Practice makes perfect

It is that time of the year again for submitting presentation proposals to the OpenStack Summit.  This time is in Austin.  In finding my destiny to the cloud, sharing technologies to others is something I have been doing.  Sharing serves 2 purposes, I can contribute to the community and also in the process of sharing, I learn a lot more.

Even I was rejected to present at OpenStack summit twice, with the support and encouragement of the community, I am doing this the third time.  

In fact, this time as I have picked up more skills and experience in OpenStack, I have more to share. The topics that I wanted to share at the Summit is not some random information but from my experience in the journey to the cloud that I believe are very useful for other people that wanted to walk this OpenStack journey.

I have submitted 3 proposals and can please vote for me.  

My session proposals are:

Under the Big Tent: OpenStack Projects Explained
Speakers: Anthony Chow
https://www.openstack.org/summit/austin-2016/vote-for-speakers/Presentation/7884
 
Overcoming the barrier and start contributing to OpenStack
Speakers: Anthony Chow
https://www.openstack.org/summit/austin-2016/vote-for-speakers/Presentation/7909
 
The Power of the Community: to infinity and beyond
Speakers: Anthony Chow
https://www.openstack.org/summit/austin-2016/vote-for-speakers/Presentation/8160


Thanks for voting for me and I hope to meet the friendly people of OpenStack there in Austin. 

  

Exploring a new possibility for my destiny in the cloud.

18 days has gone by for 2016 and I did not have a chance to sit down to write my first blog post for this year.

It was a busy month for me.

Opportunity to share

I was busy preparing my presentation for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALEx14) on "Getting over the barrier and start contributing to OpenStack".  My session is on Jan 23, 2016 1:30 pm.

I am exited to be able to share my experience in how to contributing to OpenStack with the audiences.  The objective of the session is half informational and have motivational.

This is the description of my session:

Is contributing to OpenStack something you want to do but do not know how or find it difficult to start?

You have come to the right session. This 45 minutes session will have a brief overview of the OpenStack project, the "Big tent" approach as well as the 6 month release cycle. Introduce the audience DevStack which is perfect tool for testing code changes locally.

This session will then introduce the workflow of contributing to OpenStack and all the necessary tools from setting up the development environment, run unit test and to commit code for review. Will introduce the commit best practice, Gerrit review, Jenkins automated testing at the gate and the code merging process which is a little different than the pull request for other open source projects.

The session will go over how to create a bug report for OpenStack and also to guide the audience to find some software bug or documentation change so the audience can take the baby step to start contributing and get involved in this community.

An interview with opensource.com

Being a speaker at SCALE, I was approached to answer a few questions on OpenStack and my interview was published today at opensource.com.  You can find the interview here.

A new direction for me

I am still in the process of finding my destiny in the cloud and I had some wonderful and unique experiences in 2015 on my quest for my destiny with the open source and VMware community.  With my background as a software developer and my passion to share what I have learned and know about the cloud technology, I am going to explore a new option for me.

This year I am going to explore if being a developer advocate is suitable for me. At this time I feel that being a developer advocate need to excel in these 3 areas:

• Software development
• Presentation skill
• Community involvement

I believe I have a good handle on these 3 areas but I need to "document" my work as a software developer.  I possess these qualities/skills as a software developer

• good debugging and analytical skill to solve different problems
• write simple code
• Agile software development methodology
• attention to detail

but how can I tell others about this?

One good ways is through GitHub.

After this presentation at SCALEx14 this Saturday I am going to concentrate my activities around GitHub which includes bug fixes on different open source projects such as OpenStack, Docker etc or small projects in Go or Python.

I will write more on this subject and to report on how I did in my journey to the cloud.

Things good to know before the OpenStack Tokyo Summit.

OpenStack has a 6 months release cycle and each release is given a name in which the name is associated to the location where OpenStack Summit was held and follow the sequence of the English alphabet.  The 12th OpenStack release has the name Liberty and is officially available on Oct 15, 2015.

