CloudStack, FOSDEM, and other uncategorized things

I haven’t done a great job blogging since FUDcon, so this omnibus blog post should hopefully get things up to date at least.

First, I am in Brussels for FOSDEM this weekend. I know there are tons of Fedora friends in EMEA that I have only corresponded with via IRC and email, so if you are FOSDEM, I hope to meet you in person.

Of course FOSDEM is later this week, and I traveled to Brussels yesterday – and not just so I can be a tourist. Kris Buytaert (of DevOps, and Everything is a Freaking DNS problem fame) is helping CloudStack host a Build an Open Source Cloud – Day in Antwerp on Friday, the day before FOSDEM starts. We have folks speaking from Puppetlabs, Xen, Zenoss, and of course CloudStack) There are still a few seats available, so if you are around, feel free to join us.

I’ve been incredibly busy with a number of things in CloudStack-world – we are drawing closer and closer to our 3.0 release, and just kicked out our 3rd beta release – (see the announcement here). This release is pretty transformative – a completely reworked UI that is simply gorgeous, and appears a lot more intuitive. Additionally we added a ton of security enhancements, provide for storing templates and snapshots in object storage (things like Swift, GlusterFS, and Caringo), dramatically increased our Networking-as-a-Service offerings, VM Storage migration (we already support live migration within a cluster of hypervisors, but this allows us to escape the cluster level and move VMs to different storage pools. I am getting pretty excited about this.

At the same time, Eric Christensen have been working on getting the final pieces of CloudStack packaging done for Fedora- and hope to have this done in the next week or so.

Lots of other things going on- but I just realized it’s 3:12am here – so I suppose I’ll stop writing and get some sleep before it’s time to eat breakfast.

Board member goals

I posted this to the advisory-board list, but want to have this here for additional visibility

Here is what I am passionate about working on in Fedora:

The cloud.

I apologize for using a buzzword in a serious task, but I see cloud-y things becoming far more important in the free software landscape and in technology in general. In many ways it parallels the goals (albeit in different ways) free software aspires to in empowering a user, by offering on-demand self-service access to resources. I also fear what happens if free software doesn’t continue to play a leading role here, and particularly if Fedora doesn’t continue to participate.

Thusly, my goals are:
* Ensure that the major IaaS providers make Fedora available as a deployable option.
* Ensure that the major open source IaaS and PaaS platforms are packaged and available in Fedora.
* Ensure that the surrounding ecosystem is also available in Fedora, be it the API abstraction tools like jclouds and fog, or provisioning tools like puppet cloud provisioner, knife, and Boxgrinder are in Fedora and available for people to use Fedora in cloud-building activities.

In addition to this main goal I have a couple goals regarding the governance within Fedora:

* Make sure the board remains responsive and accountable – often times people are hindered from getting things done by our slow response – and I hope a more fervent attention to trac and those pressing matters makes us more responsible and accountable.

As a corollary to that I have the following goal:

* Make sure the board stays out of micromanaging those who are doing work within Fedora. I firmly believe that the government that governs least governs best, and while I don’t want a disengaged board, I do want a board that doesn’t have to bless or anoint every action within Fedora. Fedora is a community of doers, and with a few special exceptions (trademark and other legals areas jump to mind) they should always feel empowered to get things done, and not need excessive amounts of permission.