Everyone

Josh Berkus

Should we get a Foundation?

Has your open source project grown to the point where you need a legal structure for it? Do you need somewhere to put trademarks, domains, funds, servers and copyrights so that they won't belong to individual contributors? Most open source projects which reach a certain size need the support of a company or foundation. Some projects need it immediately due to legal issues. Josh Berkus, assistant treasurer of Software in the Public Interest, will go over the options you have for creating a legal shell for your project in the US and Canada, including: * getting your own 501(c)3 foundation * 501(c)6s and other nonprofit types * joining an umbrella foundation * incorporating as a not-for-profit business

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

Mentoring

Max Mether

A Closer Look at MySQL Cluster: An Architectural Overview

MySQL® Cluster is a separate product from the standard MySQL database, despite their being tightly linked. Due to the distributed nature of MySQL Cluster, it has a far more complicated architecture than a standard MySQL database. In this presentation, Max Mether, SkySQL's Training Services Manager, will describe the architecture of the MySQL Cluster product and how the process and data flow takes place between the nodes of the cluster.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

MySQL

Tom Callaway

Selling Free Software

There are many misconceptions around selling Free Software, even the name is confusing, how can you sell something that is free? One of the main reasons that the term "Open Source" was coined was to simplify the message, that Free Software is more about freedom, and less about price. But it isn't as simple as that. Price matters too, especially in a struggling economy. From 2001 to 2006, I was a Sales Engineer (now known as Solutions Architects) at Red Hat, awarded Sales Engineer of the Year in 2005 and 2006. I never really planned on being in sales, it just fell in my lap, but I saw it as a problem that could be solved. In working towards solutions with each new customer, I came to appreciate and understand Free Software better. Additionally, I learned that the foundations that are widely understood and accepted in the FOSS community are very foreign to most organizations. The trick is learning how to bridge that gap, how to act as a translator. With no roadmap, no sales training, only a hacker mindset and a passion for free software, I learned many things about how to (and how not to) sell Free Software within organizations, large and small. I'll share some tips about how I was successful and hopefully give you some ideas.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

General

Lars Kurth

Xen in the Cloud

In 2012, the Xen project will be 10 years old and is a project which has been used by many successful vendors to build successful businesses. This talk will give an overview of the various Xen projects and the Xen community. The talk will cover: 1) The PVOPS project (Xen support in the Linux 3.x kernel): where we are, where we are going and what that means for you 2) New features and changes to the hypervisor project 3) Exciting developments in the XCP project, which is changing rapidly driven by project Kronos to support the needs of cloud orchestration projects such as CloudStack, OpenNebula and OpenStack. 4) An update of the Xen ARM project and where it is going, with a particular view on ARM's virtualisation extensions and ARM based servers. 5) Efforts to make use of advanced security features such as disaggregation that are already in use for client virtualization (QubesOS and XenClient), but have big potential for server virtualization to better support the security needs of the cloud The talk will also explain how you contribute and get engaged with Xen projects.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

Cloud and Virtualization

Sage Weil

Ceph distributed storage system

As the size and performance requirements of storage systems have increased, file system designers have looked to new architectures to facilitate system scalability. Ceph is a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability from terabytes to exabytes. Ceph's architecture consists of two main components: an object storage layer, and a distributed file system that is constructed on top of this object store. The object store provides a generic, scalable storage platform with support for snapshots and distributed computation. This storage backend is used to provide a simple network block device (RBD) with thin provisioning and snapshots, or an S3 or Swift compatible RESTful object storage interface. It also forms the basis for a distributed file system, managed by a distributed metadata server cluster, which similarly provides advanced features like per-directory granularity snapshots, and a recursive accounting feature that provides a convenient view of how much data is stored beneath any directory in the system. This talk will describe the Ceph architecture and then focus on the current status and future of the project. This will include a discussion of Ceph's relationship with btrfs, the file system and RBD clients in the Linux kernel, RBD support for virtual block devices in Qemu/KVM and libvirt, and current engineering challenges.

Audience:

Categories:

Meghan Gill

The Care and Feeding of an Open Source Community

An open source project is only as strong as the developer community around it. The traditional marketing strategies may not be applicable when dealing with a more discerning developer audience in the age of social media. So how does an open source project gain traction and usage? How do you fight FUD to build community around new technology? How does a project gain respect and mindshare among opinionated and fickle geeks? This session will examine these questions through a case study of the MongoDB project. Released for the first time in 2009, downloads of the open source database now exceed 100,000 each month and dozens of MongoDB events around the world have consistently sold out. Through bottoms-up developer outreach, MongoDB is seeing broad adoption in both the web and enterprise arenas. Meghan Gill leads the marketing and community development efforts at 10gen, the company that develops and supports the MongoDB project. She’ll talk about how seeding local user groups, organizing meetups large and small, building a social media presence, identifying advocates, and handling critics. We’ll also discuss the challenges of balancing the growth of a commercial ecosystem alongside free adoption.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

