This week I thought to get deeper on EuTester bug tracker. There have being some new issues added to the EuTester bug tracker, and I did spend some times looking at all the issues that are there. In software industry it is very important to learn to understand how bug tracer issues works because it [&hellip
From the blog E. Lekdushi CS401 by elekdushi and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
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.
The last week or so I have spent all of my time outside of class and work finishing up classes for the semester, and cs401 was no different. Between getting slides together for our presentations and finishing up my ethical analysis of the Eucalyptus project, combined with all of my other classes, it has been a busy week.
Today during class Dave, Mike, and myself took a trip over to the server room to flatten the network. Once we had that accomplished, we sat down and and configured two more nodes and edited the Eucalyptus Installation documentation accordingly. To be honest, it was very easy to do following the documentation that Dave had on the Wiki, even if most of it wasn’t necessary anymore due to there being packages we could install instead of having to compile from source. Hopefully some other people can go through the guide and get the rest of the nodes up and running.
Overall I think I learned a lot in this class over the course of the semester. I learned about version control and coding in a team environment, cloud infrastructure and how it all comes together, and a lot of python. All of which I can safely assume will make great additions to my resume. That being said, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s presentations next week and seeing how much we have accomplished as a class.
From the blog clacroix12 by clacroix12 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
At last, with a visit from Andy Grimm last week, looked like our Dave was enlightened by him and figured out what he went wrong with our cloud’s configuration and he got it fixed. Now our images on the cloud can be started. The downfall is that all the accounts are wiped, so we had to re-register and update the credentials. But anyway, it was a great news we got in a while. I can play around with eutester now.
From the blog longnguyen16 » wsu-cs by watever10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
Today is like a day that we go over to see what the group has been able to accomplish so far. Each group will report what they have done. It looks like we got the cloud running to the point that images can be added but failed to be ran. I also found out that a new version of euca2ools on github will fix the small bug about uploading image in the previous version (the one stated as the latest stable version on the open.eucalyptus.com). And all kinds of documentations are looking great.
From the blog longnguyen16 » wsu-cs by watever10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
This week I spent most of my time figuring out what was left to finish in our eutester repository. I also used a lot of screenshots from github for my powerpoint presentation. I worked with Nate, Coady, and Marcos to put together our final project. We all put together screenshots and code samples from the changes we added to the repo to show everything we accomplished this semester.
Also, I wrote my paper on the Eucalyptus Ethical Analysis this week. It was interesting to look at the software and find out where it was good and where it was not so good. As it turns out, Eucalyptus is not 100% free and open source. It is better described as “open-core” because it only allows certain aspects of the product to be used for free. To add on more powerful features, users must pay a fee, which goes against the entire open source mindset. Users are only given a free trial of the software and all of the products that can be used with Eucalyptus are proprietary. There are other options that are similar to Eucalyptus, that are actually free and open source, but it appears that Eucalyptus is more mainstream and user friendly.
From the blog trevorhodde by Trevor and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
This final week – before the last class – I have been working on my part of our groups presentation on GitHub/EUTester Documentation and the ethical analysis of the Eucalyptus project Dr. Wurst gave us. Our group has made significant progress in documenting EUTester, and the majority of the python scripts now have headers that document what that script does! Having to go through the code has been a good way to force me to learn python, which I have had on my to-do list for a while now, and has shown me the usefulness of the language.
From the blog nathandoe » WSU CS by nathandoe and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
This week I am going to start from scratch and try to install Eutester+euca2ools from our wiki only, keeping notes along the way to see if we need to update anything to make it more clear. I imagine from what I’ve been reading that we’ve made quite a large amount of progress over this course and when I had to restart last month it took me maybe an hour? (would be been less if I realized >>> meant that you type python ) but that’s besides the point. This blog post will serve as a note pad for anything our wiki should make clearer.
Updated this:
I decided that I would find someone I could use that doesn’t really know much about Eucalyptus and at least knows how to work Linux. It turned out pretty well, I have some notes jotted down that I can finalize the wiki with to make it as fast as possible. Everything was pretty well laid out, aside form small things like the note “don’t forget to use sudo” after they entered all the commands. One thing I need to add is that we never directly say to install boto.
Overall this test went pretty well.
From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona 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.
Eucalyptus has a lot of vulnerability when it comes to ethical assessment. Eucalyptus puts the power of a cloud at the keyboard of its users. It is open-source and the community could potentially use it with malicious intent. Who can be held accountable if the software is used for destructive purposes?
Eucalyptus has a very broad terms of use policy. It simply states that contributors and users are responsible for the contributions they make toward the project and the implementation of the software. Users agree that it will only be used for lawful purposes. Though, in the technology world, there is a lot of grey area. Laws often vary from state-to-state and even more so on the international level. What if a cloud is hosted in one state, where the laws are loose, and is utilized in another state where they are very tight? What legislature applies? This area is still very undefined, and proposes great risk to contributors, users, and Eucalyptus’ responsibility.
On the other hand, the more detailed the terms of use becomes, the less versatility and flexibility you have with the software. You begin to remove the open-source aspect that the project is based on. The more you tell users what the software can and can’t be used for, the less likely they are to use it. It becomes more of a burden to follow all of the terms of use than is worth it. It’s essentially a catch-22.
I think the most obscene part of the whole project is the business structure. When I buy something, I prefer to be told up-front how much it’s going to cost. Eucalyptus gives a trial of there software, then you face a fee for continued use. If you can’t quite figure out the incredibly dense and technical documentation, you’ll be charged a service fee for any help. If you want to further specialize the software with add-ons, you’ll probably pay for those too. Welcome to the Americanized version of marketing, where we nickel-and-dime you to death before you even have a working product.
I still think Eucalyptus has a lot of potential, but it requires a great deal of attention to business structure and project management. Implement release dates, and stop nickel-and-diming to reach profitability.
From the blog jforkey » wsu-cs by jforkey and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.