OpenStack Summit Tokyo will be held on Oct 27 - Oct 30 in Tokyo Japan.  On this weekend, a large portion of the OpenStack community is heading to Tokyo with excitement.  Even I am not able to attend this summit in Japan, I am excited to see what new technology innovation will be announced as well as the future direction of OpenStack.  (Note: OpenStack summit actually has 2 parts.  One part is the conference and the other part is the design summit where the open source community gather together to discuss and to shape the direction and/or feature of the next OpenStack release).

What's new in the Liberty release?

Liberty is the first release with the "Big Tent" approach.

Over the weekend, I have a chance to take a look at what's new in the Liberty release.  The most comprehensive and detail description of what's new in the Liberty is of course the release note from OpenStack.  If this is too detailed then Nick Chase (@NickChase) has an good article on the 53 things that are new in Liberty.  Also OpenStack has a very informative web page that describes the Liberty release.  There are 5 categories listed on this page as new features in Liberty:

1. Enhanced Manageability
2. Simplified Scalability
3. Extensibility to Support New Technologies
4. Container Management
5. Orchestration

The categories are all self explanatory.  It is, however, interesting to see that container management is by a category by itself and is not under extensibility to support new technologies. 

In this post let me highlight a few things that interest me the most.

Most Useful

For me the new interface to display network topology - Curvature Network Topology interface in Horizon is the most useful to visual how the network looks like.  A sample display of this new interface is:

image source: https://www.openstack.org/software/liberty/

Hot Trend

There are 2 topics that are widely discussed in the IT industry and these 2 hot technologies are opening up new use cases and to help consumer either to save money or to deploy the services faster and easier.  These 2 hot trends are:

1. Docker container
2. NFV

OpenStack provide a natural infrastructures for these 2 technologies as well as a platform to bring out the essence or core features.

Docker Container

Docker containers need an orchestration engine to make it powerful and there are Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, CoreOS fleet that builds on etcd and systemd as well as Mesos.

In the OpenStack Vancouver summit there is a one day special track on container in which there is Project Magnum which was initially to work with Kubernetes in OpenStack and now the Container Orchestration Engine (COE) in Magnum is expanded to Docker Swarm and Mesos.

In July Google joined the OpenStack Foundation should be able to bring in their expertise on container and Kubernetes to the Magnum project.  I have a blog post on this subject. Also, the introduction of libnetwork brings new networking options to Docker container.

There are 2 new projects related to Docker Containers in the Liberty release:

• Project Kolla - provide production level container deployment tools
• Project Kuryr - leverage OpenStack Neutron for container.

NFV

The service provider industry is embracing NFV because it provides agility and huge cost saving advantages.  AT&T is said to have saved big on capex with NFV. There is the OPNFV project that is driving the advancement of open source NFV functionality and stability.

Both VMware announced vCloud NFV in VMworld Europe 2015.  Cisco also has it NFV offering.

Similar to Docker Container, NFV needs an infrastructure and OpenStack is a able to provide this need.

Interestingly, the effort of NFV in OpenStack is under the Nova project instead of Neutron as one might think.

Security

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is added to both Heat and Neutron to provide better security on resource management and usage.

Security is essential to all projects and if OpenStack wanted to break into the enterprise market, security is an important element that needs to be addressed.  OpenStack already has a security group to handle security related issue in OpenStack.  Any bug fix that checked in has a SecImpact keyword to flag the OpenStack security group to look at potential security risk that is introduced in the code checkin.  There is also Project Bandit that can check for security issues in Python code in which OpenStack is written in.

Looking Ahead

I am excited to listen to the keynote and the YouTube recording of the various presentations from the OpenStack Tokyo summit. 

It will be interesting to see the future direction of OpenStack as decided by the community at the OpenStack Design Summit.

Another thing that I am looking forward to is to visit Japan and to try out the local ramen and the beer. 

image source: Gary Kevorkian of Cisco when he is at the OpenStack Tokyo Summit.

How are OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow related?

We have seen these OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow in various technology articles.  Do you know how they are related?  Or are they related at all?

Well, they all start with the letter "O", this will be great for a Sesame Street episode for us to learn words with the letter "O".  

They all start with the letter O because they are all have "open" in their name.

With "open" in their name, does that make them related?

OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow are related but not because they have "open" in their name.

Before we look at how they are related let us take an overview of what they are and some of the key concept that we need to know.  We can only take an overview of OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow in this post as they by itself can be one or more blog post to cover.

OVS

OVS is the short form of Open vSwitch.  It is an open source software based virtual network switching module that can be deployed on hypervisor such as KVM or white box switching hardware.   Detail description of OVS can be found on it homepage and GitHub page. 

A list of OVS feature can be found here.  The latest version is release 1.5

OVS is heavily used in OpenStack as KVM is the most deployed hypervsior for OpenStack while OVS is the default virtual switching module for KVM.

This diagram from OVS home page describe what OVS is:

image source: http://openvswitch.org/

As you can see both OpenFlow and OVSDB is related to OVS.  Will discus this in more detail later in this post.

 

OVN

OVN stands for Open Virtual Network and is pronounced as "oven".  This is why the logo looks like the front of an oven.  It is a sub-project within OVS.

Back in March 2015, I have already written an article on OVN.  Please refer to this post for OVN details.

OVSDB

OVSDB is a protocol. It stands for Open vSwtch Database Management protocol. It is used to manage an Open vSwitch. This is the management plan for Open vSwitch. It is defined in RFC 7047.

The heart of OVSDB is the database or schema that defines the configuration of the OVS as well as the QoS policies. Management module uses the JSON-RPC as the transport to communicate with the ovsdb-server module of the OVS. (note: JSON = JavaScript Object Notation and JSON-RPC is a Remote Procedural Call encode in JSON format).

OpenFlow

OpenFlow is a protocol.  It is one form of  control plane for Open vSwitch and is defined in RFC 7149.

The main idea is to setup flow table that defines the action of a particular flow.  The basic action types are forward and drop with other optional/recommended actions such as flood, enqueue or modify field.  

This diagram explains the Flow Table:

 

Putting OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow together

This diagram summarize the relationship between OVS, OVSDB and OpenFlow

At this time OVN is part of OVS and uses the same interface ovsdb-server and ovs-vswitchd:

Summary

Both OVS and OVN are open source switching modules with OVSDB as the management plane and OpenFlow is used to program the flow from the controller to the OVS.

OpenStack is now one more step closer to "enterprise" ready

In the month of July, groups around the world the world are celebrating the 5 year birthday of OpenStack. They are giving out  t-shirts to commemorate this event along with birthday cakes and champagne (each group is celebrating a little bit differently). 

OpenStack started in 2010 with is first release named as Austin.  Eric Wright (@discoposse) had a nice post on OpenStack Kilo release and have a detailed description of some interesting statistics about OpenStack as well as some of OpenStack's latest feature.

OpenStack came a long way in these 5 years and is starting to gain more and more attention as a solution to business needs.  Last OpenStack summit in Vancouver there were over 6,000 attendees.  New features in respond to the market needs were being added in a high pace.  While OpenStack is feature rich and is delivering these features in a fast pace with 2 releases per year, one question there is always one question in mind - 

  “Is OpenStack enterprise ready?"

Essential "enterprise" features

I think the top 2 essential enterprise features are:

1. High Availability
2. Security

High Availability
One important aspect for enterprise is to sustain continuous business operation.  To look at a product if it is enterprise ready we must look at what level of HA it is able to deliver.  Different business have different requirement for the level of HA a product can provide. If we look at that OpenStack web site, it stated that OpenStack is able to offer 99.99% of uptime for the infrastructure. But if we read on, it stated that OpenStack does not guarantee 99.99% availability for individual guest instances.  Well it does not mean that OpenStack is NOT enterprise ready.  At least the OpenStack is guaranteed to have 99.99% of uptime.  If this cannot be achieved, then we can forget about the 99.99% of the individual guest instances.

