There has been a lot of talk lately about the “Open Source Cloud.” What will it look like, who will be behind it, and can I use it now? These were hot topics at OSCON, and Stephen O’Grady had two excellent posts on them recently as well (one, two). As many other folks do, I see a few major drivers of this: the need for private clouds, the prevention of vendor lock-in (proprietary services), and open source hackers just wanting to be able to extend and fix the source code. Some layers of this open source cloud stack are further along than others, and I’m going to attempt to outline what I’ve found so far along with what I think is missing.

Virtual Machine …

I’m going to be giving a talk at the PHP user group here in Portland, OR on August 11th. Details can be found here. If you’re in the Portland area please join the group and come check it out! This will be similar to the Boston MySQL Meetup group talk I gave earlier this month with Patrick, but with more focus on PHP.

There is a lot happening with Gearman right now. Last week at OSCON we received quite a bit of good feedback with the project which will certainly help direct our priorities moving forward. In the past couple weeks we’ve had the following Gearman releases:

• Gearman C Server and Library 0.9 – This added libsqlite3 and libpq (PostgreSQL) persistent queue support. Thanks to Cory Bennett for the SQLite patch!
• Gearman PHP Extension 0.5.0 – This release includes a few more functions from the C library and bug fixes. Thanks James!
• Gearman Perl XS 0.4 – This release includes a few more functions from …

At the July MySQL User Group, Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke about Drizzle, a lightweight, microkernel, open source database for high-performance scale-out applications, and Gearman, an open source, distributed job queuing system.

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.oddments.org/notes/DrizzleGearmanBoston2009.pdf.

The first hour of video, where Eric and Patrick talk about Drizzle, is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4cGzFlcuU, and below:

The second part, about 1.5 hours, where Eric and Patrick talk about Gearman, and then illustrate Gearman and Drizzle working together in a custom search application called Narada, is …

Gearman is an open source generic framework for distributed processing. At OSCON 2009 I attended the Gearman: Build Your Own Distributed Platform in 3 Hours tutorial.

While it’s very easy to install Gearman, and follow the first example, if you missed the all important additional PHP steps listed on just one slide you may be left with the “‘Class ‘GearmanClient’ not found” error.

The following are detailed instructions for the installation and configuration of Gearman and PHP on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.

Add the Drizzle PPA to get pre-packaged versions of Gearman.

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.orig
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main" …

Similar to the MySQL and Drizzle user defined functions for Gearman, we now have PostrgeSQL functions too! These allow you to submit jobs to the job server from within your SQL query, trigger, or stored procedure. Here’s a snippet of how this looks in PostgreSQL:

shell$ psql test
test=# SELECT gman_do('reverse', 'Hello World!');
   gman_do
--------------
 !dlroW olleH
(1 row)

test=#

Special thanks to Selena Deckelmann for helping get these working!

I’ll be talking about the latest features in Gearman along with covering a few Gearman-powered applications tomorrow, July 14th, at 10AM Pacific time. Follow this link for details on how to sign up: Gearman: New Features and Applications for Distributed Job Queuing

Brian Aker and I will also be talking about Gearman at the PostgreSQL pgDay San Jose on Sunday, July 19th, and at OSCON the week after. See the Gearman presentations page for more information.

Version 0.8 of the Gearman C Server and Library has been released. This includes basic HTTP protocol support, build system improvements, and bug fixes.

Version 0.4.0 of the Gearman PHP Extension has also been released.

If you want to learn more about Gearman, be sure to check out the upcoming Boston MySQL Meetup, MySQL Webinar, or the one of the events at OSCON (tutorial, session, and …

I’ll be heading back to my home state (Maine) this week for a visit, and while I’m back there Patrick Galbraith and I will be talking at the Boston MySQL Meetup Group on Monday night about Drizzle, Gearman, and how to combine the two with projects like Narada. If you are in the Boston area, be sure to check it out!

I’ve been following the excellent work that Jan, Kay, and others have been doing with MySQL Proxy, it has really matured into a great piece of software. I talked to Jan at the MySQL UC and toyed with the idea of integrating libdrizzle into MySQL Proxy. I’ve also been asked by a number of folks when a Drizzle Proxy project will be started and if it will be as feature rich as MySQL Proxy. For a while I just said “Someday, I just don’t have the time.” Lately though I am hoping we never have a Drizzle Proxy project.

Let me explain.

One of the fundamental ideas in software engineering is code reuse through libraries or modules. Rather …