OpenStack Summit Session Voting - Please Vote!

Time to dust of the blog and beg some folks for votes on OpenStack Summit sessions...

First off, here are some great sessions I would love to see and I encourage you to vote for! There are so many submissions picking a few is difficult:

Scott & Ken's great session on VMware & OpenStack: OpenStack for VMware Operators

Getting Started with OpenStack

OpenStack Performance Tuning

Multitenancy with Cinder: How Volume Types Enable It

Lastly, I have three sessions up for consideration, please vote if you are interested and I hope to see everyone in Paris!

Predictable Cinder Performance with SolidFire Storage

Building a Cloud Career in OpenStack

Ask the Experts: Challenges for OpenStack Storage

April Recap

My trend of posting monthly recaps a few days late continues...  Sorry about that, hopefully the May recap will be on-time.  I was traveling most of April so the blogs this month tend to reflect that.

I'll start with the Cloudcast (.net) for the month of April.  We published a record number of episodes. A HUGE thanks to both Amy Lewis and Brian Katz for their amazing contributions!  Amy did a fantastic job as roving reporter and Brian's Mobilecast is really taking off!  As always, please send us any show feedback, we love to hear from you!

• The Cloudcast #81 - Data Gravity Meets Lean Analytics - w/ Dave McCrory & Alistair Croll
• The Cloudcast #82 - SDN, Big Data, Internet of Things and What's Next - w/ Lew Tucker & Dave McCrory
• The Cloudcast #83 - Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Options - w/ Rajeev Chawla
• The Cloudcast #84 - Red Hat OpenShift - Are We There Yet? - w/ Diane Mueller, Ryan Jarvinen, Krishna Ramen 

• The Mobilecast #3 - Identity and Access Management -  w/ Paul Madsen
• The Mobilecast #4 - Data Categorization and Security - w/ Bill Pelletier
• The Mobilecast #5 - App Development and Lessons Learned at Festo - w/ Steve Damadeo
• The Mobilecast #6 - WiFi, Small Cells and Mobile - w/ Art King

Next up is my new TechTarget Blog, you have subscribed with your latest Google Reader replacement, right??  I'm really having a good time writing over there.  This site (aarondelp.com) has always been more hands on and live blogs from events but the interest in the latest trends around Open Clouds and the operational aspects of cloud computing has been both great and humbling.  Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read the articles and provide feedback!

• Will "THE CLOUD" Always Be Just Out of Reach? - My thoughts on why there is no silver bullet in the cloud computing world and why it all comes down to one thing: workload
• Is PaaS the Gateway Tool for the Enterprise Cloud? - Will PaaS be the nudge the Enterprise needs to accelerate cloud adoption?
• Impressions From The OpenStack Summit - Couldn't make the OpenStack Summit? Here are my thoughts
• Expectations For the AWS Summit - Here is what I was looking for going into the AWS Summit
• AWS Summit Wrap Up - My Summary of the AWS Summit event in San Francisco

The only blogging I was able to do on my site this month is Live Blogs from the AWS event.  Here are all of them.

• AWS Summit Keynote Live Blog
• AWS Summit Live Blog: Introducing AWS OpsWorks Session
• AWS Summit Live Blog: Cloud Backup and DR Session
• AWS Summit Live Blog: Hybrid IT Design with RightScale

Thanks again for coming by and I'm looking forward to May!

March Recap

This post is a few days late but I wanted to put together a recap of everything that has been happening in March. To say March was a busy month was an understatement!  I'm not sure how much content I'll be able to post here in April as I have two speaking engagements to prepare for and I have decided I'm going to transition this blog away from Blogger and Feedburner to a WordPress hosted site.  Look for the new site probably sometime in late May based on my schedule right now.

March was our busiest month in recent memory at The Cloudcast (.net).  We published seven podcasts in March including the beginning of our expansion plans with our first podcast branch, the Mobilecast, as well as our first in a series of guest hosts, the always awesome Amy Lewis at Cisco.  Our goal for 2013 is to extend our reach into areas people have told us they want as well as some new faces to the podcast.  Please tell us what you think!

