This week was the last in-class meeting of the semester.

We discussed various ideas about how we should use our Eucalyptus cloud in the future. One of the ideas was to provide students in lower level courses with images of the cloud that supplied them with all the tools they need to do their work.

We then were able to meet up with our groups and further discuss completing our project.

I worked on creating a Power Point presentation that represented a visual summary of our research on Eucalyptus’ Architectural Overview as well as general Cloud Computing information.

Also, on Saturday we met up on campus as a group to do a practice run of our presentation. After a few run-throughs we felt pretty good about what we had prepared.

I decided on a topic and wrote my Ethical Analysis regarding Eucalyptus. This was a learning experience as I began to do my research on security issues with Cloud Computing/Eucalyptus. I had previously heard about the issues, but upon doing some research on the topic it furthered my knowledge of things I wasn’t aware of.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we got together in class and decided on how we would go about presenting our portion of the Eucalyptus project. Our group, because it discusses the Architecture Overview, will be the first group to present on May 9th, 2012. We decided it is probably a good idea to do a couple of run-throughs of our oral presentation so that we are prepared on the day of so we met up on campus on Saturday to get started.

After meeting on Saturday, we came up with the details regarding what our presentation will consist of.

I added some finishing touches to what I already have written on the storage controller and machine images.

We also received the requirements/credentials for the Ethical Analysis of Eucalyptus so I began working on that as well. The topic I chose to discuss was security and cloud computing/Eucalyptus. There are security issues with cloud computing in general so I thought that would be an interesting topic to tackle.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we did not meet as a class, as we had the 16th off due to Patriot’s Day.

During this week I made a lot of progress with my documentation on Eucalyptus Machine Images (EMIs). I was able to research the topic using the following links as references for my own documentation:

1. http://www.eucalyptus.com/download/images

2. http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusImageManagement_v2.0

3. http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Concepts_BootFromEBS.html

The Amazon AMI user guide helped to better understand Eucalyptus’ EMIs greatly.

I also began to think about what topic I’d like to tackle in regards to the ethical analysis of Eucalyptus/Cloud Computing.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we began by providing updates on where we are at with our individual projects. We also need to find out exactly what format the folks over at Eucalyptus want our documentation to be in. Then we will need to convert our simple text format over to whatever they suggest.

We also discussed beginning a paper on an ethical analysis of Eucalyptus. This is something to work on and be due at the end of the semester. We will be writing about something we find to be negative about Eucalyptus or Cloud Computing in general. This can include aspects such as: security, reliability and privacy.

I’ve also just continued with documentation on the Eucalyptus Architecture Overview (Block Storage Controller).

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we created an EtherPad to document and organize the mid-semester status of all our collective Eucalyptus documentation. Using the following EtherPad: http://typewith.me/p/Mid-semester_status, we were all able to contribute and describe what the status of our portion of the documentation is. We included the following information to describe our portion of the project and it’s status: Description, Who is Working on It, Current Status, What Has Been Done, What is In Process, What Still Needs to Be Done, What Resources Do We Need, and Other. This is going to allow us to keep track of what we’ve all done so far in regards to working with Eucalytpus as an FOSS thus far.

After meeting with my group to discuss and go over where we are all at with our individual parts of the project, I was able to continue with my documentation on Eucalyptus Block Storage and Amazon EBS Backed Images.

I updated our portion of the WiKi with my findings and research on Eucalyptus Block Storage Service (http://cs.worcester.edu/wiki/index.php?n=Main.ArchitectureOverview).

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week in class we first discussed updates on what people have been working on over the past couple of weeks. Various groups provided information regarding where they were at with their portion of Eucalyptus. Our group, (Myself, Dan Adams, and Brian Labbe), decided what direction specifically we would like to take our documenting of the architecture of Eucalyptus. We decided to split up the project into three main portions which include: Storage Controller/Elastic Block Storage, S3/Walrus, etc. I will be working on the Storage Controller/Elastic Block Storage part of the documentation. As references I’ll be using the following Amazon docs: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AmazonEBS.html and http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts.html#storage. This is helpful because I will be able to compare the Eucalyptus storage controller to Amazon’s EBS. I was able to find information regarding Eucalyptus’ storage controller here: http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusBlockStorage_v2.0. Using these tools and information I was able to begin to create a document that describes how Eucalyptus’ Block Storage functions.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

We had spring break this week at WSU so I tried to squeeze in some Eucalyptus time. This week the Eucalyptus web interface was made available and we were able to sign up for an account on our cloud. This was some pretty exciting progress. I’ve also been, once again, continuing to research and document for the “Architecture Overview” portion of the Eucalyptus documentation.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week I’ve been continuing to research and document for the “Architecture Overview” portion of the Eucalyptus documentation project. I also have been browsing and reading posts on http://planet.eucalyptus.com/. I found some great and interesting information on the site about Eucalyptus. I have also been trying out some of the commands that are documented in the Euca2ools documentation on the WiKi. Just another week of familiarizing myself further with Eucalyptus has been helpful.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week I’ve been working on documentation for an overview on cloud computing in it’s general sense. I’ve been doing research and gathering information about cloud computing and it’s various aspects and traits. I was able to find lots of information about the pros and cons of cloud computing. I also found out a lot about how cloud computing has affecting the business world in positive ways and the manners in which it has provided cost savings. It has also provided a means for people to collaborate on projects without them needing to be in the same room or even the same country for that matter. I also found great information about the different styles and types of clouds. Clouds can be public, private or hybrid. They can also be serviced in different forms (i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). I’ve learned more than I knew before about cloud computing so it’s been an interesting week of research and documentation. I also read Chapters 1-3 on http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way and Chapter 6 in http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/TOS/Practical_Open_Source_Software_Exploration/html/ch-Debugging_the_Code.html. These readings were also very informative and I learned a lot from them. The information about Bug Trackers was most helpful to me. I was not completely familiar with that aspect of FOSS projects so I found that to be helpful in many ways.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week I read Chapter 5: Buiding the Code on http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Building_the_Code&oldid=3622. I found this chapter to be very helpful and informative. It provided great tips and information regarding the best way to go about building the code for your FOSS. The information about installing and configuring the source code was especially helpful. I also read Chapter 4: Stuff Everyone Knows and Forgets Anyway in the book In The Open Source Way on http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way-Stuff_everyone_knows_and_forgets_anyway.html. This chapter also provided some great tips and information regarding simple things that one should be mindful of when they are working within a team on an FOSS. The biggest tip discussed was on open and thorough communication through direct means as well as mailing lists. I found this to be an important tip that made a lot of sense. I then assessed Eucalyptus against The Open Source Way’s checklist for determining whether a project is doomed to fail. The list of questions to determine is available at: http://theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_tell_if_a_FLOSS_project_is_doomed_to_FAIL. I found it difficult to find some of the answers to some of the questions asked in the list. Therefore it was not easy to assess the project completely. I feel that it is difficult to predict whether the project is going to be a failure or not until we’ve completed it. This is because I personally have never worked on an FOSS of any kind and cloud computing is a completely new world to me. I am hopeful that it will be a learning experience and that I will gain a better knowledge and understanding, at the least, about working in a team on an FOSS.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.