Here are my slides from today’s talk at LinuxCon on “Open Source Toolchains for Cloud Computing“. The talk focused on what open source tools could be used to create automation for managing cloud computing. I really enjoyed giving the talk and the discussion afterward, it seems that the reality among attendees was that they did very little to automate management but all had a great interest in doing so. I also enjoyed hearing from a Big 4 systems management user who said clearly that their multi-million dollar system didn’t appear to have the same capabilities as the free software solutions I mentioned.

Technorati Tags: agile IT, automation, cloud computing, devops, Open Source

I like my iPad for traveling as it gives me easy access to read and reply to email. However, I don’t like to type on it the same way I would on a regular keyboard, I prefer to use a stylus to hunt and peck rather than my fingers. I also like to draw and take notes that way too. In addition, since the iPad is prone to smudging the stylus keeps the amount of fingerprints to a minimum.

I have been using the Pogo Sketch stylus by Ten One Design which works well but it’s rather small, and the plastic clip breaks very easily.  What I really want is a full-size writing instrument. So I have been trying to make my own stylus, and have come up with a couple of solutions.

I am of the firm belief that for the stylus to be responsive the tip needs to be made of conductive foam not conductive hard plastic/rubber like is used on some styli. In my experience the hard plastic/rubber doesn’t slide well on the iPad, and you need to press extra hard to type.  So here are some of the styli I made on my own.

Writing Instrument Modifications

First you need to understand that you need to be able to conduct a small electric current from your body to the capacitive touch screen on the iPad, an important consideration when choosing what kind of instrument you modify.

Pen Modification

Modified Pen Stylus next to Pogo and generic styli

If you have a favorite metal barreled pen you can remove the ink cartridge and spring and insert a piece of conductive foam through the tip. I used a cool pen (pictured at the bottom) with a metal tube. Look at the top of the pen and you can see it is black plastic. If you wanted to hold the stylus that way it wouldn’t work.

To modify the pen below I took about a 1/2 inch long piece of foam trimmed down to about a 1/4 in diameter and the pulled it through the empty pen tip.   This gave me a pretty small point but was pretty effective for drawing. If your pen has a very narrow opening for the point you can cut the end with a rotary tool and expand the opening. The advantages of this approach is that if you like a clip on your pen or want a familiar pen, you can choose the type of writing instrument you prefer. The downside is that if the hole is small it will probably cause the tip to be deformed. I actually got a sort of fan effect from mine but it works very well. You can always trim the tip with scissors or a finger nail clipper to get the shape you want.

Lead Holder

Alvin Pro-Matic Lead Holder Converted to a Stylus

This is my favorite approach to making a iPad stylus, it uses a 2mm lead holder (used for drafting) and some conductive foam. I used an Alvin Pro-Matic Lead Holder that I picked up at a craft supply store for $6.79 ($8.48 with a 20% off coupon). The key was that this model had a metal barrel and a four way vise grip point that could grab my conductive foam point. I then went to Radio Shack and bought an inexpensive IC (about $.80) that was packed in high-density conductive phone. I trimmed a small piece of foam and then put it in the jaws of the lead holder. With this approach I feel like you can really control the size and shape of the point since you don’t have to squish the foam to get it through another opening. Additionally, you can leave the lead in the pencil and remove the foam if you need an antiquated paper writing instrument. the only downside to this approach is that if you click the top of the lead holder the jaws open the foam can fall out.

Lead Holder Styli with Conductive Foam Tip

These DIY styli are both superior in weight and length to the other styli you can buy, plus they are both much cheaper.  I  like writing with both of them but ideally I would like to figure out how to attach a 3.5-mm stereo jack and string  to the stylus so I could affix it to my iPad’s headphone port. Maybe that’s the next project.

Stylus Friendly iPad Apps

Once you have the stylus you want you I recommend two of my favorite programs that are particularly suited to using a stylus.

• Autodesk’ SketchBook Pro – SketchBook Pro is similar to the Adobe suite of desktopproducts as it lets you draw on multiple layers using various types of brushes. There are also templates for the backgrounds that resemble notepaper and other documents.  If you like to sketch this is a pretty decent app. I hear that Brushes is pretty popular too, but haven’t use it.
• WritePad for iPad - This application is an excellent handwriting recognition application and allows you to author documents or emails using a stylus. I find I can write faster than I can type on the iPad and it allows me to hold the iPad in the crook of my arm while I write with the other, perfect when I am a plane or sitting in the airport.

Other DIY iPad Stylus Ideas

There are quite a few other DIY Stylus projects out there if you aren’t keen on my idea you can have a go at these.

