Citrix Synergy Keynote Live Blog

Well, access has proved to be an issue (general wireless saturated, I have TWO MiFi's that both wouldn't work) so I'm writing this offline and will publish ASAP.  Usual Live Blog disclaimer, this is me typing as fast as possible, probably spelling and formatting errors, please forgive that.  Limited bandwidth so I'll add pictures a little later today as well.

• Mark T (CEO is up) - introduction of Synergy 2013, packed crowd
• Citrix Cloud Platform is up first, over 200+ production clouds, 40,000+ node scale, lots of references
• Talks about CloudPlatform being based on Apache CloudStack, 35,000 community members, top level Apache project graduation fastest in history, most contributions of any Apache project
• ShareFile - On-premise storage option, private and public cloud data storage, you choose where your data is stored
• ANNOUNCE: ShareFile StorageZonce Connectors - application level connectors into the Enterprise
• ANNOUNCE: Windows Azure support for ShareFile
• MSFT update - 80% growth of XenDesktop on Hyper-V
• A bunch of MSFT Windows 2012 and Windows 8 updates (too many and too fast to type)
• Citrix Receiver for Windows 8 is out
• Moving the Windows experience to a Mac is up next:
• ANNOUNCE: Desktop Player for Mac - Run Virtual Desktops on the Mac, online, offline, encrypted, centrally controlled, tech preview coming next month
• Cisco Partnership up next
• XenDesktop on UCS is a large UCS use case (FlexPod as well)
• Tighter Integration between Cisco and Citrix across the board in all product areas
• NetScaler has taken off (MPX, VPX, SDX) as a replacement for Cisco ACE and joint interoperability and development coming in the future
• Innovation Award: (videos shown of all the finalists, Miami Children's Hospital, USP - University of San Paulo, Essar) - Award goes to… USP for their use case of Cloud Platform and Cloud Portal!!  Very exciting to see our customer receive this great reward.  We are very proud of to partner with them to help them serve their customers, the students of the university!
• Up Next: Going mobile
• What is driving the industry? - Consumerization - Mobile devices and Bring Your Own Anything is taking over!
• Generations - The next generations requires different access than the traditional IT would allow
• Disruptions - self explanatory
• The Pace - Everything is faster and at a greater magnitude in scope
• Paradigm shift - "Don't Own Stuff" - more agile, more flexible because CAPEX and "stuff" isn't holding you back
• "Move, Add, & Change" - How to move faster, change quickly, add and remove quickly. Orgs need to tackle this
• for example 100,000 changes in an org cost 75 million once upon a time. now down to 25 million, savings and efficiency
• It is all about Mobile Workstyles going forward
• Up first, Windows Desktops still prevail in the Enterprise (about 85-90% today) - It is still a Windows world
• What would XenDesktop and XenApp look like in a mobile cloud era? - Project Avalon - 
• ANNOUNCE: first release is called XenDesktop 7 - designed for simplicity and mobility
• FlexCast - Windows Apps and Windows Desktops under one umbrella - FMA - Flexcast Management Architecture
• 1 package to download - automated installation and deployment
• HDX Insight - end to end monitoring of HDX traffic
• no more workload provisioning, app-by-app publishing, windows app migration (all about simplification of the operations and building)
• HDX Mobile - HD video on any device, even over 3G, 100% increase in WAN efficiency, native mobile functions (access, device GPS, sensors, cameras, etc)
• HDX mobile SDK for Windows Apps - take a .NET app, turn it into a Windows "Mobile" app through XenDesktop and XenApp, develop once and it will adjust to the device
• Demo Time - Brad Petterson up to demo XenDesktop 7
• Apps and Desktop provisioning all in one using Studio - showing Director with information from NetScaler and network traffic in real time. Shows XenApp/XenDesktop traffic, goes all the way to the app level, also shows a larger IT Support view that allows better troubleshooting across an entire org, shows an ability to assess and act on the infrastructure
• Now demo of iPad mini connecting with Receiver to a Windows 8 virtual desktop, showing off the Windows 8 experience on an iPad mini, very fluid, flash video is seamless, also showing off a full screen movie streaming over the iPad
• The redesign of Windows Apps is pretty cool to me, makes the VDI on a mobile device potentially less painful. Seems to be a natural progression
• Up Next - Cloud Enable the CPU, GPU, Network and Storage
• Delivering "intense" apps that would normally not be a candidate for delivery
• Jen-Hsun Huang - CEO & Co-Founder of NVIDIA is up to talk about this
• partnership has been around for along time, since 2006
