Author: mikal

This author has written 1358 articles

Juno Nova PTL Candidacy

  • Post author:
  • Post category:OpenStack

This is a repost of an email to the openstack-dev list, which is mostly here for historical reasons. Hi. I would like to run for the OpenStack Compute PTL position as well. I have been an active nova developer since late 2011, and have been a core reviewer for quite a while. I am currently serving on the Technical Committee, where I have recently been spending my time liaising with the board about how to define what software should be able to use the OpenStack trade mark. I've also served on the vulnerability management team, and as nova bug czar in the past. I have extensive experience running Open Source community groups, having served on the TC, been the Director for linux.conf.au 2013, as well as serving on the boards of various community groups over the years. In Icehouse I hired a team of nine software engineers who are all working 100% on OpenStack at Rackspace Australia, developed and deployed the turbo hipster third party CI system along with Joshua Hesketh, as well as writing nova code. I recognize that if I am successful I will need to rearrange my work responsibilities, and my management is supportive of that. The…

Continue ReadingJuno Nova PTL Candidacy

The Hot Gate

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This book follows on from Live Free or Die and Citadel. This time we focus solely on Dana as she is transferred to a new unit. The story is interesting, although perhaps it focusses on the dysfunction of the Latin American countries a little more than is really necessary. More interestingly, the book ends the series (as best as I can tell) in an unusual manner for a book like this, with the humans not winning a simple out right victory -- moral or otherwise. Overall, a fun light read.

Continue ReadingThe Hot Gate

Citadel

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This book follows on from Live Free or Die. I like the approach of this book, as it follows a couple of relatively normal people trying to get by, and how the main protagonist from the last book's actions affect them. Its an engaging read, while still progressing the overall arc of the series. I really enjoyed it.

Continue ReadingCitadel

The Runaway Jury

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This is an older book now, and I read it many many years ago but re-read it this last couple of weeks. I enjoyed this book. Its believable (if a little dated now), and interesting. It certainly made me think more about the first amendment and how it affects dangerous products like cigarettes than I would have otherwise.

Continue ReadingThe Runaway Jury

Live Free or Die

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This book is useful. When the Earth is invaded by evil aliens intent on stripping us of our heavy metals, I now know how to fight back using just Maple Syrup and a Death Star I just happen to have hanging around. That's education right there. This book is delightfully not sexist compared with some of Ringo's other books, which makes me happy. It does lack strong female characters, but at least they're not being used for titillation (refer to Cally's War for an example of how this isn't always true). I enjoyed this book.

Continue ReadingLive Free or Die

The Long Earth

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

Lana put me onto this book while on a trip to Texas, and I have to say I like it. This is very unlike the other Terry Pratchett books I've read, in that whilst it is occasionally amusing, it isn't really an attempt at humor. It is instead a relatively methodical examination of the impact of discovering a series of inhabitable earths a trivial amount of distance away from our own. I also have to say I like the ending, not in the sense of liking what happens, but in the sense that it wasn't a twee or overly convenient way to stop the book. A good read.

Continue ReadingThe Long Earth

Comparing alembic with sqlalchemy migrate

  • Post author:
  • Post category:OpenStack

In the last few days there has been a discussion on the openstack-dev mailing list about converting nova to alembic. Nova currently uses sqlalchemy migrate for its schema migrations. I would consider myself a sceptic of this change, but I want to be a well educated sceptic so I thought I should take a look at an existing alembic user, in this case neutron. There is also at least one session on database changes at the Icehouse summit this coming week, and I wanted to feel prepared for those conversations. I should start off by saying that I'm not particularly opposed to alembic. We definitely have problems with migrate, but I am not sure that these problems are addressed by alembic in the way that we'd hope. I think we need to dig deeper into the issues we face with migrate to understand if alembic is a good choice. sqlalchemy migrate There are two problems with migrate that I see us suffering from at the moment. The first is that migrate is no longer maintained by upstream. I can see why this is bad, although there are other nova dependencies that the OpenStack team maintains internally. For example, the various…

Continue ReadingComparing alembic with sqlalchemy migrate

On Continuous Integration testing for Nova DB

  • Post author:
  • Post category:OpenStack

To quote Homer Simpson: "All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.". One of my more recent goals is a desire to have real continuous integration testing for database migrations in Nova. You see, at the moment, database migrations can easily make upgrades painful for deployers, normally by taking a very long time to run. This is partially because we test on trivial datasets on our laptops, but it is also because it is hard to predict the scale of the various dimensions in the database -- for example: perhaps one deployment has lots of instances; whilst another might have a smaller number of instances but a very large number of IP addresses. The team I work with at Rackspace Australia has therefore been cooking up a scheme to try and fix this. For example, Josh Hesketh has been working on what we call Turbo Hipster, which he has blogged about. We've started off with a prototype to prove we can get meaningful testing results, which is running now. Since we finished the prototype we've been working on a real implementation, which is known as Turbo Hipster. I know it's an odd name, but we couldn't…

Continue ReadingOn Continuous Integration testing for Nova DB

End of content

No more pages to load

Newer Posts
Older Posts