Vendor specific build-in HA features

There are a few ways that we can take advantage of the existing and proven high availability feature provided by vendors such as:

1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 - Pacemaker
2. Ubuntu 14.04 - High Availability Cluster solutions
3. SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability
4. VMware vSphere infrastructure 

Kubernetes
Another development in OpenStack is project Magnum where OpenStack interacts with Kubernetes to orchestrate the deployment of groups of containers as a Pod and there is the replication controller in Kubernetes that user can defined the desired state of the Pod in such a way that if container dies, the Replication Controller is going to re-create the Pod defined by the user.

image source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAjyzgb5tK336Z93gwLMTxC2iSaolGw3SNof_YQZwRa3TrJYuk8OCVBFBuCatAqWhOWedOV7CNto-pB5XCXTe74XIlBFonwUbD-FRveDGpQZIGAwJbsheJPwWk8pb2RUNYC3aKUOV9hYAB/s1600/k8s+replication+controllers+(1).png

Security

Another important aspect for enterprise is security.  OpenStack has a project called Keystone that handles the security of the infrastructure.  One feature for Keystone is that it can use Active Directory as a backend server and this allows OpenStack to use the existing and widely used Active Directory.  This is helping OpenStack to be enterprise ready.

Interaction within the various element of the OpenStack infrastructure is via RESTful API.  Each entity will have to request a security token for each API call so that the target entity can validate if the initiator of the API call has the proper credential and privilege to request the operation.

OpenStack has a dedicated security team to look at the security of the OpenStack infrastructure.  Each commit to the OpenStack code base has a keyword SecurityImpact that the commiter can use to flag the security team to investigate if that particular commit has any security impact to OpenStack.

With all these features in place, more and more companies are willing to deploy OpenStack in the production environment.  This is a sample of companies that are deploying OpenStack in their production environment (just showing some examples and is not a complete list):

 

image source: http://cloudtweaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/companies-snapshot.png 

Within the last few days there are 2 new development that helped move OpenStack closer to be "enterprise" ready.

Google becoming a sponsor to OpenStack Foundation

On July 16, Google announced that it is becoming a sponsor to the OpenStack Foundation along with “big” companies such as IBM, Red Hat, Ubuntu or VMware support this open source cloud infrastructure.  I had a blog post on my reaction to Google’s announcement.

The significant of Google sponsoring OpenStack Foundation is twofold.  The first one is that Google is in a way endorsing this technology.  The second one is what its knowledge, expertise and experience on deploying container at scale to make OpenStack able to deploy container as well as virtual machine in it infrastructure.

OpenStack Innovation Center

On July 23, there is another OpenStack announcement that is worth looking into and I believe is as important as the Google announcement. This important announcement is that Rackspace and Intel is collaborating to form an OpenStack Innovation Center.  According to the press release the purpose of this OpenStack Innovation Center is to help accelerate the development of enterprise capabilities and thus driving the adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise production environment.

The agreement between Rackspace and Intel includes:

• OpenStack Innovation Center – The center will create the world’s largest OpenStack development team. It will be comprised of Rackspace and Intel engineers and will be located at Rackspace’s corporate headquarters in San Antonio.
• OpenStack Developer Training – Through this effort, Rackspace and Intel will offer new modules of courseware designed to onboard and increase the number of open source developers actively contributing to the success of the community.
• Joint OpenStack Engineering – Rackspace and Intel will resource OpenStack development, working in collaboration with the OpenStack Enterprise Work Group and community, targeting bug elimination and the development of new enterprise features. The companies will recruit new engineers to participate in OpenStack development.
• Largest OpenStack Developer Cloud– Rackspace and Intel will build and make available to the community two 1,000 node clusters to support advanced, large-scale testing of OpenStack and new features developed through the joint engineering work. The companies anticipate having the clusters available for community use within the next six months.

One good news for me as a software developer on this collaboration between Rackspace and Intel is that there will be a two 1,000-node OpenStack hybrid cloud clusters that will be made available to the OpenStack community to look a issues regarding scaling and performance.

What is next?
Wonder what is in the horizon for more enterprise features in OpenStack.  I had a conversation with a person that is in the OpenStack community and he was saying that there will be a lot more exciting announcements in the upcoming OpenStack Tokyo summit and in the OpenStack Austin summit next year. 

Reference:
"Accelerating the Enterprise Features of OpenStack: Rackspace and Intel Form the OpenStack Innovation Center." Rackspace Hosting. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 July 2015.