• talking about the "good old days" and how some projects actually failed over the years because the "cloud" wasn't ready for these intense workloads
• Demo Time - Abode PhotoShop running on an iPad - pulls up a picture, using the GPU in the "cloud" to manipulate the picture in real time, shows very complex graphic manipulation in real time.
• What about applications that have required the "big powerful workstations" until now because of the processing power required?
• Talking about the design of the Boeing of 787, the databases on the back end (Data Gravity Again!  Google It), made development around the world difficult
• Instead using remote workstations driven by GPU's and only move the pixels, not the data
• Showing various examples of apps running in realtime, actually showing a 4k video resolution file and editing in real time.  Very cool
• Now talking about how it happens on the back end. Virtualization of more than the CPU is required, we now need the GPU to be virtualized
• New NVIDIA GPU's are designed with virtualization in mind, now integrated with virtualization
• ANNOUNCE: virtual application running on a virtual desktop with a virtual NVIDIA GPU
• Showing AutoCad, PLM (Manufacturing), vGPU remotely for the first time
• Google Earth running on a virtual machine using a hand gesture technology (have to see it to explain it), Demo of hand gesture control of Google Earth in real time, really cool!!
• It's called the NVIDIA GRID vGPU and is integrated into XenDesktop 7
• Open GL Support, industry first direct GPU
• Up Next - XenApp 6.5
• Announce of Feature Pack 2 with many new features (too many to type here)
• June will see shipping for both XenApp and XenDesktop
• The world of apps is moving beyond Windows Apps
• What about IOS, Android, mobile data?
• 3 big areas to mobile devices - devices + apps + data - need a strategy that takes both into account
• Even if you take care of all three areas, the Experience is the most important factor
• How do you deliver a consumer-like mobile experience at work?
• 3 things to do that - infrastructure to manage mobile lifecycle + mobile apple & data + developer tools and app ecosystem
• XenMobile - How to deliver this - Provision, security, apps, and data to mobile devices
• Want seamless windows integration
• Worx Enroll - self-service device registration is the first step (provisioning)
• Worx Home - Mobile settings, support, more (operations)
• Demo Time  - Showing of BYOD of an iPhone 5 using Worx Enroll and Worx Home
• Enroll checks the device, checks if it is jailbroken (Boo!) and certifies the device
• You then enroll and your "apps" are pushed to the device, Worx Home acts like a corporate app store, could be a desktop, an app, a mobile app, a file, etc.
• XenMobile has GoToAssist built in for mobile device support in the Enterprise
• Now sowing XenMobile admin UI, shows all devices in the enterprise with a very nice break down of the devices
• This allows you as an admin to wipe the "business" side of the device
• Now showing a new Samsung S4 and the Nokia with Windows 8, Android on a stick from Wyse
• XenMobile is designed for the full mobile lifecycle
• What about apps that talk to each other (copy, paste, etc)
• You don't want salesforce data leaking out, evernote to contain confidential information for example, create a barrier between life and work
• MDX Technology - Micro VPN and secure app containers, app specific lock and swipe, inter-app communication, conditional access policies
• XenMobile now includes WorxMail (mail, calendar, contacts), WorxWeb, ShareFile as a "basis" for office communications
• Demo Time - Showing email, have a sensitive email, can't open it or move it out of the app "container" but does it allow it on ShareFile
• Showing another email with a link to the internal Intranet and it will fire up a micro-VPN and use WorxWeb to tunnel back
• Showing an integration of ShareFile integrated with internal file shares on the intranet.  Allows you to connect back to corp data on ShareFile along with document editing on the iPad
• SharePoint connector into ShareFile - Pulls SharePoint into ShareFile, allows checkout of documents and editing with many SharePoint tracking features in place.  Check back in with a Note as well
• Podio - can now use the Chat API, (use GTM for real time interaction, Podio for team based actions), can also do video chat built into Podio with builtin one button, it uses HD Faces technology built into Podio
• XenMobile has 3 version - MDM Edition, App Edition,  and Enterprise Edition
• Available in June
• Worx App SDK - Worx Enable any mobile app
• Also a Worx "App store" for IT to enable apps in the Enterprise
• (NetScaler & wrap up content here but had some other things come up so missed them, sorry about that)