• Static Sock and an Ink Pen – I had lousy results with this one, it could have been the sock I used but it was pretty laggy and performance was inconsistent
• Plastic pen, conductive foam and wire – I prefer using a metal barrel pen as I like the weight but this will work too.
• Sausage Stylus – This is just plain ridiculous, but funny
• Review: Ozaki iStroke M+L Stylus – I was tempted to give this a try but it’s a little on the expensive side, iLounge has a decent review

[Note: I guess I am not as clever as I though as I was adding this blog post I found Crabfu's DIY iPad Stylus video with the same idea to use a lead holder with capacitive foam though he has some different caveats like gluing the foam to a cotton swab stick to allow the lead holder to grip it, not sure if you really need that step.]

Technorati Tags: apple, DIY, iPad, lead holder, modifications, pen, Pogo Sketch, styli, stylus, Ten One Design, Touchscreen

In celebration of System Administrator Appreciation Day I published a story at Linux.com called Open Source Toolchains for Systems Administrators, here is an excerpt:

“Software developers are very familiar with toolchains, series of programs where the output of one program forms the input for the next. A free software example would be using the GNU Emacs editor, the GNU bin-utils and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to write a program. Software developers frequently create programs and subroutines that are used in other programs rather than recoding the same process over and over again.

Just as software developers have different task-specific tools to make up software tool chains (e.g. editors, compilers, build scripts), systems administrators can use tool chains made up of tools used to automate management functions and maintenance of Linux servers.”

I think it’s a good description of how to automate Linux server administration, read it and let me know.

Linux.com: Open Source Toolchains for Systems Administrators

Technorati Tags: automation, Cfengine, Chef, Linux, Monitoring, opensource, Opscode, provisioning, Puppet, Systems Management, Zabbix, Zenoss

Here are my slides from today’s talk at today’s OSCON, Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing presented with John Willis (VP of Services at Opscode) and Alex Honor (Founder of DTO Solutions and Leader of the Control Tier Project).  The idea we hoped to convey is that integration between open source tools can help automate and make your infrastructure more fault tolerant.

After talking to some attendees it became apparent that perhaps a paper that supports the talk would be helpful. I’ll try to work on that over the upcoming weeks.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, control tier, Open Source, Opscode, Zenoss

There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be? I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.

Today Rackspace has thrown their hat in the ring with their new OpenStack initiative in collaboration with NASA — as in rocket scientists, smartest guys in the world. Unlike Amazon’s EC2 which preaches open APIs, Rackspace is working to develop an open source platform that compliments their hosted cloud offering. They also have a strong open source partner in NASA who has been working on their own cloud computing platform, NASA Nebula. NASA Nebula will now become the cornerstone for the OpenStack initiative.

The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. The project boasts both a compute and storage component. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers and is available as a developer’s preview with a release target of October. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Also available as a developer preview the OpenStack Storage project expects to release a production ready version in mid-September.

Adding the Rackspace hosting model to a strong open source project makes this approach to cloud computing especially interesting. Giving private cloud users a logical migration path to public cloud use. The question effect will this initiative have to truly drive open cloud computing standards.

OpenStack, A Foundation for Hybrid Clouds?

This initiative while founded on open source is not necessarily the cure for lock-in but it does go much farther than anyone else offering a fully accessible reference architecture available as open source. The closest comparison I see is Eucalyptus that is mimicks the Amazon EC2 cloud compute architecture (though not Amazon S3), though Amazon and Eucalyptus don’t seem to share a commonly agreed upon road map but rather a leader-follower relationship.

OpenStack’s formula is more coordinated and with a respectable user to champion it, NASA. The U.S space agency has one of the most compelling publicly documented private cloud computing stories.  NASA has gone so far as to package their solution in small footprint shipping containers to distribute among NASA research centers. These portable data centers are a model that many organizations looking to build private clouds are watching with interest.

I like that private clouds built on the OpenStack reference architecture should be fully compatible with Rackspace hosting services. Giving users the choice to run their own cloud or host or adopt a hybrid model. It’s not unlike open source adoption models were users download a free software version that has compatibility with a commercially supported version.  Plus this is not Rackspace’s only foray into open source distributed computing as they support the Apache-hosted Cassandra project, a highly scalable distributed database, and have been showing their support at numerous cloud and open source events.

The OpenStack Web Interface

The strong message accompanying the launch is one of open standards and prevention of cloud lock-in. Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace states this clearly that OpenStack wants to prevent vendor lock-in:

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies.”

