FOSS field trip - Eucalyptus

Description - This page will be used to collaborate on our classes experience while completing the\\ exercise [|FOSS Field Trip 2 - Assessing a Project].\\

Background Information - The Spring 2012 class CS-401 has the goal of exposing higher level Computer Science students\\ to Open Source (OS) projects. OS, sometimes referred to as FOSS (Free Open Source Software), describes both the nature and\\ intent of the project - namely, to provide a piece of software and the source code behind it to the general public in order\\ to create a user and development community.

Goal of the exercise - To expose students to various OS projects in a loosely directed manner. A student, at the end of the\\ exercise, should be able to desribe the software/ project, and provide various data on the project itself. Data may include, but\\ is not limited to: Size of the community (# of developers/ contributors), how often the software is downloaded (usage), as well as\\ links to wiki pages, bug tracking and any other pertinent information gathered.

Bug Tracking - "How are bugs and feature requests tracked? Are there a lot of open items? Are they being worked on? Are issues being addressed?" - Eucalyptus has a launchpad.net site for tracking bugs and feature requests. At the time of writing, there were 168 open bugs, the latest patch to fix a bug was 9 weeks ago.

euca2ools euca2ools -command line controls to an eucalyptus cloud.

%center%'+ FOSS Field Trip 2 – Eucalyptus - 		Dan Adams+'

http://open.eucalyptus.com/

Eucalyptus enables the creation of on-demand private computing clouds. Eucalyptus implements an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) private cloud. This is the cloud service style that supports virtualization. Users can create their own virtual systems, networks, servers, etc., all without the capital expense of actually buying all this equipment. It can be used to make a public cloud, reside behind a private firewall, or be a combination of both.

Activity on the project has spiked lately, jumping from 6 committers in February of 2011 to 16 in November. Dmitrii Zagorodnov (Nick eee) is the most active contributor. There are about 5,000 new lines of code in the last 2 months. The code is primarily Java C, and HTML, with a smattering of other languages. Virtual machines are run on top of a hypervisor, each having its own kernel, supporting libraries, and applications.

The project is actively looking for contributors. Roles vary from setting up help wikis to contributing code. As a Eucalyptus code contributor, you receive an issue tracker ID that lets you submit patches to our internal ticketing system (RT). Interactions with Eucalyptus are be conducted via the issue tracker. To get in on this, you must first submit the Contributor Agreement. See http://open.eucalyptus.com/participate/online_contributor_agreement. Anyone can view the patches in RT, but only contributors and Eucalyptus personnel have authorization to modify and add comments on RT.

Supporting documentation is excellent on the site. Among them: tutorials on cloud computing, case study on setting up the community cloud, community wikis, road maps, and much more. It has already been a crash course in cloud computing for me, having no prior experience in this area. Bugs and wishes (feature requests ) are reported and tracked using the internal ticketing system (RT). You can find Eucalyptus code branches on Launchpad. (https://code.launchpad.net/eucalyptus). There are currently 168 reported bugs in queue, but many are “committed” meaning a fix is on the way, or the issue has been fixed. There are, however, several bugs “confirmed” but not fixed, that are over 2 years old.

This is a viable open source and commercial project. The commercial version of Eucalyptus is being used by the U.S. Defense department, as well as NASA, the FDA, and private companies such as HP, Raytheon, and Puma. Developments in the open source projects are later pipelined into the commercial project. This is what funds the open source side of things.

I downloaded and installed Euca2ools, as well as the Ubuntu cloud utilities. I signed up for and was approved for a community cloud account. I am still fuzzy on how to actually use the community cloud. According to the site, “This community cloud is hosted at Coresite (http://www.coresite.com/) …and is accessible via InfoRelay's (http://inforelay.com) networking fabric. I was not sure if I need to have accounts on these sites as well. I’m sure that will become readily apparent in class. Communication is done through launchpad bug tracker, forums, wikis, IRC chat, mail lists, and “Planet Eucalyptus” feed aggregator.

This looks like it will be an interesting project. I have already learned a lot just researching the site. I am looking forward to actually seeing this thing work.

%center%'+ FOSS Field Trip 2 – Eucalyptus - 		Eduart Lekdushi+'

Eucalyptus is an open source Linux-based software architecture which it provides efficiency-enhancing private and hybrid clouds platform, and it can install on all major Linux OS distributions, including Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, openSUSE, and Debian. The users can provision their own collections of resources via Eucalyptus’ self-service interface on an as-needed basis thru IaaS (Eucalyptus provides Infrastructure as a Service). Because the users can access over enterprise intranet that sensitive data remains secure from external intrusion behind the enterprise firewall with a Eucalyptus private cloud. Eucalyptus is providing a virtual network overlay that both isolates network traffic of different users and allows two or more clusters to appear to belong to the same LAN (Local Area Network).

Some of very important features of Eucalyptus are AWS-compatible API, Walrus: An S3-compatible bucket storage manager, multiple network modes to accomodate different network architectures, Web UI and command-line tools for cloud administration and configuration and more. Also, some of the Eucalyptus users interacting with the cloud are SSH Key Management, Image Management, Linux-based VM Management, IP Address Management, Security Group Management and more.

There are many ways to participate in the Eucalyptus Open Source Community, and some of the ways to participate in this project are to test the Eucalyptus Community Cloud (ECC) and to provide feedback too Eucalyptus Community, to post the issues to the Support forum to help expand everybody knowledge base, comment on ECC blogs and recommend new blog topics, add to and improve the documentation on ECC community wiki, identify and register bugs, Check out ECC developer's corner and become a Eucalyptus code contributor, and many more.

There are about at list 6 forums in ECC. Some of the forums names are News and Announcements which has about 51 topics, Articles and blogs which has about 48 topics, Eucalyptus General which has 994 topics, Eucalyptus Support which it has 3167 topics, Site feedback, and Eucalyptus Community Cloud. Some of the active forums topics are Eucalptus Cloud not starting, Walrus requests, instance run problem, determine the node of a VM, and Install Eucalyptus on CentOS 6.0 Final.

One of the ways the Eucalyptus developers are communicating together is thru IRC channel # eucalyptus on irc.freenode.net but also they do have other ways to communicate with each other. For example there is community website, blog, and Planet Eucalyptus which can allow the community to communicate with each-other. Also, on the community website you can find a lot of information about the functional requirements, design documents, installation documentation, etc. You can find instructions for installation and setting up of Eucalyptus about each operating system in website. So this website is the most useful resource for the installation and setting up of Eucalyptus community.

Eucalyptus tracks its bugs and other issues by encouraging their community to submit bug reports via launchpad. Eucalyptus has high number of new and open bugs. According to Launchpad, Eucalyptus code has 102 new bugs, 168 open bugs, 5 bugs in progress, and 0 critical bugs. This is very ambition project and also it is new project too. Eucalyptus has 5 active reviews and 44 active branches owned by 17 people and 3 teams. Like any other open source projects Eucalyptus has its own committers which are helping to fix bugs. There were 16 commits by 5 people in the last month. Also, a lot of contributors and some of the famous names are Chris Grzegorczyk with 2647 points, Graziano Obertelli with 1030 points, Neil Soman with 551 points, Daniel Nurmi with 432 points, and Dmitrii Zagorodnov with 216 points.

From this assignment I did learn a lot about an open source project like Eucalyptus. It was very interesting how a community was build around the Eucalyptus project. I did learn how to research an open source project and for what to look for it. Also, I did learned that how to contribute to an open source project.

Reference: http://open.eucalyptus.com/