So what do you do on a cold winter’s Saturday in Austin? Well if you are interested in Cloud Computing and IT operations you go to OpsCamp. This past Saturday was the first of what we hope to be many OpsCamps, held in an unconference format, to discuss ideas around next generation technologies and strategies for IT Operations.

The OpsCamp crowd was an eclectic crew of systems administrators, open source software developers, traditional software people, and service providers who came together to figure out how to address the needs of IT operations and the tools they use to administer virtual/cloud systems.

One Theme – Everything Old is New Again

I sat in on quite a few conversations most centered around two old themes: Monitoring and Configuration Management. While the problems are similar the landscape is changing. The use of the term devops was very prevalent noting that systems administrators are often required to have some degree of scripting and software development skills to adequately do their job. Effective systems administration goes beyond keeping servers running but the automation of tedious process to increase productivity. In the monitoring arena concerns centered around the amount of data we collect and how to make that actionable to assure consistent service levels.

Lightning Talks

The event started out with a word from the sponsors who had five minutes to talk about their products and services or otherwise woo the crowd. The main sponsors each took their shot at defining their interests in the cloud and how they could help during five minuted lightning talks. Presenters included Erik Dahl (CTO of Zenoss), Brett Piatt (Technical Alliance Manager at Rackspace Hosting) and Luke Kanies (Founder of Puppet and Reductive Labs).

Thanks to the other sponsors Bitnami, Opscode, Spiceworks and Redmonk who also helped make the event happen.

The Unpanel

Rather than having a meticulously planned agenda OpsCamp is interactive. During the Unpanel members of the audience got on stage and talked about what they thought would be interesting topics to discuss this included OpsCode CTO  Adam Jacob, Zenoss CTO Erik Dahl, Puppet founder, Luke Kanies, Travis Campbell from the University of Texas, Systems Administrator Matt Lawrence, Damon Edwards — President of DTO Solutions, Andrew Schafer and moderator extraordinaire — John M. Willis. This led to an interactive session with the rest of the OpsCamp attendees to address the following questions:

• What is DevOps?
• What is monitoring?
• How do you monitor/manage/apps/systems that use multiple environments
• Should I be listening to events or actively monitoring systems?
• Have you thought about monitoring from the cloud into your data center?
• What are the new things that need to be monitored?

The panel discussion was very interesting as well as the audience inputs. The session runs about 30 minutes but is pretty interesting to get the takes on cloud computing challenges from some exceptionally bright people.

The OpsCamp Session Board

Sessions

After quite a bit of discussion the sessions were decided on the following sessions:

• Agent Evolution – Do we need agents for management and if so are they going to be heavy, tedious and burdensome as the agents we have come to know and love.
• The Evolving Role of the Sysadmin
• Monitoring for the Cloud or Service Level Assurance
• Toolchains for Clouds
• Vendor “schmoozing” to talk about the products the vendors had to offer for cloud computing

The Organizers

Even though the conference was an unconference I think a big nod needs to go to my fellow organizers (or my co-conspirators) who worked together virtually from all over the country to pull of the event. Many thanks go to Damon Edwards (DTO Solutions and part of the Control Tier project),  John M. Willis (cloud guru from OpsCode) and Dave Nielsen (Founder of CloudCamp),

Videos and Pics

Damon has some videos from the day with Luke Kanies of Puppet and Reductive Labs and Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss on the Dev2ops blog. We also have a bunch of pictures from the event in the OpsCamp Flickr group.I created an OpsCamp Twitter list for those of you looking for some folks who are smart on cloud computing and devops.

Keep your eye on OpsCamp.com for future events. I believe this one was one of many to be held around the world.

Related Articles

• Opscamp Austin Roundup (johnmwillis.com)
• OpsCamp Austin: IT Ops and the Cloud (cloudswitch.com)
• Videos: Luke Kanies, Bill Karpovich, Ernest Mueller at OpsCamp Austin 2010 (dev2ops.com)
• OpsCamp Debriefing IT Management & Cloud Podcast #66 (redmonk.com)
• Something about Austin #opscamp (austin.metblogs.com)

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, CloudCamp, Configuration Management, Open Source, Opscode, Reductive Labs, Zenoss

If you are involved in analyst relations you will find this funny.