This is not unlike VMware who echoed that sentiment with an announcement this spring to collaborate with Google AppEngine.  VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod stated that they too were committed to open standards and preventing login:

“Our shared vision is to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. The rich applications should be able to run in an enterprise’s private cloud, on Google’s AppEngine, or on other public clouds committed to similar openness.”

So with all this openness and commitment to open standards is the ability to move from cloud to cloud seamlessly just around the corner? This remains to be seen it but the initiatives all seem to be well-intentioned and moving in the right direction.

Does Open Source Prevent Cloud Lock-in?

I don’t know whether Rackspace’s OpenStack will truly prevent cloud lock-in but it does seem to be well-intentioned. Though I  believe the following things need to happen to insure cloud lock-in doesn’t become a rampant problem:

• Virtualization Portability – At a very simple level users need to be able to move from virtualization technologies including those hosted in the cloud need to be able to migrate seamlessly, that includes VMs running in VMware , Xen, HyperV and KVM. Then once in the cloud they need to be able to move across clouds both public and private unencumbered — Amazon, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and others. Adoption of a widespread virtualization standard like Open Virtualization Format (OVF) could help (OpenStack does seem to already support OVF, a good sign).
• Data Portability – Just as compute environments move so should data, but not only move but be accessible across network and cloud infrastructures with high fidelity.  Security of that data goes without saying but adds another layer of complexity.
• Cross Environment Tools – Finally, the tools to managing these environments need to manage both cloud and legacy architectures to insure that  the management of these new computing paradigms don’t make things even more complicated.

I hope OpenStack helps drive this vision. However to deliver on the true vision of true portability across cloud platforms other cloud providers and vendors other than Rackspace will have to participate.

Related Articles

• Rackspace’s Open Stack Makes Cloud Storage Personalized (fastcompany.com)
• NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility (zdnet.com)
• RackSpace’s OpenStack Targets Cloud Lock-in (pcworld.com)
• Rackspace Launches OpenStack – Open Source Cloud Computing Software (openstack.org)
• Robert Scoble: Rackspace ends cloud lock-in (scobleizer.com)
• OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem (readwriteweb.com)
• OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud Project Emerges (gigaom.com)
• OpenStack – an open source cloud platform (redmonk.com)
• Rackspace Launches OpenStack To Open Source The Cloud (laughingsquid.com)
• Rackspace, NASA launch OpenStack: Can it prevent cloud lock-in? (zdnet.com)
• Rackspace and The OpenStack Project (thetechscoop.net)
• NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer (go.theregister.com)
• Announcing Open Stack – Open Cloud Computing Standards (blog.zenoss.com)
• Opening the Rackspace Cloud (rackspacecloud.com)

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, data, lockin, NASA, nebula, Open Source, OpenStack Compute, OpenStack Storage, ovf, platform, portability, Rackspace, VMware

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management.

In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of maintaining server configurations started to really come to light for me.

The Challenges of Server Configuration

A large part of configuring infrastructure is repetitive and time consuming. Many sysadmins rely on their own scripts to help manage the process but it’s still a one-off for each administrator and their individual knowledge seldom if ever gets institutionalized throughout the entire organization.

Having a framework for maintaining configuration data is important. Configuration scripts are often authored as shell scripts or Perl or even Python but are seldom maintained or used beyond the original author. Some technologies use plugins that could be used to abstract configuration variables, users and systems then shared among users of the technology but plugins are often specific to a given technology and non-transferrable.

Despite the breadth of this problem there are relatively few solutions that can easily be consumed by medium-sized enterprises outside of large management suites available from the Big Four (HP, IBM, CA and BMC). The independent software vendors have all been consumed by bigger less focused organizations including Opsware (acquired by HP), Bladelogic (acquired by BMC) and Configuresoft (acquired by by VMware). In my opinion there is no real leader in this space.

In a conversation with Opscode CEO, Jesse Robbins, he shared his experience maintaining availability for web properties at Amazon.com. As a top ops guy and “master of disaster” at Amazon.com he had no access to these tools, they were simply sold in a way that was inconsistent with the way he evaluated and consumed products and services.  Opscode, a relatively new company develops the open source Chef project, which automates IT management via a client-server platform.

Opscode’s approach to server configuration challenges is to use recipes written in Ruby, the chef domain specific language(DSL). Then these cookbooks can be executed securely by the Chef client-server architecture and finally Chef is available as open source software to download, use and redistribute. In a nutshell Opscode met the following criteria is what interested me about their technology which is relatively easy to use, share configuration recipes and consume.