ApacheCon LiveBlog: Software Defined Networking (SDN) in CloudStack

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week.  This session is with Chiradeep Vittal.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

• Introduction is about how does Amazon built a cloud (see his previous session for this part)
• SDN Definition - Separation of Control Plane from the hardware performing the forwarding hardware - Also centralized control
• Central control eases configuration, troubleshooting, maintain over time
• Eliminates the tedious "log into every box" idea of network maintenance, log into controller
• OpenFlow is that SDN? - NO, it is a protocol for the control plane to talk to the forwarding elements
• Control is on the "top" and forwarding is on the "bottom"
• flexibility example, different route based on direction. Box A and Box B, different flow from A to B and B to A if needed
• IaaS and SDN go hand in hand - Agility, API configuration, Scalability,  Elasticity (all the ity's!)
• SDN enables virtual networking - the illusion of isolated networks on a physical wire
• SDN does have issues - Discovery of virtual addresses -> physical address mapping for instance
• He is now going over a multi-tenant topology example:

• CloudStack model - map virtual networks to physical network - define and provision networks and manage elasticity and scale
• CloudStack Network Model is very robust (see pic, too much to type, things in box tend to be SDN functions)

• How de we put this together?
• CloudStack Service Catalog - Cloud users don't see the "guts" of the configuration, the cloud admin or operator designs the service catalog and presents this to the users
• example - Gold Network - LB + FW + VPN using virtual appliances
• Platinum - LB + FW + VPN but using hardware devices
• Now going over topology example of the Gold offering & Platinum (uses Juniper firewall and Netscaler to Load Balance:

• In both examples the users has no idea if they are on the Gold or Platinum network
• Multi-Tier virtual networking - can define application tiers and isolate based on need as well, who is connected where
• Orchestration - He went through the Multi-Tier example and demonstrated all the steps that would have to be down manually (too many to list) and this will all be done through orchestration
• CloudStack Orchestration Architecture (see picture) - plugin Framework allows this to happen

• SDN works with CloudStack through the plugin model, the SDN controller talks to the plugin, today there is integration with Nicira NVP, BigSwitch, Midokura, and CloudStack Native (requires XenServer)

• CloudStack Native Controller uses GRE and and talks to Open vSwitch on the XenServer
• All isolation happens through the concept of a tenant key over the GRE tunnels. Each tenant has a unique key
• What makes the CloudStack controller different? 
• It is purpose built for IaaS and is not a general purpose SDN solution
• Proactive model - Deny all flows except ones programmed by the end-user API - others send to central controller and may have problems at scale
• Use the CloudStack virtual router to provide L3-L7 services (mainly because most hardware doesn't understand GRE today)

ApacheCon LiveBlog: Powering CloudStack w/ Ceph RBD

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week.  This session is with Patrick McGarry.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

(No title slide picture this time - missed it)

