Blog entries

Randy Bias panel at #VMWorld2010

John Furrier interviewed members of the SF Cloud Computing Club today at VMWorld 2010 for an episode of SiliconAngle.tv’s TheCube series.

In the interview, John interviews:

  • Rich Miller, Managing Director & Principal, Cumulati
  • Bernard Golden, CEO, Hyperstratus
  • Randy Bias, CEO, Cloudscaling

The link is here: http://www.justin.tv/nicefishfilms/b/269320590

The video clip is below:


Watch live video from #theCube from SiliconANGLE.tv on Justin.tv

Randy’s comments are mostly in the 9:00 to 35:00 minute window but the audio was off from 9:00 – 17:22 so it’s a bit faint in the first half.

Some of the questions that are addressed in this talk include:

  • What is the current landscape for cloud computing?
  • What are the issues now?
  • Which issues are key?
  • Is security a real issue?
  • How do I use cloud while maintaining my compliance?
  • Who is using cloud inside the enterprise? Apps teams or Infrastructure teams?
  • How should cloud service providers think about cloud?
  • How big of a deal is cloud?
  • What are the entrepreneurial opportunities?

Thanks to John Firrier and the SiliconAngle.tv team for a great interview.

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A Most Interesting Cloud Meetup

most_interesting

Relax after VMWorld and come share Dos Equis with the OpenStackers.

We’ll be discussing cloud, cloud, cloud and maybe dodgeball Thursday evening.

5PM-8PM Sept. 2nd
@ Tres Agaves Restaurant
130 Townsend Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
(Just a few blocks from Moscone)

Come out and meet people working on OpenStack. (We’re interesting people and willing to talk about things besides cloud. Promise…)


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Stay Open My Friends
open-stack-cloud-computing-logo

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Leaders in the Cloud: OpenStack

“People don’t realize that lock-in actually occurs at the architectural level, not at the API- or hypervisor-level”

Randy Bias discusses the impact of OpenStack on the cloud computing ecosystem with sandhill.com’s Kamesh Pemmaraju.

Kamesh outlines the current state of cloud adoption, OpenStack and looks ahead.

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Interacting with your Swift install

Once you have swift services running, you are going to want to interact with them. (You can have them running in minutes if you want: swift-solo)

OpenStack Logo

Most of the currently available tools that interact with Rackspace’s Cloudfiles are hardcoded to that API endpoint, so even though the APIs are virtually identical, most the current releases don’t work with swift yet. Since we needed something for testing and demonstrations, we’ve been patching some of the third party projects to store and retrieve files with swift. Here’s a couple quick examples using Cyberduck, a GUI program, and Fog, a Ruby gem, from the command line.

Setting up Swift

All of the tools expect interaction with SSL enabled servers, so we will need to install and enable that within swift.  In the swift-solo repo, edit chef/cookbooks/swift/attributes/swift.rb and enable ssl:

default[:swift][:proxy_server][:use_ssl] = true
default[:swift][:auth_server][:use_ssl] = true

Swift 1.0.2, has an issue with ssl, so you will need to use a more recent version with the SSL fix. You can run from the swift trunk on launchpad, or we have a cyberduck branch in our swift repo that has the fix in place.  Again, edit the chef/cookbooks/swift/attributes/swift.rb file:

default[:swift][:repository][:url] = "http://github.com/cloudscaling/swift.git"
default[:swift][:repository][:tag] = "cyberduck"

Perform a swift-solo install, or re-install, as per the documentation.
You can use the swift-auth-create-account program to create your test account:

ubuntu@host:~/swift-solo$ sudo swift-auth-create-account account user password
https://example.com:8080/v1/338b6b2d-5137-40b4-9b95-9106a0d4db52

What’s important to note with creating the account is the URL that you are given back.  It is the URL your client will use to proxy into the swift services.  As such, the IP address or domain name exposed needs to be publicly available to your client, and it needs to be using https.
To verify it worked:

ubuntu@host: st -A https://127.0.0.1:11000/v1.0 -U account:username -K password stat
Account: 338b6b2d-5137-40b4-9b95-9106a0d4db52
Containers: 0
Objects: 0


Using Cyberduck

cyberduck logo

Download the Cyberduck sources, and edit the Protocol.java and lib/cloudfiles.properties to reflect the new endpoint following the instructions in the swift documentation. (go Caleb!)
Then rebuild cyberduck, and start it.  You should be able to interact with your swift install.


Using fog

fog

We have provided a patch to the fog gem to enable support for Swift, as of version 0.2.27.  Install the fog gem, then setup your ~/.fog configuration file:

:default:
:rackspace_api_key:     password
:rackspace_username:    account:user
:rackspace_auth_url:    example.com:11000

You can verify it works with the command line client:

username@host$ fog
Welcome to fog interactive!
>> f = Fog::Rackspace::Files.new(Fog.credentials)
>> f.put_container("test_container")
>> f.get_container("test_container")
>> f.directories
<Fog::Rackspace::Files::Directories
[
<Fog::Rackspace::Files::Directory
key="testcontainer",
bytes=10,
count=1
>
]
>

UPDATE:
The lastest builds of Cyberduck now support OpenStack

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OpenStack: Swift Barn Raising

At Cloudscaling, we’re getting closer to putting OpenStack into production services. This is the first installment chronicling that journey and opening some of the tools that we are developing along the way.

OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud computing framework for building infrastructure as a service, and Swift is a subproject which provides a scalable distributed object store. We have already expressed opinions about how a community of service providers all running an open platform would do to the cloud computing ecosystem (think Linux kernel of cloud). To support our own work, we try to make it as simple and easy as possible to build and configure clusters. We want to make it simple and easy for everyone else too. Today we are releasing ‘swift-solo‘ on github, which is essentially a chef automated install of the instructions for setting up an Ubuntu 10 VM for swift development. (We took inspiration from Opscode’s OpenStack Swift cookbook, but you’ll see a lot of things have been split out and extended. Thanks to Adam Jacob for those cookbooks and chef.)

The way it works now, after installing git and chef, one command will deploy and start swift on a single machine. The chef recipe can be configured to sync code from a git or bzr repository so you can quickly deploy changes in your development environment. There are also scripts to setup testing (basically install python-cloudfiles) and make sure the service is working (store an object and retrieve it).

old fashion barn raising

Swift is actually 5 separate services, object, container, account, auth and proxy. In theory, each of those can be scaled separately, but in practice the documentation says Rackspace runs the object, container and account services together and breaks out the proxy and auth.

Object, container and account servers are members of partitioned consistent hash rings mapping names to physical locations. Object servers index the actual blobs, container servers index the objects and the account servers index the containers.

Auth servers provide authentication and the proxy servers are the API gateway that coordinates request and responses with the rest of the services.

There are some other moving parts to do things like handle replication, auditing the integrity of objects and rebalance the rings.

The Swift documentation has a lot more information about the architecture, operational considerations and the code. Dig in.

Cloudscaling is interested in creating an open cloud ecosystem and we’ll keep sharing our work and trying to lower the barrier to participation. In the future, we plan to explain and open some of the work we are doing to handle authentication, automating the installation/configuration across clusters and other operational lessons we learn along the way.

Your first running Swift service is only a git clone away.

We would love to hear your feedback, suggestions and issues.

Finally, a shout out and thanks to the Scalers working on OpenStack/Swift: Big ups to Caleb Tennis for working on these chef recipes, Blake Barnett, and Joe Arnold.

Want to hack on OpenStack or Chef? We’re looking for good people to build open source automation tools and cloud infrastructure. Join us.

Drop us a line…

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