Technorati Tags: analyst relations, Forrester, Gartner, Redmonk

Sounds like cloud computing to me

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, Humor

Latest cloud news and links:

Puppet versus Chef: 10 reasons why Puppet wins

John contends that Puppet has a bigger head start and that Chef has a huge gap to close or remain a tool for the Ruby on Rails cloud crowd.

Puppet, Chef, Dependencies and Worldviews

Andrew explains that, “Puppet guarantees that order matters on the level that it is specified. Chef guarantees that if you start with the same input, you get the same output.”

Proposed legislation looks to build confidence in cloud computing

During a forum held at the Brookings Institution Microsoft senior vice president and general council, Brad Smith, proposed federal legislation meant to address ts cloud computing. Smith and other forum participants stressed the need to raise privacy and security issues associated with cloud computing to a federal level – and the need to do it quickly.

IBM grabs largest enterprise cloud deployment

IBM is expected to announce on Thursday the largest enterprise cloud computing deployment to date as Panasonic begins a migration off Microsoft Exchange to IBM’s LotusLive cloud service. More than 100,000 employees will participate in the initial migration effort expanding to a total of more than 300,000 employees and external partners globally.

Amazon S3 Plugin for Firefox

S3Fox Organizer helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3

Technorati Tags: amazon, Chef, cloud computing links, IBM, legislation, Puppet, S3

Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases  and a real community behind them.  At first glance my final list read like a cast of manga characters with names like Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly, OpenNebula, RabbitMQ and Zenoss. However they all seem to benefit from a strong development ethic, a growing community of users and the ability to address challenges associated with cloud computing.

• Chef – Chef  is a relative newcomer with their project being only one year old but they are aggressively developing their project as can be seen by the frequency of their code check-ins. is an integration framework for configuration management for all types of IT infrastructure but especially popular among cloud deployments. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure. Chef is professionally supported and sponsored by Opscode.
• collectd – collectd is a daemon which collects system performance statistics store the values in a variety of ways, one implementation is to store them in RRD files. What makes collectd particularly useful is it’s plugin architecture which allow the daemon to collect information from a variety of services and servers like Apache, memcache and Linux Vserver. collectd on its own is really interesting but what I really see is an opportunity for collectd to feed other systems management tools.
• Eucalyptus - Eculyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Eucalyptus Systems provides consulting, training and support services.
• OpenNebula – This is perhaps the most interesting and most relevant project of the list for cloud computing, billing itself as the open source tool kit for cloud computing.  OpenNebula is a tool that can be used  to build any type of Cloud deployment  and manage virtual infrastructure in a data-center or cluster or to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, for highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports public clouds by providing cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.
• OpenQRM – I have been a fan of OpenQRM for a long-time or at least well before the hoopla around Cloud Computing and have had the opportunity to work with technology when it was still part of a now defunct venture-backed company, Qlusters, and then spun out as a stand-alone open source project. While OpenQRM is not what I would consider a tool for public clouds I think it’s geared towards people delivering private virtual clusters or cloud capabilities.  openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT infrastructure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins. What’s really interesting about OpenQRM is that it can suck up physical installations, create an image, write that image to a SAN and then run the virtual instances on demand.  I think the opportunity for OpenQRM is to be able to suck those images up and then spit them out to cloud computing resources like EC2, RightScale or Rackspace Cloud. UPDATED:
• Puppet – The Ruby on Rails project is a great configuration management tool, very similar to Cfengine (which pre-dates Puppet) and Chef (which was started after Puppet). Puppet is a model-driven open source framework designed to automate the building and configuration of servers. Puppet lets you perform normal administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) on any number of systems, using essentially the same code, even if those systems are running completely different operating systems.
• RabbitMQ – RabbitMQ is an enterprise messaging system released under the Mozilla public license that adhere’s to the AMQP standard (AMQP is a standard that allows middleware products to send messages to one another). What really strikes me about RabbitMQ is the activity in their community especially their mailing lists and IRC channels. This was astounding to me as I feel like I am pretty up-to-date on active open source projects but before John’s post I was in the dark about RabbitMQ. Of the ones listed so far it’s really one that I feel like there’s really something substantial there. Commercial support is available from RabbitMQ LTD.
• Zenoss -  Zenoss made John’s list because of it’s Amazon Web Services monitoring capabilities and its ability to monitor all sorts of other cloud and virtual infrastructure. I am also excited about Zenoss making the list because the Zenoss Community is working to extend Zenoss Core to monitor all infrastructure you already have. I am very excited about the future of Zenoss as the community continues to expand its virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.
  [Disclosure: This caught my eye since I am the community guy for Zenoss.]