Chef, The Open Source Project

Chef is a systems integration framework released under the Apache License Version 2.0.  Chef, can manage servers by writing code in Ruby stored in configuration recipes called  cookbooks. Chef can integrate with existing infrastructure like LDAP via libraries using arbitrary Ruby code, either to extend Chef’s or to implement custom classes. Users can also configure applications that have dependencies on other parts of the infrastructure like databases and discern that information via the Chef server. However, I like Robbins’ description of Chef — sysadmin robot performing configuration tasks automatically and much more quickly than a single admin could ever hope to.

Though Chef was only released on January 15^th , 2009 it has gotten rapid adoption and gained a large number of contributors. According to the Opscode wiki there are 157 approved contributors to Opscode projects and well over 20 companies. Beyond that the #chef IRC channel is typically attended by over 100 users and Opscode staff, signs of a healthy, growing open source community.

Opscode, The Platform

The Opscode Platform is the commercial offering from Opscode Inc. It is a centrally managed data store hosted by Opscode into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, OS versions and more delivered as infrastructrue-as-a-service (IaaS). This data on the Opscode Platform can be accessed and becomes useful in the following ways:

• Search-based Automation: All the data collected by the Opscode platform is indexed and searchable. Users can dynamically query this data from within Chef recipes to configure services that require complex configuration.
• Role-based Access Control: The data index is has an access control system enabling administrators to centrally manage the level of infrastructure access.
• Portability: The data stored on the Opscode Platform serves as a virtual blueprint of a given infrastructure, making it much easier to create perfect clones of a production environment.

The Opscode Platform is in a free beta release for the next 60 days. After the trial period, participants can manage up to 20 nodes on the Platform for $50 per month and $5 per month for each additional node. Pricing and availability information is available on their website.

Opscode, The Company

Opscode was founded in 2008 by Jesse Robbins and Adam Jacob, both experienced web operations leaders. Since then they have recruited a top notch team including cloud and systems management expert John Willis, Adrian Cole leader of the jclouds project and Christopher Brown a Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Opscode today announced that they closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures (who also was an investor in BladLogic before it was acquired by BMC)  and includes a follow-on investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson(DFJ) whose other open source investments include SugarCRM and Fonality. DFJ led Opscode’s Series A round of funding of $2.5 million, bringing the total amount raised for the company to $13.5 million, a sizable amount of capital to bring this technology to market.

Opscode is also seeing good adoption of Chef, not only do they have a few thousand active users on their wiki plus chef is currently in production at numerous top websites, including 37Signals, Etsy, IGN Entertainment, Scribd, and Wikia. Not only are web jockeys using chef but other large infrastructure providers are contributing to the project. Engine Yard, Rackspace, RightScale and the Springsource division of VMware have signed on to contribute to the project. They are even being very public about it as seen in this endorsement:

“We are excited about the open source contributions the Springsource Division of VMware has made to Opscode Chef.” said Javier Soltero, CTO of Springsource Management Products at VMware. “Chef is an important tool for automating infrastructure management and we look forward to its continued growth and success.”

Making Sysadmins into Superheroes

Opscode Chef is a hugely powerful tool that can greatly amplify the knowledge an effectiveness of systems administrators by automating a significant number of their maintenance tasks, improving their productivity and allowing them to focus on higher value tasks. Not only does Chef provide a framework for building systems but repairing them, keeping availability high and time to resolution low. This gives IT professionals a lot of leverage in getting their tasks done, allowing them to solve a problem once and then automate the process going forward. In other words Chef can turn systems administrators into super heroes by vastly improving their productivity and overall quality fo service.

The need that Opscode addresses can be filled to some degree through other software. Cfengine, Puppet and bcfg2 are all open source software solutions that address server configuration needs and have been around for some time. As mentioned above there is also large management suites that handle the same problems though they are expensive and have their own limitations. What is unique about Opscode approach is that they offer a robust, fully featured software platform as open source and a commercial offering that has full compatibility with the open source project.

This is somewhat unique as many commercial open source projects have a specific feature set that are only available to their enterprise customers. In a conversation with Opscode VP of Service, John M. Willis we discussed those users who are not interested in the Opscode platform but still want commercial support. He said that Opscode is building a select high-quality partner network that can handle these requests. Most recently Opscode has announced a partnership with DTO Solutions who employ members of the Control Tier project and is a big proponent of the DevOps approach to infrastructure management. Other partners will soon be onboard as well.

I am very much a fan of Opscode and there approach though my description probably doesn’t do it justice. Theoretically, a systems administrator who successfully implements automation tools such as Opscode can improve not only their productivity but the uptime of servers by improving speed to resolution for outages.  Opscode has a great opportunity thanks to a talented team, a novel go-to-market plan and a real need for these types of tools among IT professionals.

