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

Catching Up - What Have I Been Up Too

What happened to the last 3 months?!  To say it has been a busy summer has been an understatement.  Hopefully more blogs coming in September for some cools things I'm working on but here is a recap of the last few months.

• Engineer's Uplugged S3E1 talking about cloud computing workloads and environments
• Speaking in Tech Podcast talking OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.
• Huffington Post Top 100 Cloud Computing Experts on Twitter
• Follow up post from the Cloudcast on how many we've had on the show
• I'll also be presenting a vBrownBag Session on Apache CloudStack at VMworld
• I also hosted a series of podcasts with Enterprise Management 360 for Citrix:
• Citrix in the Cloud
• Managed Services in the Cloud Part 1
• Managed Services in the Cloud Part 2
• Managed Services in the Cloud Part 3

I've also been generating a lot of content over the summer, too much to list here.  Go check out my blog on Tech Target as well as the latest episodes of the Cloudcast and Mobilecast.  Thanks again for coming by!

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"!

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

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.

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.]

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!

As the Open Stacks Turn

What a week for cloud computing!  First there was the news that CloudStack was released into the wild, then OpenStack created a foundation and brought in major players including IBM, Red Hat, and Canonical.

I'm not going to say which platform is better or discuss the technical merits.  But, I would like to add a comment on the possible future of each product.

Today, CloudStack appears to be a more production ready product and has a nice list of large customers but it has Citrix as the only major contributor to date.  OpenStack on the other hand is making great progress towards a goal of production ready and most of the code is coming from Rackspace.

But, (and it's a huge but in my opinion) what happens next?  It would appear the vast majority of the major technical players are aligning with OpenStack.  Can CloudStack make it if it is only backed by Citrix?

I'll give you my standard answer of "it depends".  It depends on which IBM, Red Hat, and others show up to the OpenStack party.  If most of the companies that joined the OpenStack foundation this week "phone it in" and are only at the table to make sure they can have their logo on the product, OpenStack will fail.  You will essentially continue to have what you have today, Citrix against Rackspace.

If IBM, Red Hat, and many of the others actively participate and contribute code, developers, time, etc. into the OpenStack product, then look out.  I'll be watching the list of contributors in the next few releases to see how the percentage of contributors per company breaks out and I suggest you do the same.