I also think there are a couple of other projects that weren’t on John’s list but have both an open source and cloud computing component:

• Bitnami – BitNami.org simplifies the process of deploying web applications virtually and in the cloud. Each BitNami Stack contains an application that is fully integrated with all of the software it requires to run. BitNami Stacks are available free of charge as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud templates. Examples of BitNami-packaged applications include Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Redmine, Subversion and many more. Bitnami is sponsored by the cross-platform installer vendors, Bitrock.
• Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) -  ECP is worth watching is as much for its firebrand leader Reuven Cohen and his expertise as it for the merits of the project . ECP is a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses. ECP can help you design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud and in the process significantly reduce administrative and systems workload. Our browser-based dashboard enables IT personnel to simply and efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing, and analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity in an easy to use utility. We’ve designed the ECP platform to work alongside your current virtual data center, providing additional value and cost savings.
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud – Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) is included with Ubuntu Server Edition and integrates a number of open source projects (including Eucalyptus). Given the rabid Ubuntu fan base I think the UEC will immediately benefit. This gives users a turnkey package to deploy a private cloud. I also liked the he code name for Ubuntu 9.10 the latest release was Karmic Koala and as we all know Koala’s eat Eucalyptus (a clever little joke from the Canonical folks who develop Ubuntu).

I am sure there are other notable open source cloud computing solutions and tools that I haven’t mentioned and hope to add to this list going forward.

Updated:

My colleague Simon Jakesch (who’s a ton smarter than me) pointed out this omission from my list (which makes me feel sheepish since I have been working with Damon Edwards whose part of the ControlTier project for the last few weeks):

• ControlTier - ControlTier is an open source, cross-platform build and deployment automation framework. ControlTier can help you to coordinate and scale service management and administration activities across multiple nodes and application tiers. Where ControlTier is shines is as an orchestrator for administrative tasks like starting and stopping services and starting other programs. Many of the contributions and commercial support come from DTO Solutions.

Related Articles

• Open Source Meets Cloud Computing (Information Week Government Blog)
• Lowering the barrier to open source (NASA Nebula Blog)
• Forecast for 2010: The Rise of Hybrid Clouds (GigaOm)
• Application packaging for cloud computing: A proposal (c|net’s Wisdom of Clouds blog)
• Cross-Platform Clouds Coming to Storage (MSP Mentor)

Technorati Tags: Chef, cloud computing, collectd, Enomaly, Open Source, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, Puppet, RabbitMQ, Ruby on Rails, Sys Admin, systems managment, Ubuntu, Zenoss

Last fall, Redmonk analyst Michael Coté published a paper (PDF) noted how a lot of companies were scaling back big conferences and shift to informal self-organizing unconferences like BarCamp or Mashup Camp. I actually prefer these conferences to the normal circus style tradeshows driven by marketing dollars and hype.