• What is Ceph - storage that does object, block, and file all in one; block is thin provision, snapshots, cloning - object has REST API
• RADOS (Google it) object store at the lowest level
• Why Object at the lowest level - more useful than blocks, single namespace, scales better, simple API, workload is easily parallel
• Because of this: define a pool (1 to 100's), independent namespaces and object collections
• (Topic change) - Architecture
• aggregate a bunch of different machines so that you can have a "large enough" front end to handle large number of requests in
• In this "pile" you will have monitors. Monitors provide consensus for decisions, always an odd number, do not store data (traffic controllers) to the storage nodes (OSD nodes)
• On an OSD node -> physical disk -> file system -> OSD layer
• CRUSH - pseudo-random placement algorithm for data placement, CEPH "secret sauce", allows for stable mapping and uniform distribution with additional ruled configuration (can apply weights, topology rules)
• How does it work, take an object, talk to monitors, CRUSH breaks it up, places it around according to the rules
• What happens when something breaks? If an OSD node is lost, the ones with the copy of the data replicates the blocks somewhere else according to CRUSH rules and moves on
• How to talk to it? LIBRADOS - library for RADOS, support for C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP
• Also RADOSGW - Rest gateway compatible with S3 & Swift
• CEPH FS - A POSIX-compliant distributed file system with a Linux kernel
• RBD - reliable and fully-distributed block device sitting on top of the object store
• RADOS Block Device (RBD) - storage of disk images in RADOS, allows decouple of VM from the host, images stripped across the pool, snapshots, copy-on-write clones
• What does this look like? vm's are now split across the cluster, great for large capacity as well as high I/O instances of vm's
• same model as Amazon EBS
• it is a shared environment, so you can migrate running instances across cluster
• Copy-On-Write Cloning (he gets lots of question on this) - think of a Golden Image Master vm and you want 100 copies - You spin the 100 instantly and it takes up additional storage as needed and the vm's grow.
• Question: Is there a performance impact to this? A: No, but as usual it depends on the architecture (how many devices are hitting it)
• CloudStack 4.0 and RBD? via KVM, no Xen or VMW support today
• Live migrations are supported
• No snapshots yet
• NFS still required for system vm's
• Can be added easily as RBD Primary storage in CloudStack
• snapshot and backup support should be coming in version 4.2, cloning is coming, support for secondary storage in 4.2 (backup storage is coing in 4.2)

ApacheCon LiveBlog: DevCloud - A CloudStack SandBox

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week.  This session is with Sebastien Goasguen.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

• Today's talk will focus on DevCloud and CloudMonkey
• Sebastien giving overview of IaaS market in general. He was actually an OpenNebula guy prior to CloudStack
• With IaaS setting up a virtual sand box can be tricky since there are a larger number of moving parts: hypervisors, storage, networking
• DevOps - quick introduction to DevOps to help everyone understand why this is such a big movement in the industry right now (bringing development coser to the operations)
• This helps us set up an environment to enable a software defined datacenter that allows for automation at all levels
• Now talking about ASF (Apache Software Foundation) and CloudStack. He has a LOT of analysis around the community. The growth once joining as an incubation project shows a HUGE spike (CloudStack is now the #1 Apache project when it comes to commits)
• On to the internals of CloudStack, goal is to be as agnostic as possible (multi-hypervisor, both block and object storage) 

• Network tends to be the most challenging for new folks (firewall, load balancing, basic networking vs. advanced networking, VPN, etc.) - See the bottom line on the picture above
• Apache 4.0 was released in November, 4.01 was just released, 4.1 set for March. Goal is new release every six months
• Architecture -> Zone(datacenter) -> Pods(rack) -> Cluster (hosts) -> primary & secondary storage -> Instance (virtual machines)
• Centralized management server - can be multiple management servers behind a load balancer and replicated MySQL for large scale

• system vm's are used to communicate from the management server to some features (firewall, secondary storage, etc.)
• (Topic change) - What is DevCloud - CloudStack in a box, aimed at developers but can be a local EC2/S3 "cloud in a box"
• self contained - cloudstack management server, ttyllinux (to stay small), system vm's, MySQL, interface all on one laptop - on a beefy laptop expect a good number of instances
• What is CloudMonkey - cloudstack CLI - great for auto-completion of features, tabular output, help, scriptable, shell interaction, etc.
• Intro - Launch CloudMonkey, you now have a shell to talk to your cloud, need to do a key exchange, then ready to access your devCloud instance
• Demo Time - He is running VirtualBox on a Mac Book Air, he is using a NAT interface, forwarding a few ports needed (8080, 2222, 8443, 5901, 7080) - The vm uses nested vm's to launch inside the virtual machine on the laptop
• 2nd Demo - He is running the 4.01 release on his laptop directly from the sourcecode instead of the devcloud vm as well.
• Back to DevCloud - He shows the system vm's up and running and an instance that is halted.
• Went into Web UI - Gave an overview of the Infrastructure, you will have a zone and pod that is defined (named devlcoud), from there a single host as well
• Secondary storage - NFS storage is built in and emulated, primary storage is "local". No need to stand up an external NFS service
• templates - the system vm's and the small linux template are already included.
• Sebastien went through creation of a new instance using the included tiny instance and shows everything spinning up.
• You can take snapshots (saves to secondary storage)
• The first time a template is used it is pulled from secondary storage and copied down to primary storage
• Global Settings - EC2 API feature turn on if you want to run EC2 commands against it
• Now going over CloudMonkey features
• First thing, set the API key (get this from the UI)
• Now you can do common tasks (list virtual machines, start/stop virtual machines, etc.)
• Another way to use DevCloud: different network type, 2 vNICS, one host only and one NAT
• Build it from source (need Maven dependencies), deploy the database, basically build it yourself. Because you build it this way, there are no zones, pods, etc.  You build everything yourself.
• One thing you can do with this is build your entire infrastructure from scripts. This allows you to test build process of CloudStack for replication.  This is a very powerful use case!

