canonical – Made by Mikal

Moving on

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 9, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

Thursday this week is my last day at Canonical. After a little over a year at Canonical, I'm moving on to the private cloud team at Rackspace -- my first day with Rackspace will be the 17th of December. I'm very excited to be joining Rackspace -- I'm excited by the project, the team, and the opportunity to make OpenStack even better. We've also talked about some interesting stuff we'd like to do in the Australian OpenStack community, but I'm going to hold off on talking about that until I've had a chance to settle in. I am appreciative of my time at Canonical -- when I joined I was unaware of the existence of OpenStack, and without Canonical I might never have found this awesome project that I love. I also had the chance to work with some really smart people who taught me a lot. This move is about spending more time on OpenStack than Canonical was able to allow.

On conference t-shirts

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 22, 2012
Post category:Conference

Conference t-shirts can't be that hard, right? I certainly don't remember them being difficult when Canberra last hosted linux.conf.au in 2005. I was the person who arranged all the swag for that conference, so I should remember. Yet here I am having spent hours on the phone with vendors, and surrounded with discarded sample t-shirts, size charts and colour swatches. What changed? The difference between now and then is that in the intervening seven years the Australian Linux community has started to make real effort to be more inclusive. We have anti-harassment policies, we encourage new speakers, and we're making real efforts to encourage more women into the community. linux.conf.au 2013 is making real efforts to be as inclusive as possible -- one of the first roles we allocated was a diversity officer, who is someone active in the geek feminism community. We've had serious discussions about how we can make our event as friendly to all groups as possible, and have some interesting things along those lines to announce soon. We're working hard to make the conference a safe environment for everyone, and will have independent delegate advocates available at all social events, as well as during the conference.…

A first pass at glance replication

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 11, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

A few weeks back I was tasked with turning up a new OpenStack region. This region couldn't share anything with existing regions because the plan was to test pre-release versions of OpenStack there, and if we shared something like glance then we would either have to endanger glance for all regions during testing, or not test glance. However, our users already have a favorite set of images uploaded to glance, and I really wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to use the new region -- I wanted all of their images to magically just appear there. What I needed was some form of glance replication. I'd sat in on the glance replication session at the Folsom OpenStack Design Summit. The NeCTAR use case at the bottom is exactly what I wanted, so its reassuring that other people wanted something like that too. However, no one was working on this feature. So I wrote it. In fact, because of the code review process I wrote it twice, but let's not dwell on that too much. So, as of change id I7dabbd6671ec75a0052db58312054f611707bdcf there is a very simple replicator script in glance/bin. Its not perfect, and I expect it…

Got Something to Say? The LCA 2013 CFP Opens Soon!

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 22, 2012
Post category:Conference

The call for presentations opens on 1 June, which is only 11 days away! So if you're thinking of speaking at the conference (a presentation, tutorial, or miniconference), now would be a good time to start thinking about what you're going to say. While you're thinking, please spare a thought for our web team, who are bringing up the entire zookeepr instance so that the CFP will work properly. We've been getting heaps of stuff done over the past few months. We've had a "ghosts" meeting (a meeting with former LCA directors), found conference and social venues, and are gearing up for the Call For Presentations. We've signed a contract for the keynote venue, which I think you will all really enjoy. We have also locked in our booking for the lecture theatres, which is now working its way through the ANU process. For social events, we've got a great venue for the penguin dinner, and have shortlisted venues for the speakers' dinner and the professional delegates' networking session. We're taking a bit of extra time here because we want venues that are special, and not just the ones which first came to mind. The ghosts meeting went really well…

Folsom Dev Summit sessions

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 11, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

