The Stackforge Libra project as with most Openstack based projects is written in Python.  As anyone who has used Python before probably knows, Python has something called a GIL (Global Interpreter Lock).  The GIL basically causes Python to only execute one thread at a time, context switching between the threads.  This means you can't really use threads for performance reasons in Python.

One solution to get a little more performance is to use Eventlet.  Eventlet is a library which uses what is called "Green Threads" and hacks on top of the networking libraries to give a mutli-threaded like feel to an application.  As part of this blogging series for HP's Advanced Technology Group I'll write about some of the things I found out the hard way about Eventlet so hopefully you don't hit …

I have been pretty quiet on the blogging front for quite a long time now.  The main reason for this is I have been working very hard on leading a small team which is developing a Stackforge project called 'Libra'.  As you can probably guess from the name, Libra is a Load Balancer as a Service system.  Many of you may not of heard of it but according to Stackalytics it was the 27th biggest project in terms of code contributed during Havana and 2nd biggest in HP (something I am especially proud of because it has been one of the smallest teams in HP Cloud).

It is based on the Atlas API specifications, creates software-based load balancers, is implemented in Python and sits on top of Nova instances rather than working under the cloud.  It also has several unique features which could be …