Really great presentation and great overview to those new to CloudStack and DevCloud!

ApacheCon LiveBlog: Object Storage with CloudStack & Hadoop

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week.  This session is with Chiradeep Vittal.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

• How does Amazon build a cloud:
• Commodity Hardware -> OpenSource Xen Server -> AWS Orchestration Software -> AWS API -> Amazon eCommerce Platform
• How would YOU build the same cloud on CloudStack - You can in much the same way: Hardware -> Hypervisor -> CloudStack -> API -> Customer Solution
• CloudStack is built in the concept of a Zone (much like an AWS Zone)
• Under the zone is a logical unit of Pods (think of it as a rack)
• Secondary Storage is used for Templates, snapshots, etc. (items that are storage and not changed often, need to be shared across pods)
• Cloud Style Workloads = low cost, standardized hardware, highly automated & efficient (it's the Pets vs. Cattle analogy)
• At scale, everything breaks eventually
• Regions and Zones - Region "West", hope a Region will not go down when another Region goes down. - Replication from one Region to another Region is the norm
• Secondary Storage in CloudStack 4.0 today
• NFS is the server default - mounted by any CloudStack Hypervisor, easy to set up
• BUT - doesn't scale well, "chatty", maybe need WAN optimize. What if 1000 hypervisors talk to one NFS share?
• At large scale NFS shows some issues
• One solution is use object storage for secondary storage
• Object Storage has redundancy, replication, auditing built in to the technology typically
• In addition, this technology enables other applications, API server in front of the object store and you know have "Dropbox", etc.  typically static content and archival kinds of applications
• Object is 99.9 availability and 99.(eleven 9's) durability according to Amazon S3 and Massive scale (1.3 trillion objects in AWS today serving 800k requests per second
• Scalable objects can not be modified, only deleted (called an Immutable object)
• Simple API with a flat namespace - think KISS princisple
• CloudStack S3 API Server - understands Amazon S3 API with a Pluggable BackEnd, default backend is a POSIX filesystem (not very useful in production), Carringo was mentioned as a replacement, also HDFS replacement
• Question - Does CloudStack handle all the ACL's / Answer: Yes
• FollowUp - Does that mean SQL Server is a possible constraint / Answer: Yes
• Integrations are available with Riak CS and OpenStack Swift
• Upcoming in CloudStack 4.2 - Framework to expand this much more
• Given all of this, what could we build? (Topic switch)
• Want an Open Source, scales to 1 billion objects, reliability & durability on par with S3, S3 API
• This is now a theoretical design (hasn't been tested)
• (See picture for architecture)

• Hadoop meets all of these requirements and is proven to work (200 million objects in 1 cluster, 100PB in 1 cluster), need to scale, just add a node, very easy
• BUT - Name Node Scalability (at 100's of millions of blocks, could run into GC issues), Name Node is a SPOF (Single Point of Failure) - this is being worked currently, Cross Zone Replication (Hadoop has rack awareness, what if further apart?) - this isn't really tested today, where do you store metadata (ACL's for instance)
• take a 1 billion objects example (bunch of assumptions here) - needs about 450GB per name node, 16TB / note = 1000 data nodes
• Name Node management is federated (sorry this is vague, getting beyond my knowledge of Hadoop architecture at this point). Name Node and HA really hasn't been tested to date
• NameSpace shards, how do you shard them? Do you need a DB just to store this?? What about rebalancing between node names?
• Replication over lossy/slower links (solution really breaks down here today)
• Async replication - how do you handle master/slave relationships?
• Sync - not very feasible if you lose a zone (writes never acknowledged so will not continue)
• Where do you store Metadata?
• Store in HDFS along with the object, reads become expensive and meta data is mutable (needs to be edited), needs a layer on top of HDFS
• Use another storage system (like HBase) - required for Name node federation anyway, but ANOTHER system to manage
• Modify the Name Node to store the metadata
• high performance (doesn't exist today)
• not extensible and not easy to just "plug in"
• What can you do with Object Store in HDFS today?
• Viable for small size deployments - up too 100-200 million objects (Facebook does this) with datacenters close together
• Larger deployments needs development and there is really no effort around this today

