cloudstack), apply the fix into 4.1 anyway, and inform the submitter that the patch has conflicts with master to get that sorted out (or you can fix it yourself).

4.0.1-incubating Vote

The 4.0.1-incubating release has passed the vote on cloudstack-dev, and is now in the 72-hour IPMC vote. Going into the vote on general@incubator.apache.org, the release artifacts already have 3 +1 mentor votes, so it should pass barring any -1 votes.

Preparing for Translation

With the feature freeze in place, it's time to get docs into shape and start getting things ready for translations. Sebastien Goasguen has created a new /pot directory with the .pot (portable object templates).

Sebastien notes that contributors need to remember the 50-character limit for XML filenames, as Transifex doesn't support longer file names. Contributors will also need to run publican update_pot when updating doc files and/or creating new files.

Packaging in 4.1

Hugo Trippaers sent out an update about the discussion on packaging for 4.1. Hugo says the main goal for redoing the current way of packaging CloudStack is to get "rid of ant and waf completely." The secondary goal "is to create a reference set of packages which in itself should be enough to get anyone going with CloudStack, but will hardly depend on the underlying distro. Real distro specific stuff should be handled by packagers from those distros. We just aim to provide a reference implementation."

Hugo also says that the plan is to rename the packages "to make it perfectly clear what somebody is installing." That's going to change the location of a number of files, but Hugo says "we intend to include symlinks for backwards compatibility."

The planned packages for now are cloudstack-management, cloudstack-agent, cloudstack-common, cloudstack-cli, cloudstack-docs, cloudstack-awsapi and
cloudstack-usage. You might already have seen these names in some of the checkins.

One of the side-effects of the new packaging plan is that CloudMonkey may not be installed with the RPMs, but instead require that admins use PIP to grab CloudMonkey.

Support VM Snapshot Held to 4.2

Mice Xia proposed merging the VM Snapshot branch to master ahead of the 4.1 branching/feature freeze on January 28th. However, there were a number of questions about the feature's implementation and consensus was not reached in time for the 4.1 branch's creation.

On the plus side, this is why we have time-based releases. While it will delay inclusion into CloudStack slightly, the feature will be well-poised to go into 4.2 and the additional attention that the discussion has raised will likely make it that much better a feature when merged to master. It also means that a single feature won't delay the 4.1 release, which already has quite a lot of improvements and new features that CloudStack users will want to have ready when it's scheduled for release.

Proposal to Deprecate the non-RESTful APIs and API Server

Rohit Yadav has proposed deprecating CloudStack's non-RESTful APIs and API server over a reasonable timeline. The reaction has been positive, and Min Chen has offered to share an architecture design that's in-progress, when it's ready.

Help Reviewing Runbook

David Nalley has sent out a request for help reviewing his runbook, which is an opinionated guide to setting up a simple CloudStack install on a single CentOS 6.3 server using KVM. Other CloudStack users and contributors have expressed interest in creating similar runbooks for Ubuntu-based systems.

Upcoming Events

  • India User Group Meet-up: Citrix, ShapeBlue, and CloudByte are combinedly organizing a CloudStack India User Group Meetup in Bangalore (5 February, 2013).
  • Build a Cloud Day (BACD): Full day BACD at SCALE on Friday (22 February 2013).
  • CloudStack Booth at SCALE: Meet with CloudStack folks at SCALE (23-24 February 2013), also Joe Brockmeier is speaking about CloudStack at SCALE.

Jira

Be sure to check the list of 4.1.0 bugs to see if there are any open issues assigned to you, or any unassigned issues that you could take on.

New Committers and PPMC Members

The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to welcome Koushik Das as a committer this week. Well done, Koushik!

As the 4.1.0 feature freeze approaches, the mailing list has been extremely active. The activity on -dev is off the charts, with (according to MarkMail) more than 4,400 messages sent to -dev in January - and the month isn't over yet! This eclipses the previous record set in October 2012 of 3,109 messages. Major discussions this week include the Javelin merge and IP clearance issues.

The feature freeze is 31 January 2013. Testing and bugfixing will carry through from 1 February 2013 to 28 February 2013, then docs freeze is on 28 February (excepting release notes and translations). See the full schedule on the wiki.

Major Discussions and Issues

As usual, the -dev mailing list has been hopping for the past week. Here's a summary of some of the major issues and discussions that have taken place over the last week.

Counting down to feature freeze for 4.1.0-incubating

Reminder on 21st January that there were 10 days left to feature freeze on Apache CloudStack 4.1.0-incubating. Status at the time of the reminder:

Out of 95 total proposed features / improvements, their status is:

3 Closed
12 Resolved
5 Reopened
21 In Progress
54 Open

IP Donations

This week we had several VOTE results around IP donations from Citrix.

Note that Chip Childers sent an email about incoming IP Clearance VOTEs to incubator-general@apache.org about the 7 IP clearance votes that would be sent to the incubator folks.

Javelin Merge

Alex Huang started a discussion about merging the Javelin branch into master. "The content of the merge is the storage framework refactoring and converting everything use Spring." There's some decisions yet to be resolved around the storage piece of this that needs to be resolved before the request to merge Javelin is decided.