To that end I had the privilege to work with Dave Nielsen the founder of CloudCamp, Cloud and Systems Management pro, John M. Willis, and Damon Edwards of DTO Solutions to put on a new event for systems management professionals interested in cloud computing.  So on January 30th in Austin, TX there will be the first OpsCamp for systems management and cloud development professionals. The spirit of the conference is very much in the spirit of DevOps Days which happened late last year,  focused on taking the principles of Agile software development and applying them to IT operations.

So don’t take my word for it, read what some other people are saying about OpsCamp.

Dave Nielsen, co-Founder CloudCamp “With rapid change occurring in IT operations, we realized that a place is needed where operations personnel and sysadmins can meet to share their experiences, challenges and solutions. OpsCamp is organized as an unconference which encourages the open exchange of ideas around next generation technologies and strategies for IT Operations. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

John M. Willis, Author of Cloud Computing and Systems Management Blog, co-host IT Management Podcast and the Cloud Cafe
“While the cloud has lowered the barrier to entry for businesses to own a data center; it has not decreased the complexity of managing complex applications and data center operations.  OpsCamp is about exploring the opportunity to intersect ideas like agile development, continuous deployment, and data center operations to promote the rise of a new movement that breaks down the traditional walls between development and operations (i.e., DevOps).”

Michael Coté, Analyst at Redmonk, co-host IT Management Podcast
“After many years of steady pace in the IT world, the tools and technologies used to do the daily work of operations are rapidly changing. Thanks to virtualization and cloud computing moving mainstream, new, hopefully better ways to deliver IT are emerging. These things aren’t always fully baked yet, but the thought-leaders and early adopters are quickly crystallizing. OpsCamp is an exciting chance to get involved in these conversations whether you want to start directing this shift in operations, figure out if it works for you, or just check it out. And, not only is it free, it’s in a damn fine spot: Austin.”

Luke Kanies, Founder of Puppet and Reductive Labs
“OpsCamp is a great opportunity to share expertise and experience in managing operations in the cloud.  The unconference setting provides a perfect mix between learning and sharing, and the intimate setting guarantees everyone gets something out of it.”

Erica Brescia, CEO, BitRock and Bitnami Project Lead
“In rapidly evolving disciplines such as how to deploy and manage software in the cloud, the one-way dialogue found at typical conferences just doesn’t cut it. OpsCamp will give early adopters and innovators the opportunity to share best practices and guide the development of the next generation of cloud operations tools and services.”

Space is limited for the event so please RSVP if you plan to attend.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, OpsCamp, Systems Management

On the advice of my brother I recently updated my cable modem from an old Motorola Surfboard Surfboard 4100 to a Motorola Surfboard 6210. The old modem was issued to me from Time Warner to access my Earthlink high speed internet account in Cary,NC near the Research Triangle Park (RTP).

Since the new modem supports Docis 3.0 I now can download via 8 bonded channels versus the 4 bonded channels down with the old modem that supports Docis 2.0 which theoretically should give me a speed boost. Here are the results of the test.

Performance Tests with Motorola Surfboard 4100

Before upgrading my cable modem I ran a couple of speed tests against the SB4100, here are the results.

Performance Tests with Motorola 6210

This modem seems to give me much better download speeds than the previous cable modem with at least 100% increase in download speeds.

Over the course of a few days it seems like the modem is reliable and hasn’t dropped my connection. The hardest part of the upgrade was getting through TWC’s provisioning department where you have to give them your new Mac address so they can grant it access their network. Even though the Docis 3.0 gives me 8 channels for downloads it still only supports 4 channels and it doesn’t appear to improve my upload speeds. Overall if you want an easy boost you can probably get one with a modem upgrade providing your current modem is older.

Related Articles

• 105 reviews of Road Runner (rateitall.com)
• Time Warner Routers Still Hackable Despite Company Assurance, Blogger Says (wired.com)

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Data Communications, Earthlink, Modem, motorola, roadrunner cable modem Earthlink, RTP, Time Warner, Time Warner Cable

This tweet from former MySQL AB CEO Mårten Mickos caught my eye. It shows a trend of increased demand for MySQL and PostgresSQL expertise while job postings on job websites for  those with Oracle and Ingres expertise declined.

