Category: Work

OpenStack is open for business

July 19th, 2010 · Soren · Cloud computing, Rackspace, Work 9 comments - Tags: ,

Moments ago Rackspace announced the OpenStack project. Not only is this awesome news in and of itself, it also means that I can finally blog about it :)

The Rackspace’s IaaS offering consists of two parts: Cloud Servers and Cloud Files. Incidentally, OpenStack (so far, at least) has two main components to it: A “compute” compenent called “Nova” and a “storage” component called “Swift”. Swift is the software that runs Rackspace’s Cloud Files today. Nova was initially developed by NASA and is not currently in use at Rackspace, but will eventually replace the existing Cloud Servers platform.

Last week, we held a design summit in Austin, TX, USA, with a bunch of people from companies all around the world who all showed up to see what we were up to and to help out by giving requirements, designing the architecture or write patches. The amount of interest was astounding!

I’m sure others will be blogging at length about all that stuff, so I’d like to touch upon some of the ways in which Nova differs from the alternatives out there. I’ll leave it to someone else to talk about Swift.

  • Nova is written in Python and uses Twisted.
  • Nova is completely open source. There’s no secret sauce. We won’t ever limit functionality or performance so that we can sell you an enterprise edition. It’s all released under the Apache license, so it’s conceivable that some company might write proprietary, for-pay extensions, but it won’t be coming from us. Ever. This is true for Swift as well, by the way.
  • Nova currently uses Redis for its key-value store.
  • Nova can use either LDAP or its key-value store for its user database.
  • Nova currently uses AMQP for messaging, which is the only mechanism with which the different components of Nova communicate.
  • The physical hosts that will run the virtual machines all have a component of Nova running on them. It takes care of setting up disk space and other parts of the virtual machine preparation.
  • It supports the EC2 query API.
  • The Rackspace API is in the works. I expect this will be the basis for the “canonical” API of Nova in the future, but any number of API’s could be supported.

I cannot explain how excited I am about this. Let me know what you think!

“I got redirected here from linux2go.dk.. What gives?”

April 6th, 2010 · Soren · Work No comments - Tags:

I got fed up with the old site. It was unfocused, unprofessional, not very pretty, out-of-date.. Frankly, I was feeling embarassed about it.

I took it offline completely a couple of weeks ago, expecting to redo it altogether.  While thinking about its future and trying to write a few things for the new web site, I found it more and more awkward to pretend that my company and I were separate entitites. There’s only me in the company. It’s always been that way. I’ve had a few people I’ve known that I could rely on if I got too busy or somehow ended up with assignments with requirements I couldn’t meet, and at some point in the future there might be more people in the company, but for the time being, it’s just me. Realising this and not pretending or attempting to create the illusion that it’s something it’s not makes this whole thing more straightforward.

So, instead of spending a lot of time writing content for a new website, I’ll try to see if a simple blog will serve me well. Welcome.

Not an April fool’s joke

April 1st, 2010 · Soren · Rackspace, Ubuntu, Work No comments - Tags:

Today marks the beginning of my second month working for Rackspace.

I’ve realised I haven’t actually blogged about my leaving Canonical, so this post doubles as an announcement about that, I suppose.

A lot of thought was put into that decision. Ubuntu is an awesome project to work on and Canonical was a fun and interesting “place” to work, but “all good things must come to an end” so I decided to “quit while I was ahead”. Come up with more clichées if you feel like it. The short story is that I just wasn’t having much fun anymore.

Rackspace came along as an interesting option. I’ve known about them since forever, and they are doing very interesting stuff in the cloud computing area, so it seemed like a natural progression. I had a few interviews and after we overcame some initial difficulties (they’re not that used to having people from Denmark work for them) I started my new job working on Cloud Sites on March 1st.

This does not mean that I’m going to stop working on Ubuntu, though. It’ll just be on my own time and working on a narrower set of things than I have for a while. I also hope to be at UDS (I’ve applied for sponsorship) so that I can meet all my awesome, old colleagues.

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