Head in the Clouds

Recently, Citrix announced that it will donate CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This is a very exciting moment in the history of the CloudStack project.  The ASF is the premier open source foundation in the world and it has a track record of successful, completely open projects.  The CloudStack project has been increasingly open during its life.  But, “increasingly open” isn’t good enough.  We have to be 100% open in our technical discussions to run the project in the meritocratic fashion that successful Apache projects use.  In this blog post I’ll do a brief review of CloudStack openness and list out the changes we’ll be making over the next few months to transform CloudStack from a largely single-entity development effort to a collaborative, community project.

CloudStack 1.0 was proprietary software.  Closed specs, closed discussion, closed bug database, closed source.  The CloudStack 2.0 release in May, 2010 transitioned CloudStack to an open-core model.  About 95% of the source was available under GPLv3 and the bug database was open, but the technical discussions were closed and few technical documents were publicly available.  In August, 2011 Citrix published 100% of the CloudStack source code.  We started publishing some technical specs, but the discussions were still closed.

In late 2011, in conjunction with the Acton release, we started doing a better job publishing technical specs.   Not perfect – we weren’t iterating the designs in the open – but good progress.  We also (finally) came up with a process for accepting contributions.  In 2012 we’ve created a publicly available project dashboard , started publishing meeting minutes, and getting a larger number of non-Citrix contributions.

That’s good stuff, but there are some fundamental changes needed to make it more open.  Instead of publishing designs and discussion results after the fact, we have to publish the earliest version and then iterate in the open.  We also have to have the technical discussions on the cloudstack-dev mailing list (see below for the new one), and not on our internal engineering list.  This will take policing -- and I’m part of the problem here -- but through force of will a few folks can make a big difference here.

We also need to ask more of the community.  Our bug database is open, but, there’s no place to go with an “ask-list”.  Nowhere can you easily see important features with no owner, nor can you easily search to find the bugs with the most votes.  We need to pick a few features with a variety of technical needs and ask the community to help out.  That part is easy, BTW.  CloudStack has so many potential integrations in the datacenter that just listing those would give years of work to interested parties!

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With CloudStack Acton now released, there's precious little time to stop and rest. Instead, we are already rapidly working on the next CloudStack release, codenamed Bonita.


As part of this release we are making a concerted effort to make the entire CloudStack development process far more transparent and inclusive. I do ask that you be patient with us in this process, the level of cultural change is massive. The first step is to at least let folks know what's going on - and Haroon (The project manager for the project) will be posting meeting minutes, status updates, etc. on the cloudstack-devel mailing list. Once we have communication down we'll work on making things far more inclusive and participatory.

So for Bonita - the status from a PM view will be here:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/display/RelOps/Bonita

You'll also note that Haroon has published meeting minutes from the few meetings that have occurred; for instance you can see Bonita Kick Off Meeting:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1344273

We welcome your participation as we start work on this release.

After many months of hard work and long weekend hours, we are finally releasing the Acton release.

This is the first major CloudStack release since our 2.2.x series and it includes many new features such as:

- - Network as a Service
- - Projects
- - LDAP Support
- - Openstack Swift Support
- - Netscaler MPX/VPX/SDX Support
- - vSphere 5.0 Support
- - XenServer 6.0 Support
- - Brand spanking new User Interface
- - and many others

I want to take a moment and thank the community for all of their help. The beta process resulted in hundreds of community discovered and reported bugs. This release also had a far greater level of non-Citrix contribution, from bug fixes and even some major feature contribution.

You can find the binaries here: http://bit.ly/x2svsr

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CloudStack is please to announce the release of version 2.2.14. This
release is largely a bugfix release.

While most of our development effort seems to have been directed at
the upcoming Acton (3.0) release as seen by the plethora of
pre-release builds, we have continued to work on the 2.2 CloudStack
releases, fixing bugs and increasing stability.

You can find binaries here:
http://bit.ly/ziBbrE


Release notes (PDF) are here:
http://bit.ly/xbOHCo

You will note that the community has added Portuguese and French
language support to the UI

You will also note that there are separate binaries for EL6.0, EL6.1 and
EL6.2, please make the correct choice if applicable.

The latest version of the CloudStack Acton beta builds is now out and available for consumption.

Things should be getting into pretty good shape now as we wind our way closer to GA.

You can find the binaries here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloudstack/files/Pre-release%20software/Acton_beta_feb1/

You'll also notice several new documents, the first is the new features document showing off all of the cool stuff in Acton, the second is the Admin guide, which has been long awaited by many folks.

Please help test this release - the more bugs we find now, the less that will exist in GA. As always test things that are important to you, but please also consider testing:

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