LICENSE and NOTICE files for 4.1.0

Chip Childers has raised a question about changes to the LICENSE and NOTICE files for CloudStack. This would remove all binary dependency notice info from the top level LICENSE and NOTICE files in the source tree, and create two copies of the Whisker descriptor.xml files, one that generates the source distro's files and one that generates the files for packaged versions of Apache CloudStack.

VOTE called for 4.0.1-incubating

The VOTE for 4.0.1-incubating has been called as of January 25 and will run for 72 hours or until it gets the required votes, or is -1'ed and restarted. Note that, if successful, the release still needs to be voted on by the IPMC and receive at least three +1 votes. The release could be out as early as next week, if all goes well.

Writing unit tests after Javelin is merged

Alex Huang has written up a page on how to write unit tests after the Spring injection framework is merged into Master.

CloudStack San Francsico Bay Area Meetup group created

A new meet group has been created for San Francsico Bay Area http://www.meetup.com/CloudStack-SF-Bay-Area-Users-Group/. First meetup is expected in February, so stay tuned.

Bang-up job on translations

According to Sebastien Goasguen

The mad race to CloudStack documentation translation has started.
Japan is leading the way with 52% of the translation complete.
China is close second with 40%
Brazil is third with 11%

See more about working on translations on the wiki.

Hyper-V Plugin

Donal Lafferty has submitted a review request for a Hyper-V plugin for CloudStack.

Upcoming Events

Speaking at events doesn't happen by accident, or without preparation. For example, if you want to speak at a major event like OSCON, you need to submit a talk well in advance.

CFPs to be aware of

Mark Hinkle sent a note to -dev reminding that the CFP for OSCON 2013 will close on 4 February. If we want to see CloudStack talks at OSCON (and we do, yeah?) then get those proposals in!

The Linux Collaboration Summit CFP also closes on 4 February 2013 in case you were looking to get a CloudStack or related talk in.

What's on tap for the coming weeks

Jira

New Committers and PPMC Members

As usual, a lot of activity on the -dev mailing list. Several VOTEs this week around features donated by Citrix, and quite a few upcoming events. Speaking of events, videos from the CloudStack Collaboration Conference are up on YouTube!

Major Discussions and Issues

Upcoming Events

Jira

New Committers and PPMC Members

For this week's news only we're mentioning new committers and PPMC members for this month (Jan 2013);

  • Sebastien Goasguen (committer)
  • Joe Brockmeier (PPMC)
  • Kelcey Damage (committer)

Each week, we'll summarize the most important issues and developments in the Apache CloudStack (incubating) community. This week, the vote on accepting Marvin tests, Apache CloudStack bylaws, issues with features for 4.1.0, and upcoming events.

Major Discussions and Issues

Upcoming Events

CloudStack will be represented at a number of events in the next few weeks:

Jira

In the last 30 days (as of 11 January, 2013) 345 issues have been created in Jira, and 85 have been resolved.

New Committers and PPMC Members

  • Sebastien Goasguen and Kelcey Damage were welcomed as new committers.

The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.0.0-incubating release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform. This is the first release from within the Apache Incubator, the entry path into the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

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 4.0.0-incubating release represents the culmination of more than six months work by the CloudStack community. The release includes more than a dozen new features, many bugfixes, security fixes, and a fully audited codebase that complies with ASF guidelines.

New Features:​

  • Inter-VLAN Routing (VPC)
  • Site-to-Site VPN
  • Local Storage Support for Data Volumes
  • Virtual Resource Tagging
  • Secure Console Access on XenServer
  • Added the ability to create a VM without immediately starting it (via API)
  • Upload an Existing Volume to a Virtual Machine
  • Dedicated High-Availability Hosts
  • Support for Amazon Web Services API (formerly a separate package)
  • AWS API Extensions to include Tagging
  • Support for Nicira NVP (L2)
  • Ceph RBD Support for KVM
  • Support for Caringo as Secondary Storage
  • KVM Hypervisor support upgraded to work with Ubuntu 12.04 and RHEL 6.3

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.

CloudStack Collaboration Conference​

The CloudStack project will have its first collaboration conference in Las Vegas, from November 30th through December 2nd at The Venetian. The conference will provide an opportunity for the community to learn more about CloudStack, share best practices for deploying CloudStack, and discuss ideas for upcoming releases.

Learn more about the CloudStack Collaboration Conference at:

http://collab12.cloudstack.org/

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.

The CloudStack Collaboration Conference schedule is now up! You can find it at:

http://collab12.cloudstack.org/schedule/

A big thank you to everyone who's submitted talks, and to David Nalley, Chip Childers, and John Kinsella for helping wade through the submissions. We were initially concerned about the quantity of submissions given the short run-up to the conference - but we were blown away by the quality *and* quantity of the submissions.

We'll be announcing keynotes shortly, and the evening events. A lot of really good stuff coming for the conference - I hope to see many of you there, you really don't want to miss it!