Related Articles

• The Origins of Amazon’s Cloud Computing (GigaOm.com)
• Chef Wiki (opscode.com)
• Understanding cloud and devops–part 1 (news.cnet.com)
• 3 Companies That Tackle Complexity in the Cloud (readwriteweb.com)
• Opscode Unveils Funding, Hosted Platform (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Opscode Gets $11M to Take on IBM and HP Management Software (gigaom.com)

Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Chef, Configuration Management, Iaas, Open Source, Opscode, PaaS, Puppet, Systems Management

I saw this presentation linked from my new co-worker  Josh’s blog, it’s Simon Sinek’s TED talk on How Great Leaders Inspire Action. He uses Apple as an example of a success and Tivo as an example of a failure. Sinek asserts that leading companies lead because of the why they do what they do not the what or the how. His golden circle theory says that most companies start by talking about the what they do, followed by how they do it and then talk about the why. Great companies and leaders flip that using the example of Apple’s why, “Think Different” and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” not “I have a plan”.

I have always believed that the why is most important part and have been recently struck by Tony Hseih’s, CEO of Zappos, assertion that delivering happiness (the why of Zappos) was the catalyst for their success and their eventual $1.2 billion dollar acquisition by Amazon. It’s what separated them from the thousands of other online retailers.

I really like Sinek’s talk and have listened to it many times over the last week.  It also reaffirms what I believe about open source– the reason open source software development works is because people believe in the way that it’s developed. Agree or not I think the talk is very good and worth the listen.

It was a lot of fun to be a guest on Twit.tv’s FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz and Simon Phipps this week. My partner in crime, Zenoss Community Manager Matt Ray, and I gave them the lowdown on Zenoss and had a great time talking to the two excellent co-hosts.

If you are podcast listener and like open source I highly recommend FLOSS Weekly and all their episodes. You can listen to the Matt and talk about Zenoss on episode 124 from their site.

I wrote this post for the Zenoss community blog today, on cloud lock-in today. Rather than cross-posting I’ll just give you the lead in and you can read it there if you like.

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold. Despite a widespread interest in cloud computing there may be some pitfalls including cloud lock-in.

Just like the web boom of the late 1990s it’s being powered by open source software with Xen and KVM hypervisors, Hadoop mapreduce, memcached and a proliferation of the NoSQLnon-relational databases whose numbers seem to be growing by the day.

Not only is open source software helping to power the cloud infrastructure but contributions from growth companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and RackSpace are at an all-time high

Read Three Cloud Lock-in Considerations on the Zenoss blog

Right on the heels of this Stanford study on iPhone addiction, Retreveo published these usage stats about social media usage and “addiction”.

Twitter and FaceBook:

• 48% of people check/update FaceBook and/or Twitter after they go to bed
• 18% of people under 25 years old can’t go more than a couple hours without checking in on FaceBook
• 61% of people under 25 have to check in on FaceBook at least once a day
• 11% of people over 25 years old can’t go more than a couple hours without checking in on FaceBook
• 55% of people over 25 have to check in on FaceBook at least once a day
• 16% of people under 25 years old rely on Twitter and/or FaceBook for the morning “news”

iPhone Users:

• 28% of iPhone users check/update Twitter before they get out of bed
• 26% of iPhone users check/update Twitter before they turn on their TV
• 23% of iPhone users rely on Twitter for their morning news

Electronic Messages:

• 11% of people under 25 years old can be interrupted by an electronic message during sex (The number drops to 6% of people over 25 years old)
• 24% of people under 25 can be interrupted by an electronic message while in the bathroom. (This number drops to 12% of people over age 25)
• 49% of people under 25 years old can be interrupted by an electronic message during a meal. (27% for people over 25 years of age)
• 22% of people under 25 years old can be interrupted by an electronic message during a meeting. (11% of people over 25 years of age)

I really think we might need to help the 11% and 24% in the last group.

Related Articles

• Our Social Media Obsession by the Numbers [STATS] (mashable.com)
• Facts : Addicted To Social Media (sociableblog.com)
• Addicted to Social Media? (stealthmode.com)
• We’re Addicted to Social Networks: 48% of Us Check Them in Bed (pamorama.net)
• We’re Addicted to Social Networks (socialmediatoday.com)
• Commented on “Patrick Curl: Social Media Consultant” (theresabloginmysoup.com)
• We’re addicted to social media, even in bed (sfgate.com)
• We’re addicted to social media, even in bed (seattlepi.com)
• Story of a Social Media Addict (danalookadoo.com)

Technorati Tags: Addiction, Facebook, iPhone, Social Media, Twitter