ApacheCon LiveBlog: CloudStack Top 10 Network Issues

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week.  This session is by Kirk Kosinski.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

• Kirk was an original cloud.com support engineer so he has seen a LOT over the years
• # 1 Issue - VLANS! - biggest single reason for issues in CloudStack, check switch misconfiguration (Are all VLANs trunked by default?)
• Does DHCP work for a certain number of the VMs? Lead indicator of this problem, vm's are running on the same host but the VLANs are messed up
• So many reasons why VLANs could be a problem, this can be very hard to troubleshoot depending on the complexity of your environment (firewalls, layers of switches, etc)
• #2 - Hypervisor problems - mostly network related again - NIC drivers, bonding (especially Xen), cabling, etc.
• don't try to manually hack your management server database!
• #3 Open vSwitch on XenServer - It is the default now. Make sure you run the latest patches!
• #4 Security Groups - KVM, works out of the box most of the time, Xen, must enable Linux bridge back-end, must install Cloud Supplemental Pack (XS < 6.1), doesn't work on vSphere currently
• #5 Host Connectivity - between hypervisors to system vm's and secondary storage
• #6 CloudStack "Physical Networks" - not necessarily "physical", traffic labels - multiple NICS, etc.
• #7 Console Proxy virtual machine - Connectivity from management server to end users web browser
• check realhostip.com connection, check SSL cert status
• #8 Templates - was it eth0 and you are now using eth1?, sysprep for Windows errors
• #9 Password Reset Feature - reset script problems, check DHCP client & version
• Daemon Problems - check 8080/tcp on virtual router (socat process, stop and restart)
• #10 User and Meta-Data - Start/Stop vm, Start/Stop virtual router, Destroy/Recreate virtual router, check management-server.log

ApacheCon LiveBlog: CloudStack's Plugin Model

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week.  This session is by Don Lafferty.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

 

• Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation is the opening bullet
• Of course, CloudStack's plugin model permits this!
• This presentation will be a case study for the addition of Hyper-V as a newcomer (meaning Don is a new comer) support into CloudStack - This shows where Don is coming from and challenges as he is getting started in this ecosystem
• To be able to learn to plugin to CloudStack, you need to break it into pieces to make the learning curve more manageable: Hardware management (provisioning plugins), CloudStack Orchestration, Adapters (to bridge Orchestration & Provisioning) & Framework
• Plugin serves two masters: Server component (java, adapter API's, RESTful API's, etc.) & Server Resource (Agent Proxy i.e KVM or Direct Connect i.e. Xen)
• Follow the Apache Process for New Features:
• Announce over mailing list
• Publish Spec & Design
• JIRA Ticket
• Setup Dev Environment
• Branch on github, use your own public branch
• Submit changes to Review Board
• Decide which wiki you want to use: Incubator Wiki (cleaner, simpler  or CloudStack Wiki (more in depth, harder to new comers) - DO NOT use the pre-Apache wiki!
• Don recommends breaking the project into small steps to start just to learn the Apache process. Once you have the process down, then move onto more complex development
• For the Hyper-V example he broke this into Phase 1 (talk over Message Bus to talk to an agent) and Phase 2 (WS-Management to the WMI layer)
• Reuse and Repurpose rather than Rewrite!  (There is a ton of CloudStack code that exists, use it!)
• Don discusses Phase One - He borrowed code from the KVM version of the agent and communicated over the message bus and combined with code from the Hyper-V plugin for OpenStack
• Don went into some code examples and command examples - over my head :) - Take away, how do you want to structure the "conversation" between the management server and the agent.
• Pay attention the development mailing lists and see if a development trend helps solve your issue.  (i.e. NFS to secondary storage in CloudStack, Hyper-V of course prefers an SMB connection, there was a project already going on to make this happen so no need to do that code)
• Make Preparations for IP Clearance - These things take time and need to make sure the source code can be donated to the Apache Foundation to make sure everything is kosher from a legal standpoint.
• Session wrapped up with Q&A around how much of the learning curve is Apache related vs. CloudStack related.  It is a "two headed monster" to get going.  You have to learn the process and you have to learn the product.  They go hand in hand.