General

Philippe Robin

Consolidating Linux and Open Source Projects on ARM

Devices and platforms based on ARM architecture have become some of the most widely used platforms running Linux as it is used in a large number of mobile and embedded devices. In adopting Linux and open source projects many companies have evolved their working practises, moving from traditional closed development to using open source software components and contributing changes back to upstream projects to enable their platforms and build a strong developer community around them. Given that ARM is used in such a diverse range of platforms, the challenge for software developers and open source project maintainers has been to integrate and maintain contributions in an efficient way and limit code duplication to enable them to scale as the number of contributors increases. The Linux kernel has been a very visible example of this, with Linus Torvalds recently pushing back on contributions forcing some code refactoring and clean-up for redundant implementations. This talk with present the current status of Linux on ARM and how ARM and its partners are addressing these challenges to better support Linux kernel and upstream open source projects. In addition, ARM partners are contributing performance improvements to the Linux kernel and key open source projects to better perform on ARM CPU and platforms where there is a very strong focus on optimizing the balance between power usage and performance. This presentation will also highlight some of Linaro key contributions as a not-for-profit organization created to provide a framework for partners, and open source developers, to collaborate in developing and optimizing open source projects on ARM.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

Kernel

Sean OMeara

Infrastructure Automation with Chef

Infrastructure is code. The separation between how you manage infrastructure and applications is disappearing. System administrators love Chef because it gives them flexibility to integrate all aspects of their infrastructure such as monitoring and trending tools with applications. Software developers love Chef because it helps them take care of the muck so they can focus on writing great applications. Get beyond just configuration management. Investigate Chef's architecture and design including tools and capabilities and dissect the anatomy of a Chef run.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

SysAdmin

Christopher Nolan, Darren Dao, Jeff Roberts

nventory - Your Infrastructure's Source of Truth

Additional Speakers:

darrendao

jroberts235

Modern web infrastructures should be able to scale easily. A number of critical tools are also needed to reach this nirvana of fast scale. Automation is essential as well. The core pieces to getting there are a CI/build/release tool (jenkins), CM for both system and app (chef, puppet, etch), node builder (kickstart, cobbler, cloud), orchestration (capistrano, mcollective), and monitoring/metrics (nagios, graphite/collectd, cacti). The last piece that most companies don't realize is very essential is a Source of Truth that ties everything together. Some companies manage it on a tool by tool basis. Each tool has its own concept of nodes on the network. There is no convention for how nodes are grouped together and acted upon. If someone in app support spins up new instances for a service they then have to let the monitoring folks know so that they can be added to monitoring. Many companies use text files or xml files to describe hosts. Though better than nothing it is probably the worst way to do things. It must be manually maintained. It must be pushed to many places for various tools to leverage it. It isn't always consistent. It is also difficult to extend with detailed information. Sometimes the problem is solved with elaborate hostname conventions. "Let's describe everything about a host in it's hostname!" Bad idea. It leads to hostnames like: production-web-2gb-apache-proxy.rack7.slot8.cluster3.datacenter2.losangeles.domain.com. That's ugly and annoying but we've all seen it. Your network needs a Source of Truth. This SoT needs to support both automatic and manual descriptions of what it knows. Devices on your network should automatically check in and send as much information as possible. You should be able to layer information on top of these devices to describe their roles. You should have a number of ways to access this information including webui, command line, RESTful interface, APIs for popular languages like Perl and Ruby. This is why we use nventory. Then into detailed explanation of nventory including it's architecture, a demo, and real world descriptions of how we use it at eHarmony to integrate with tools like Jenkins, Nagios, Chef, etch, etc. Lots of screenshots and examples.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

DevOps

Elizabeth Krumbach

Bringing Linux into Public Schools and Community Centers

Volunteers with the San Francisco Bay Area non-profit Partimus have been working to put Linux and other F/OSS software into area schools. Getting into schools is one of the biggest hurdles for anyone looking to bring F/OSS into education and can often be an insurmountable one, so the first suggestion will be that if the goal is to spread Linux and F/OSS in education is to start with an adult learning center, after school program or similar organization in the area. Partimus itself benefits from an enthusiastic, outgoing leader who took the time to make connections with schools and volunteers in the area and made involvement in one public charter schools into involvement with several programs and schools.

Once in a school the organization has to come up with solutions that will not only meet the needs of students, teachers and staff, but be maintainable, work with the existing IT infrastructure and have the ability to scale with developing needs of the school, so the use of a PXE boot server, custom ISOs, OpenLDAP, proxy services and local repositories which we document in the Partimus "School Lab in a Box" document will be covered. Beyond the technological challenges comes working with teachers who are frequently over-worked and don't have time for ticketing systems or reaching out to volunteers when there are problems with the systems.

Partimus has had to employ the talents of individuals who would not necessarily consider themselves highly technical to meet with teachers to frequently discuss their needs and challenges and then organize the appropriate training or instruction for programs and tools that the teachers have a need for.

Audience:

Everyone

Categories:

Open Source Software In Education

Christopher Nolan, Darren Dao, Jeff Roberts

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