January 20-22, 2012, Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel

Cloud and Virtualization

David Kavanagh

Installing Eucalyptus: Past, Present, and Future

From the start, Eucalyptus has been installed using a set of instructions that walked the user through various options, from distro to hypervisor to network mode. While there is still value in that for the ultimate flexibility, there are other ways to get Eucalyptus installed. FastStart is one such technology. It uses a set of simplifying assumptions to create a POC installer. For those who want to not only provision Eucalyptus, but handle ongoing configuration management, Puppet offers a nice set of features. We've developed a set of scripts to provision your Eucalyptus infrastructure. Finally, a new project we're running fully in front of the community is called Silvereye. Simply, this project provides a simple single media install solution whereby the first node is bootstrapped from a DVD and the remaining nodes are installed over the network. We have great plans for where this will lead.

Audience: 

Karsten Wade

oVirt - Infrastructure and Management Platform for the Data Center

This presentation is for anyone who cares about Linux-based KVM virtualization. It is to give a high-level look at the new oVirt project. oVirt was restarted as an open sourcing of the RHEV management platform. The new project is releasing code from a community of interested people and vendors you recognize. The oVirt Project is an open virtualization project providing a feature-rich server virtualization management system with advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more. By open we mean open source and open governance, done right. The presentation will cover the history of the code, how and why the community was created, and the governance and methods of the community. In addition, all the current components of the oVirt project will be discussed at a high-level.

Audience: 

John Mark Walker

Introducing the Open Cloud Initiative

The Open Cloud Initiative has been created by a number of well-known representatives of the greater cloud computing community to educate the public about the value of open standards (specifically, open formats and open interfaces) in cloud computing (e.g. the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product). It is modeled after the Open Source Initiative, a California 501(c)3 non-profit, but is totally independent of it. Run by individuals, it is also independent of any commercial vendors. The Open Cloud Principles (http://www.opencloudinitiative.org/principles), which were developed by way of an open community consensus process, form the basis of a certification trademark program which allows users to request, and vendors to offer, “Open Cloud” certified products and services. The primary purpose of the Open Cloud Initiative is to provide a legal framework within which to research and define “Open Cloud” and develop programs that educate the technology industry at large as to its benefits. Our programs will include speaking at and hosting events related to cloud computing; media campaigns in the technology press advocating for open formats and open interfaces; certification programs that enable the community to designate products and services as Open Cloud-compliant; and education of consumers and providers of cloud computing as to the benefits of Open Cloud. Learn all about the OCI, including how you can join our efforts.

Audience: 

Kir Kolyshkin, Maxim Patlasov

Reinventing Linux loopback device for clouds

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One of the feature differences between hypervisors and containers is the ability to store a virtual machine image in a single file, since most containers exist as a chroot within the host OS rather than as fully independent entities. However, the ability to save and restore state in a machine image file is invaluable in managing virtual machine lifecycles in the data centre. This talk will début a new loopback device which gives all the advantages of virtual machine images by storing the container in a file while preserving the benefits of sharing significant portions with the host OS. We will compare and contrast the technology with the traditional loopback device and LVM, and describe a few features of a new loopback useful in container snapshotting and live migration. This talk will be technical in nature but should be accessible to people interested in cloud, virtualisation and container technologies.

Audience: 

Jesse Andrews

State of the OpenStack

OpenStack's mission is to produce the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable. Because OpenStack abstracts servers, networks and storage to a single restful API, integrating it with your system(s) can be an ordeal. Lessons learned in the field with real deployments at Sony Computer Entertainment America and x.commerce. To help getting it to work for you, we will explore the architecture of major components and how to setup a complete development environment using devstack, a documented shell script that goes from Ubuntu to a running cloud in 5 minutes.

Audience: 

Thomas Stocking

Cloud Computing for Small Business

We will start off talking about the past, or legacy forms of shared computing: Bulletin Boards, shared hosting, and the hosting you get from domain registrars. We will look at the current hype of Cloud computing (still in full swing) and what it means for enterprises. We will briefly cover the education problem, and how everyone explains cloud computing a little differently. Exactly what is the cloud? It depends on who you talk to (and what they are selling). From there we will go on to discuss what open source software like Linux does to the economics of cloud computing, and why this is good, and what the wise adoption of cloud computing does to the data sharing model, and why this is bad (if not really new). The bottom line? If you accept some risk, open source can be an enabler to low-cost, easy to use, cloud-based compute resources. On to small business use cases like e-commerce. Is shared hosting enough? Do you need an app to deliver your product? What about a database? Cloud computing is better than shared, and cheaper than dedicated hosting. Do you run a software company? What about an open source project? Combining private Cloud computing like VMware's ESXi with cheap public cloud, pay-as-you-go hosting can address your needs for dev and test servers, and, if you decide to offer product training, you can give your attendees a cloud instance to run with. Another cloud altogether is the SaaS offering, and some of the bigger SaaS offerings like Salesforce are cost-effective at small numbers of users (or even free). This can help you get off the ground as a little guy, but beware the lock-in that comes with these solutions. It's really expensive to have a dozen or more accounts, so if your small business is headed for medium size, consider another path. Finally we will talk about what the future holds: the coming blood bath of contenders for the enterprise market, and how low-priced, targeted hosting companies can service the underserved, using Linux and open source. In Q&A, we want to hear your stories: did/do you use the cloud in your small business? How is it working out? Do you have a horror story or a shining example to show us? What do you think about the current crop of cloud offerings? Any cloud APIs you really like or hate? What do you think about the price charged by Amazon? Anyone have a favorite (or least favorite) vendor to tell the group about?

Audience: 

Richard Su

Aeolus - Clouds Flying in Assembly

As clouds become commonplace, there is a need to manage virtual instances across a great variety of clouds and cloud-like environments. The tools that Aeolus provides both ease the burden of managing large numbers of clouds, as well as ensure that cloud consumers can use large numbers of clouds to avoid getting locked into the offering of any single provider. Besides managing virtual machines in various clouds, a cross-cloud broker like Aeolus needs to be able to build images for these clouds from a single specification, track which images have been converted and uploaded into what cloud, as well as automate image updates. To further simplify the management of complicated cloud uses, Aeolus makes it possible to describe multi-instance applications like three-tier web applications as one unit, from image definition to upload and launch into target clouds. The main components of Aeolus are Conductor, the application that users and administrators interact with, Composer, an application and tools for building and managing images, and Orchestrator, tooling for treating groups of virtual machines as one application. This talk will provide a detailed overview of Aeolus' capabilities, and serve as an introduction to the use of Aeolus to solve real world problems.

Audience: 

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.

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