A few thoughts on high availability features (or the current absence thereof) in OpenStack.

I've just proposed a session for the OpenStack Folsom design summit which Jay Pipes was nice enough to invite me to (thanks!), and I thought I'd write up a few thoughts of mine ahead of time to get the discussion started.

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I've seen recent attempts at blog posts to show how to get started at hacking on an OpenStack project.  Unfortunately they seem to have over-complicated the issue for new users.  As part of the Core Infrastructure team it is my job to make submitting, reviewing and merging code easier for developers.  This includes documenting that process, so here goes :)

1. You need a Launchpad account and need to be joined to the Openstack team.  You can also join the team of one of the many subprojects if you want to.  Make sure Launchpad has your SSH key, Gerrit (the code review system) uses this.
2. Sign the CLA as outlined in section 3 of the How To Contribute wiki page …

Gerrit is a fantastic tool for performing code reviews and automating many of the tasks which can become quite complex. Unfortunately its default style is not the most attractive thing to look at all day. Yesterday I was tasked with skinning Gerrit to make it more in-line with Openstack. This was not as easy a task as I first anticipated, mostly down to not having the ability to edit the HTML layout very much without editing Gerrit's source.

The result isn't perfect but hopefully a notable improvement which will be coming to an Openstack review site near you soon.  Here is the before and after shots:

In 2008 my career took a sudden unexpected turn into the world of MySQL when I was offered a job at Sun.  Since then MySQL and it's forks have been a big part of my life.  The whole community (I mean the people, not the companies) around MySQL are part of what really drove me.

Unfortunately to me something has changed.  I am not exactly sure what it is, but I am sure it is not just me because others have expressed it in conversation too.  I wasn't enjoying things as much as I used to and for several reasons, some related to this, I have been quite ill.

Recently I was approached by HP's new cloud division who wanted me to work on OpenStack.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to start something new inside a new vibrant community.  That is not to say I have anything against my previous …

Cloudera raises $40m. Accel announces $100m fund. Rackspace takes OpenStack private. And more.

# Cloudera raised $40m in series D funding and announced a partnership with NetApp around its NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

# Accel Partners launched a $100m Big Data Fund to invest in Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors.

# Rackspace …

OpenStack Foundation. New Pentaho CEO. And more.

# Rackspace announced its intention to form an independent OpenStack Foundation.

# HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud.

# Pentaho appointed Quentin Gallivan as its new CEO.

# Hortonworks continued the discussion about contributions to Apache Hadoop.

# Bob Bickel explained why CloudBees is not, itself, open …

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

…

Red Hat acquires Gluster. Adobe acquires PhoneGap. Oracle does Hadoop. And more.

# Red Hat agreed to acquire Gluster for approximately $136m in cash. Red Hat CTO Crian Steven explained why.

# Adobe announced its agreement to acquire Nitobi, creator of PhoneGap.

# Oracle unveiled its Oracle Big Data Appliance, including Apache Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL database.

# ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS …

Topics for this podcast:

*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’

iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)

Microsoft’s Android revenue. Tizen formation. And more.

# As Microsoft announced its latest Android-related patent agreement with Samsun, Goldman Sachs estimated that the company will make $444m in revenue from Android patent deals for fiscal year 2012.

# LiMo Foundation and The Linux Foundation announced the formation of Tizen to develop a Linux-based device software platform.

# Karmasphere raised $6m in a series B round …