I was a little shocked by the graph until you realize it’s just a trend. I then looked at the absolute number of jobs requesting database expertise and the story quickly becomes clear….

So if you are looking for a DB admin job the overall number of jobs in that sector are overwhelmingly Oracle jobs but the growth is in MySQL and PostgresSQL expertise.

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Database, Ingres, Mårten Mickos, MySQL, Oracle, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL

Open Source for America just posted a video on how open source can play a role in U.S. government on YouTube. Open Source for America(OSFA) is a non-profit organization with the following charter:

The mission of OSFA is to educate decision makers in the U.S. Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the U.S. Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.

If you would like to get involved you can do so here: http://www.opensourceforamerica.org/get-involved

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware acquired open source java vendor SpringSource that not only developed the popular Spring framework but had also acquired open source systems management vendor Hyperic (May 2009) and commercial Apache support vendor, Covalent (January 2009).

According to CNET’s Matt Asay, Yahoo!’s  Zimbra business unit is still growing and has an impressive customer base:

Lost in the news of Zimbra’s release of version 6.0 of its collaboration suite is the importance of one very big number: 50 million. That’s how many paid mailboxes Zimbra claims now, a number that puts it within spitting distance of IBM Lotus Notes (approximately 145 million paid mailboxes) and Microsoft Exchange (approximately 175 million paid mailboxes). Whatever the truth to rumors that Zimbra is up for sale, Zimbra is an appreciating asset for Yahoo, not a depreciating one.

I also noticed a couple of months ago that VMware started to re-brand getting rid of their old blue logo and moving to a grey logo sans the “virtualization boxes”. According to this post by VMware CMO Rick Jackson:

Now, as we look at our current offerings based on vSphere, and our vision of delivering the infrastructure for unrestrained cloud computing, the image we are portraying to the market has evolved.  In fact, our message embodies the notion of freeing IT from the constraints of physical resources.

Makes you wonder in the long-term where VMware might draw the line...

Build, Manage and Provide the Silver Lining for Clouds?

Does this signal the beginning of a broader VMware open source acquisition strategy? Maybe they will complete their java application stack with a database.  Barring Larry Ellison offering to sell MySQL to VMware maybe there are some other opportunities. VMware might benefit from picking up EnterpriseDB or maybe become the patron saint for MySQL fork, MariaDB sponsored by MySQL creator Monty Widenius. Beyond the database there are a number of interesting buying opportunities out there for VMware should they have their pocketbook open. For one there is rPath which can build and update Linux virtual machines and provide automated provisioning of systems taking VMware’s management and deployment capabilities one step further.

Another option would be to get deeper in management by picking up one of the open source configuration management vendors like Reductive Labs that produces Puppet or newly funded cloud configuration rival Opscode and their open source project, Chef. They could even go old school and take a look at CFengine which is similar to Chef and Puppet but supports not only Unix-like systems but Windows too. Alternatively, they could acquire commercial open source vendor, Cloudera that provides support for Hadoop, an open source implementation of  MapReduce which is ideally suited for cloud deployment.

I guess that’s enough speculation for today. However, it will be curious to see if the deal goes through and if VMware pays a premium over Yahoo!’s acquisition price of $350 million back in 2007. It could as The VarGuy notes it could trigger a reset for how open source companies are valued.

Related Articles

• VMware Buying Zimbra – My Initial Thoughts (cloudave.com)
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare (mashable.com)
• Yahoo! to offload Zimbra on…VMware? (theregister.co.uk)
• Zimbra notches 100 percent growth (news.cnet.com)
• Rumor: VMware Buying Zimbra Open Source Email? (thevarguy.com)

Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Cloudera, Covalent, Hyperic, MapReduce, MariaDB, Open Source, Opscode, Puppet, Reductive Labs, Spring Source, VMware, Zimbra