The Cloudcast #76 - Bringing Depth to PaaS for Real World Deployments
The Cloudcast #77 - OpenStack, PaaS APIs, Platform Tools, Automation & News
The Cloudcast #78 - Open Source Software 101
The Cloudcast #79 - DevOps Evolution and the Phoenix Project
The Cloudcast #80 - Regional Cloud Madness

The Mobilecast #1 - A Year of Going Mobile
The Mobilecast #2 - Health, Fitness and Wearable Computing

In addition to this blog I have also been asked to blog about Cloud Computing over at Tech Target.  I have a pretty extensive consulting and operations background so I have been asked to think about cloud computing from an operations standpoint.  I'm aiming for at least one blog a week over there.  Please head on over and subscribe to the blog!  I met my goal in March, here are links:

What Happens When Your Cloud Goes Away?
Cloud Applications and Vanishing Software Generations
Will Clouds Ever Be Open?
Impacts of Cloud Workload Consolidation

Last (but not least!) on this site I published two articles, one on the NYC Cloud Computing Meetup I attended and a new semi-regular news link round up I plan to do.

NYC Cloud Computing Meetup Recap
In Case You Missed It #1

As always, thanks to everyone for coming by and look for big changes coming "soon"!

NYC Cloud Computing Meetup Recap

Last week I was able to attend the New York City Cloud Computing Meetup.  It was a very cool event and Joe Brockmeier presented Deploying Apache CloudStack from API to UI.

Deploying Apache CloudStack from API to UI from Joe Brockmeier

Joe did an awesome job (as always) and the meetup was nicely attended, I would estimate about 40-50 people were in the room.  Here are a few random thoughts and impressions in no particular order:

• The session was very interactive. It took the crowd a little bit to come out of their shell but once they did the discussion was very free form and constructive
• The level of questions were very good.  Many were about how to implement and architecture related questions about specific features. Snapshots in particular generated a lot of discussion on slide 26. It appears we are starting to move beyond the basic cloud definitions and into the nitty gritty of implementations
• There were customers in the room and they greatly helped with the discussions (Thanks Jeff @ DataPipe!). It was great to hear how their real world experiences were put to use and how they were able to tackle some of the issues and concerns brought up
• I like how Joe started with some features of the NIST definition and then added an additional point (see slide 4). I agree with Joe that API access is crucial going forward
• Slide 15 (the architecture overview) generated a lot of real world discussion in the room that I believe was very helpful to everyone

All in all a great event!

In Case You Missed It #1

I'm going to try something new and see how this works. I read a LOT of Cloud Computing news.  When I was speaking on a panel recently I was asked afterwards why I don't share a lot of the news I find interesting and thought provoking.  Great question and here is an initial attempt to do just that.

Below is a list of articles I found interesting over the last two weeks and some commentary on what I see going on in the industry.  I'm still not 100% on the format so let me know what you like and want to see changed.

Events & Misc. Links

• Portability: No Snowflakes For You - David Nalley put together an awesome post on how thinking about portability and how you may be doing it wrong. Best article I've read in awhile and addresses a concern I see over and over again.
• AWS Summit 2013 Announced - I'll be attending the San Francisco event as well as the Boot Camps and hope to blog while I'm there
• Monkigras 2013 Videos Posted - If you want to see some awesome presentations, go check this out. A must attend event to say the least
• The first Triangle (as in the Raleigh & RTP area) OpenStack Meetup is this week
• Simon's On Structure - Another great and thought provoking article by Simon. Are you a Pioneer, Settler, or City Planner?
• Bay Area CloudStack Meetup Recap
• Apache CloudStack Weekly Update - I subscribe to the AWS, OpenStack, and CloudStack Weekly Updates so I can follow as much as possible.  The CloudStack Weekly Update is new so I wanted to highlight it here
• RightScale first to sell Google Compute - GigaOm & DataCenter Dynamics Links

Amazon News
Amazon continues to steam ahead but the last few announcements have been very interesting.  In their quest to add more value (and lock-in) to their ecosystem, a bunch of small companies with products built around their cloud were put on notice.  How does a small startup compete with AWS when they decide to move into that space?  Time will tell...

• Amazon OpsWorks - Build "stacks" and deploy apps easily
• AWS Diagnostics for Windows Servers - AWS pushes into the Enterprise by showing Windows more love
• AWS Trusted Advisor & GigaOm Article - Free trial announced, I see a lot of "little guys" impacted by this one

Open Compute
One big OpenStack story to focus on from yesterday, IBM going "all in" with OpenStack.  I saw this one coming a mile away.  Even though I'm now employed by one of the vendors I posted about I still contend that it depends on which vendors show up to the OpenStack Party. As an outsider looking in it appears HP is "phoning it in" (and a lot of people are leaving), while IBM and RedHat are getting serious.