Links to Everything CloudStack Collaboration Conference

Lions and Tigers and CloudStack Monkeys Oh My!

This weekend the first ever Apache CloudStack Collaboration Conference was held in Las Vegas!  A HUGE thanks to David Nalley, Karen Vuong & Joe Brockmeier for pulling off such an incredible event!  If you thought the cloud wasn't "real world", take a look below. The content was amazing!

This document is intended to be a living archive of the content from #ccc12.  This is by no means an inclusive list.  If you see a link that I haven't included, please leave me a comment and I will update this article as quickly as I can.  I believe the sessions were recorded and as soon as I get a link I will add it as well.  Thank you!

Keynote Presentations:

• "The Most Interesting Man in the Cloud" Peder Ulander opened the event. I will post his slides shortly.
• Aneel Lakhani from Gartner. Enterprise + Cloud + Open
• Jim Jagielski - Apache Code, Community, and Open Source
• Tom Raftery from GreenMonk - Can We Hack Open Source Cloud Platforms to Reduce Emissions?
• John Willis (@botchagalupe) from EnStratus - Analyzing a Complex Cloud Outage

Networking Session Presentations:

• Rohit Yadav - DevCloud & CloudMonkey - CloudStack Demos; Link to the code.
• Hugo Trippaers - CloudStack & Nicira NVP Integration
• Floyd Strimling - Monitoring CloudStack Deep Dive
• Michael Ducy - DudeOps - Why the Big Lebowski is About Building a Cloud
• Somik Behera - Networking Considerations for CloudStack
• Dan Bode - Integrating CloudStack with Puppet & code link
• Jason Hancock - Running Puppet on CloudStack Instances & YouTube Video
• Ed Laczynski - Solving the Cloud Puzzle - The Complete Stack Explored
• Chiradeep Vittal - The Evolution of CloudStack Architecture
• Andrew Bayer - CloudStack and jclouds
• John Griffith & Dave Cahill - CloudStack and Cloud Storage
• Roeland Kuipers - Mission Critical Cloud Computing
• Uri Cohen - Building a Carrier Grade PaaS with CloudStack
• Geoff Higginbottom - Introduction to CloudStack Networking
• Chip Childers - 6 Months In: What I've Learned about Apache Projects
• Diane Mueller - Adventures in Deploying a Private PaaS on CloudStack
• Andy Gross - Riak Cloud Storage
• John Kinsella - CloudStack Secured
• Prasanna Santhanam - Continuous Test Infrastructure
• Dominic Curran - Under the Hood: Open vSwitch & OpenFlow in XCP & XenServer
• Jessica Tomechak - Open Writing! Collaborative Authoring for CloudStack Documentation
• Rajesh Ramchandani - High Value Cloud Service
• Kelcey Damage & Clayton Weise - CloudStack in Production - Considerations & Design
• Duncan Johnston-Watt - Quality Control in a Cloudy World
• Chiradeep Vittal - Apache CloudStack: A Not So Cloudy Future
• Alex Huang - Apache CloudStack Evolution Proposal
• Funs Kessen - Storage in a Mission Critical Cloud(stack)
• Marcus Sorensen - Implementing CloudStack's VPC Feature
• Marcus Sorensen - Using CloudStack with Clustered LVM
• Donal Lafferty - Supporting Hyper-V 3.0 on Apache CloudStack
• Ben Cherian - Making a Case for Distributed Overlay-Based Network Virtualization
• UPDATED: Mice Xia - Integrate 3rd Party Security with CloudStack

Announcements:

• CloudCat - Manage & Report on CloudStack - Site & Code Links
• Basho Riak CS supports Multi-DataCenter Replication

My apologies ahead of time for any typos and/or botched names. It is very late on a Sunday but felt it was important to get this out as quickly as possible.  Just about everyone listed here is on Twitter so feel free to look them up!  Thank you again for everyone who attended the conference!!