News

Last month has been a busy and fruitful month. We last mentioned that our internal beta test had started and that our team visited the OpenStack Summit in Paris. For the first time, the twice-yearly OpenStack Summit took place in Europe and attracted about 6000 participants, making it the largest summit to date. It’s an indication of the momentum that OpenStack is currently experiencing. We were impressed by the amount of people that attended and the level of both professionalism and enthusiasm of the community.

Last week, a new phase in our OpenStack project started. Instead of just the members of our project team, all people at Cyso have now been invited to test our new platform and are actively doing so. It’s the final stage before we open up the platform for external beta testers. Our new group of testers has been instructed to try all sorts of different things to break the platform that our project team might not have thought of.

Today the OpenStack 2014.1.3stable Icehouse release has been announced. We’re currently testing and developing on version 2014.1.2 and will upgrade as soon as we’ve determined the changes and possible impact to our environments. Our production installation has remained stable for the last couple of weeks in which even a hardware disruption didn’t result in any impact to services. We’ve made a lot of progress with our automation tool for rolling out OTA environments and made structural changes to the use and handling of API’s.

Last week, several configurations have been created in Razor and Puppet to roll out different development environments with specific settings. These environments are using virtual Arista switches in order to resemble eventual production as closely as possible. Among other things, during the OpenStack meetup in Amsterdam on Wednesday 3 September, we’ve been given tips on how to improve performance of the erasure coded Ceph storage, which we’re intending to try out and possibly use.

Several users have continued last week’s trying out of our SSD-equipped test environments. In addition, more progress has been made towards the look and feel and future construction of the website and online community. Amongst other things, design sketches and icons have been made for users and components.

This week, focus for testing shifted mostly towards failover and recovery mechanisms and live migration of instances. Calamari, the reporting and management platform for Ceph, is producing the first graphs on usage and availability as well. Our colleagues are receiving fully virtualized test instances of the platform for them to use for providing feedback on stability, ease of use and performance. Other environments have been created for developing and testing of the APIs for the different teams within the project.

We’re continuing performance testing and benchmarking the pre-production platform, which has also been opened for individual (internal) beta test accounts. More work has been done on debugging some open issues regarding the Neutron networking component. The public API has been tested for automatic starting of images and instances. More preliminary sketches have been made of the logo.

Work is ongoing for testing performance and streamlining the installation of the platform using Puppet. We’re testing the erasure coded Ceph storage pools and different OS images (Ubuntu, CentOS, CoreOS and Windows 2012 for now). First work has been done on the final branding and a logo of our service and the user community.