• IBM Goes All-In on OpenStack - Wired and All Things D Links

VMware

Beating up VMware has become the cool thing to do.  I joked about it on Twitter but I believe the VMware's message from PEX (VMware Partner Exchange) last week sent the wrong message the same way I felt AWS sent out some bad mojo at their conference late last year.  The big guys tend to approach this as all or nothing and everyone else is the enemy (it's their job, don't blame them) but most customers I talk to don't see it this way at all.

• James Staten on VMware's Innovator's Dilemma
• Randy Bias' Analysis of VMware's situation - Randy is Cloudcast Alumni and love him or hate him, he will always tell you his opinion

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)

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!!

This Month on the Cloudcast (.NET)

Another month has come and gone at the Cloudcast (.NET).  November was a great month for content.  We managed to get in a number of podcasts, produced some new You Tube videos, attended the AWS re:Invent conference, and we announced we will once again be running the Krispy Kreme Challenge to raise money for the North Carolina Children's Home.  If you like the show, please consider sending a donation here (we will match donations!)  Thank you!

• Episode #62 - Jesse Andrews stopped by and he was awesome to talk to about the current state of OpenStack and some great info on both the Folsom and Grizzly releases.  As a side note Jesse and I finally got to meet face to face last week at the AWS conference, awesome dude!
• Episode #63 - James Watters from VMware gave us the low down on VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS and updates since we last spoke to Dave McCrory awhile back.
• Episode #64 - Cloudcast alum Raejeanne Skillern gave us an update on Intel and the recent Intel Developer Forum.
• Episode #64.5 - Brian and Aaron take a break to talk about what we're thankful for (hint: our listeners) as well as announce our pledge to not only raise money for the Krispy Kreme Challenge, we will match all donations for the first $1000!
• Episode #65 - Aaron catches up with Mat Ellis from Cloudability at the AWS re:Invent conference and Matt breaks out the number one reason why you could be a "cloud noob".
• Episode #66 - Another AWS re:Invent episode, this one with Solomon from dotCloud. Solomon was great to talk too and I really feel his company is brining some unique features into the PaaS space.

This Month on the Cloudcast (.NET)

Another great month for the Cloudcast (.NET) podcast.  Here is a summary:

• Episode #58 - The Cloudcast's first ever live round table discussion at Build a Cloud Day. I thought it went very well and you can hardly tell where I edited us getting kicked out of the room (saved for the bloopers show)
• Episode #59 - Luke from PuppetLabs. Personally I think one of the best interviews we've ever done.  Luke was great to talk to and really knows his stuff.  The conversation went some places I didn't expect but overall awesome quality and always good to have Nick riding shotgun.
• Episode #61 - Justin from Basho. The concept of NoSQL scale out databases is new to me and I learned a TON on this show. Justin did a great job explaining some of the nuts and bolts of databases and cloud storage.

First one to spot our mistake this month gets a prize...

My Next Challenge: Are You Working to Your Strengths?

Last night on Twitter the bomb dropped.  Yesterday was my last day of employment with VCE and shortly I will start as the Senior Director of Technical Marketing for Cloud at Citrix. I wanted to take some time to tell everyone about my journey to this role and how I believe my path could affect your career as well.

While the response was overwhelming and positive (I mean that, thank you everyone! I was floored at the response last evening on Twitter!), the number one question was “Why?”.  The answer to this question lies in knowing your strengths and constantly working outside your comfort zone to challenge yourself to do better things in our industry.

Over the last 16 years (has it really been that long?!) my career path has been mainly trial and error, with sometimes mixed results.  My “light bulb” moment actually came while I was recently doing some consulting for a company.  The entire company is based around the Strengths Finder 2.0 book and exam.  Everyone in the company is required to take it and their top 5 strengths are listed on the back of their badge.  As part of my time there, I took the test and learned a good bit about myself.  For those that are curious, my top 5 are Input – I love to gather input, Learner – I’m always learning, Achievement - I live by checklists and goals, Communication – I love to communicate, and Woo – Winning Others Over – I love to bring you to my side.

When I stepped back and thought about the portions of my role within VCE I really enjoyed I realized they often fit into one or more of my top 5 strengths.  From there it was a matter of trying to find a role that would allow me to utilize these strengths as much as possible.

By accepting this new position at Citrix I have found a role that I believe firmly fits all of my strengths and I’m very excited for the next phase of my career.  I challenge you to do the same.  Are you working to your strengths?  Do you naturally enjoy your core job functions?

