shakenfist

I don't blog about every Shaken Fist release here, but I do feel like the 0.4 release (and the subsequent minor bug fix release 0.4.1) are a pretty big deal in the life of the project. The focus of the v0.4 series is reliability -- we've used behaviour in the continuous integration pipeline as a proxy for that, but it should be a significant improvement in the real world as well. This has included: much more extensive continuous integration coverage, including several new jobs. checksumming image downloads, and retrying images where the checksum fails. reworked locking. etcd reliability improvements. refactoring instances and networks to a new "non-volatile" object model where only immutable values are cached. images now track a state much like instances and networks. a reworked state model for instances, where its clearer why an instance ended up in an error state. This is documented in our developer docs. In terms of new features, we also added: a network ping API, which will emit ICMP ping packets on the network node onto your virtual network. We use this in testing to ensure instances booted and ended up online. networks are now checked to ensure that they have a reasonable minimum…

The other day we released Shaken Fist version 0.2, and I never got around to announcing it here. In fact, we've done a minor release since then and have another minor release in the wings ready to go out in the next day or so. So what's changed in Shaken Fist between version 0.1 and 0.2? Well, actually kind of a lot... We moved from MySQL to etcd for storage of persistant state. This was partially done because we wanted distributed locking, but it was also because MySQL was a pain to work with. We rearranged our repositories -- the main repository is now in its own github organisation, and the golang REST client, terrform provider, and deployment tooling have moved into their own repositories in that organisation. There is also a prototype javascript client now as well. Some work has gone into making the API service more production grade, although there is still some work to be done there probably in the 0.3 release -- specifically there is a timeout if a response takes more than 300 seconds, which can be the case in launch large VMs where the disk images are not in cache. There were also some…