Head in the Clouds

For those of you that are Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) users and are in Silicon Valley the CloudStack community team and some of our developers will be attending the Xen Hackathon at Oracle in Silicon Valley on March 6th-8th. If you want to help make Xen Cloud Platform a better hypervisor for your cloud come on in the XCP project lead Mike McClurg will be there as well for you to discuss where XCP is going. 

What is a Xen Hackathon?

The aim of Xen Hackathons is to give developers in the Xen community the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other Xen developers. It is a 3 day self-organizing event, where Xen developers work on concrete problems around the Xen codebase in small self-organizing groups.

Xen developers with the following expertise will be present: Xen Hypervisor developers, kernel developers (working on Xen components in the Linux kernel), XCP developers working on project Kronos and the Xen Cloud Platform. Xen on ARM as well is MIPS will also feature in the March 2012 Hackathon.

Xen Hackathons are also great opportunities for companies and open source projects, built on Xen, XCP or commercially based Xen products to test (and fix any issues in their products) against the latest open source baselines. You will have access and be able to work on concrete code problems with Xen developers at the Hackathon.

XCP has, in a very short time, become one of the preferred hypervisors in the CloudStack community, and for good reason. XCP has a number of features that eclipse even some of the paid editions of XenServer, and all with no annual need to reacquire even the free license code.

The XCP project recently announced the release of version 1.1, which has continued to generate a lot of interest and questions about when CloudStack will support it.  To keep pace with the rapid development cycle of XCP, CloudStack recently merged in code to support XCP 1.1 and that should appear in the next release of CloudStack. Of course, if you want to play with it today, you can always build from source.

The potential for XCP (and the sister Project Kronos which releases XAPI, or the Xen API, as a package that can be included in Linux Distributions) is exciting, and I hope to see XCP and Project Kronos drive a lot of the innovation around Xen and open source virtualization in the coming months. 

Cloud Computing continues to be built around open source, open standards and open hardware

Last  week I attended O'Reilly Publishing's OSCON, one of the biggest open source events in the world. OSCON is one of the few places where you can get training and information from the people who develop the software you use everyday (if you are an open source software user at least).  

Here are some of the things I did and saw that were interesting to the cloud computing user in me. 

• One of the highlights of the conference for me was helping OpenStack celebrate their one year anniversary. Since announcing the project at last year's conference OpenStack has come a long way and CloudStack and Citrix are happy to be partnered with OpenStack project, we believe a lot of good things coming their way and we are anxious to improve our collaboration with them.
• This year as expected of most IT conferences, the folks at O'Reilly added a cloud computing track to the program. Some of our favorite sessions were conducted by  Build an Open Source Cloud Day partners Puppet and Chef who gave talks on how to configure and automate cloud infrastructure. 
• Also Dell released a new open source project code-named Crowbar that helps speed the deployment of OpenStack clouds. Rob Hirschfield has a nice write-up about the project and pointers to all the resources around the project (which coincidentally leverages Chef). 
• One bit of cloud news that came out of the event was the launch of the Open Cloud Initiative, a effort to drive open standards in cloud computing and "....provide a legal framework within which the greater cloud computing community of users and providers can reach consensus on a set of requirements for Open Cloud, as described in the Open Cloud Principles (OCP) document, and then apply those requirements to cloud computing products and services, again by way of community consensus."
• Which makes you ask, "Is it open source or open standards or is it both?"

What was clear to me after attending the event was that open seems to be a requirement for all aspects of cloud computing: from hardware (FaceBook's Open Compute project), to software (Managing Open Source Software Releases on a Cloud Platform), to standards (Achieving Hybrid Cloud Mobility with OpenStack and XCP). 

This week I am heading to Santa Clara, CA to attend the XenSummit to hear what the state-of-the-art in Xen project and I am very excited as I think Xen is one of the most under-rated open source technologies, especially given the proprietary alternatives. If you are going to attend the event look me up. 

Are you a Xen User? Do you want to see where the Xen project is heading? Then you should consider attending the 2011 Xen Summit in Santa Clara, CA. There will be some great discussion on the Xen hypervisor as well as some great information on cloud computing. David Nalley and I will be there too, hope to see you there!

Here are few of the sessions CloudStack users might be interested in:

Xen in the Cloud

Marco Sinhoreli, Private Cloud Project Leader, Globo.com

Abstract: Globo.com is a internet branch of the Globo Organizations, the biggest latin america media group and the 4th around the world. This session will show how Globo.com utilizes the Xen Cloud Platform and how using it was technologically and economically advantageous.

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