In summary, go learn what makes you tick. Don’t wander around waiting for the next job to find you.  I suggest taking the Strengths Finder 2.0 test.  With that information, ask yourself are in the right role in your organization?  If not, Fix it!

NOTE: I bet you didn’t expect this article to go there, did you? For those looking for gossip/dirt on why I left VCE or would like to read more into my departure, please don’t.  VCE has treated me awesome over the last two years and we parted on very good terms.  VCE is doing just fine and I believe will continue to lead the converged infrastructure market for years to come.

Taking Rackspace Private Cloud for a Test Drive

Rackspace has released something very cool that I wanted to share with everybody!  Today they released their Private Cloud product based on OpenStack.  Some details on the product:

• Designed to run on bare metal but can be virtualized!
• Based on the Essex release
• Not all features are supported (see the documentation) but there is enough there to take it for a test drive.
• Completely automated installation, answer a few questions and Chef does the rest!
• The documentation is very straightforward for installation and basic administration tasks for both bare metal and virtualized (KVM, VMware Fusion, Workstation, vSphere) environments
• In my experience it works with both an i5 and i7 Mac with Fusion 4.X

So, why this article?  Because as always, I wanted to push this a little bit.  The documentation calls for a minimum of 6GB (4GB for the controller + 2GB for a compute node) so you will need a workstation with 8GB at a minimum.  I decided to start with that but I also used two laptops to run multiple compute nodes.  Lastly, I also tried to reduce the memory footprint down to work solely on the MacBook Air but my results aren't stable enough so far.  I will continue to play and see if I can make that configuration work.

The environment: 

• An i5 Mac Book Pro with 8GB and OCZ SSD.  This is my laptop machine I've used in previous home lab configurations.  The base recommendation for the controller is 4GB and 2GB for each compute node.  I loaded up my controller and one compute node on this laptop.
• An i7 Mac Book Air with 4GB.  I added another compute node on this machine.
• To get the machines to "bridge" the networks I changed the default settings on the virtual machine for each node to Bridged instead of NAT.  This allowed me to piggyback onto my home wireless router to send packets back and forth.  My home router gives out DHCP on the 192.168.3.100-254 range so I hardcoded my controller to 192.168.3.10, compute node1 to 192.168.3.11 and compute node2 to 192.168.3.12.

• Both laptops were running Fusion 4.X without any problems.  I tried to use my wife's laptop (an i5 just like mine except 4GB and local HD) when she wasn't looking to add another compute node but she is running Fusion 3.X and the node wouldn't load.  I don't mess with mama's laptop so I decided not to tempt fate any further.
• It worked great!!  Here's the picture of the home lab on the kitchen island:

Summary:

I have been following the OpenStack community with great interest and so far this appears to be the easiest way to take OpenStack for a test drive.  I was up and running in less than an hour and will continue to tinker and learn.  A huge thanks to the Rackspace team for lowering the barrier to entry for people interested in OpenStack as it continues to build momentum!

[DISCLAIMER: I participated in the beta of this product. I provided feedback in exchange for early access to the software.  I was not compensated in anyway nor solicited to provide this post.]

EMC & Puppet Labs Announce Project Razor

Something really cool happened this morning!  EMC and Puppet Labs jointly announced a next generation provisioning system called Project Razor.  Brian and I had a chance to sit down with Puppet Labs and EMC to get some exclusive information on the project for a Cloudcast that we released this morning.  If you are at EMC World, be sure to check out Chad's World featuring Razor tonight at 5:30

Rather than tell you all about it, here are a bunch of links hot off the press (but go listen to the podcast!!):

• Nick Weaver's post
• Dan Hushon's post
• Puppet Labs Press Release
• Puppet Labs Blog Post
• Chuck's Blog Post
• Chad's Blog Post

UPDATE: Since I posted this here are a few links to actually get it and posts on how to get started as well!

• Getting Started with Razor Blog Post - Great post by the always awesome Nan Lui (great meeting you this week Nan!)
• Project Razor Wiki - github's wiki on Project Razor
• Razor github - Get it!

New Cloudcast (.NET) with Randy Bias - OpenStack & OpenClouds

Last night Brian and I had the great pleasure of talking to Randy Bias (CTO & Founder of Cloudscaling) about OpenStack and OpenClouds.  We had a great time and Randy had some very insightful views that are worth a listen.  Head over and check it out!