I thought I should write up the dev summit sessions I am hosting now that the program is starting to look solid. This is mostly for my own benefit, so I have a solid understanding of where to start these sessions off. Both are short brainstorm sessions, so I am not intending to produce slide decks or anything like that. I just want to make sure there is something to kick discussion off. Image caching, where to from here (nova hypervisors) As of essex libvirt has an image cache to speed startup of new instances. This cache stores images direct from glance, as well as resized images. There is a periodic task which cleans up images in the cache which are no longer needed. The periodic task can also optionally detect images which have become corrupted on disk. So first off, do we want to implement this for other hypervisors as well? As mentioned in a recent blog post I'd like to see the image cache manager become common code and have all the hypervisors deal with this in exactly the same manner -- that makes it easier to document, and means that on-call operations people don't need to determine…

Reflecting on Essex

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 6, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

This post is kind of long, and a little self indulgent. However, I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I did for the Essex release cycle, and what I want to do for the Folsom release. I spent Essex mostly hacking on things in isolation, except for when Padraig Brady and I were hacking in a similar space. I'd like to collaborate more for Folsom, and I'm hoping talking about what I'm interested in doing in public might help with that. I came relatively late to the Essex development cycle, having never even heard of OpenStack before joining Canonical. We can talk about how I'd worked in the cloud space for six years and yet wasn't aware of the open source implementations at some other time. My initial introduction to OpenStack was being paged for compute nodes which were continually running out of disk. I googled around a bit and discovered that cached images for instances were never cleaned up (to start an instance, an image is fetched from glance, possibly has its format converted, is resized, and then an instance started with that resulting image, all those images were never being cleaned up). I filed bug…

Call for papers opens soon

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 4, 2012
Post category:Conference

It's time to start thinking about your talk proposals, because the call for papers is only eight weeks away! For the 2013 conference, the papers committee are going to be focusing on deep technical content, and things we think are going to really matter in the future -- that might range from freedom and privacy, to open source cloud systems, or energy efficient server farms of the future. However, the conference is to a large extent what the speakers make it -- if we receive many excellent submissions on a topic, then its sure to be represented at the conference. The papers committee will be headed by the able combination of Michael Davies and Mary Gardiner, who have done an excellent job in previous years. They're currently working through the details of the call for papers announcement. I am telling you this now because I want speakers to have plenty of time to prepare for the submissions process, as I think that will produce the highest quality of submissions. I also wanted to let you know the organising for linux.conf.au 2013 is progressing well. We're currently in the process of locking in all of our venue arrangements, so we will…

Wow, qemu-img is fast

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 4, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

I wanted to determine if its worth putting ephemeral images into the libvirt cache at all. How expensive are these images to create? They don't need to come from the image service, so it can't be too bad, right? It turns out that qemu-img is very very fast at creating these images, based on the very small data set of my laptop with an ext4 file system... mikal@x220:/data/temp$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 10g Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=10737418240 real 0m0.315s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s mikal@x220:/data/temp$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 100g Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=107374182400 real 0m0.004s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000s Perhaps this is because I am using ext4, which does funky extents things when allocating blocks. However, the only ext3 file system I could find at my place is my off site backup disks, which are USB3 attached instead of the SATA2 that my laptop uses. Here's the number from there: $ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 100g Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=107374182400 real 0m0.055s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s So still very very fast. Perhaps its the mkfs that's slow? Here's a run of creating a ext4 file system inside that 100gb file I just made on…

Slow git review uploads?

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 3, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

jeblair was kind enough to help me debug my problem with slow "git review" uploads for Openstack projects just now. It turns out that part of my standard configuration for ssh is to enable ControlMaster and ControlPersist. I mostly do this because the machines I use at Canonical are a very long way away from my home in Australia, and its nice to have slightly faster connections when you ssh to a machine. However, gerrit is incompatible with these options as best as we can tell. So, if your git reviews are taking 10 to 20 minutes to upload like mine were, check that you're not using persistent connections. Excluding review.openstack.org from that part of my configuration has made a massive difference to the speed of uploads for me.

Announcement video

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 1, 2012
Post category:Conference

I imagine that most people saw this at the conference closing. However, for completeness and because I feel that if we're going to put videos of other speakers online then I should suffer the same fate, here is the LCA 2013 announcement from Ballarat: