notmyname

OpenStack is designed to be a collection of projects that together can be used as the basis of a scalable cloud deployment (public or private). Currently, there are two big projects in OpenStack: nova and swift.

Nova can be compared to EC2. It is designed to provision compute instances, and it's goals are to support a million physical hosts with many times that for VMs running on the hosts. It is currently under active development and used in production at NASA.

Swift is a scalable object storage system similar to S3. It's designed to support 100+ petabyte clusters each with 100000 requests per second, tens of thousands of hard drives on thousands of storage nodes. It is currently running in production at Rackspace as Cloud Files.

Unlike AWS or Eucalyptus, OpenStack is 100% open--both source and development.

The claim of "the new Linux" comes from the thought that Linux was an open OS that changed the way servers ran. OpenStack's goal is to be the OS for the data center. It's a layer above the individual machines and ties together the IaaS pieces needed for a DC.

Disclosure: I work for Rackspace and am a developer for swift.

I use my own domain running my own mail server (postfix, etc). I figured there is no better way to learn about running a mail server than actually doing it. My favorite thing is having a catch all email address that lets me give a unique email to everyone (business, website, etc) who asks. For example, I know that anything that goes to hackernews@ will come from here. Anything to bestbuy@ comes from there. And I've had one case where I started getting tons of spam to one specific address. Blacklist that address, and the spam problem stopped.

Obviously, a new programmer's code will not be as good as an experienced programmer's. I think the important lesson here is to "write code". "like you just learned how to program" modifies "write", not the code.

I found myself in the same position as the author. As I was going through a CS program, I thought back to my early years of writing code. Sure, those early programs didn't have computationally optimal algorithms or the current {design pattern|algorithm|language} of the week, but they were fun, and I got stuff done.

Once I graduated, and now that I've been coding professionally for nearly 8 years, I find that the best way to keep that passion about code and not get encumbered by "how it's supposed to be done" is to read other peoples' code and work with really smart people who encourage you to be a better developer.

One thing that is implied is a strong understanding of who the users are and what they want from the product. I'm always encouraged to hear of large, influential companies talk about these sorts of things because I hope that these practices become more standard. Understanding users rather than guessing at what they want and measuring the effects of changes made seem to be obvious, but I'm always surprised at how often it isn't done.

...that the author uses.

This is much less interesting than some general survey analysis on the state of open source software for the year.

FWIW, non-block storage services (like Rackspace Cloud Files and S3) should not be vulnerable to these info leaks. I cannot speak to the S3 backend, but this sort of attack would not be possible with Cloud Files. Of course, the use case is a little different when you don't have access to a block-level device.

How do I change my password?

Also, I clicked a link before entering a password, and now I can't log in. Can't reregister; can't have login with an empty password.

It's not me

Nice interface. I do see one issue, though.

Click on a file in a subfolder, then click on a file in a top-level folder. Both remain highlighted. See the screenshot for an example.

http://c0280441.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/Screen%20s...

Sounds like something that needs a manager appointed to hire a team to determine the appropriate process. Don't forget the Project Manager to keep track of scope, the Business Analyst to prioritize according to company needs, and the Integration Engineers to ensure that other groups will be able to properly implement the solutions. Of course, the everything will need to go before the Change Management Committee and assigned a risk score before it can be implemented.

The confirmation email isn't a bad idea. I wouldn't mind it too much.

Perhaps a simpler idea though is to make sure the users can easily delete data or routes that are sent in via email. It doesn't really solve the "spam" routes that could be added to an account, but it does make it easy for a customer to clean it up.

Perhaps require confirmation if many routes are uploaded in a short amount of time.

Perhaps require a secret key hash to be included in the subject of the message.

And you need to be poor to understand and effectively help the poor. And you need to be a minority to understand the problems minorities face.

Yes, participating in something or belonging to a group helps one understand it, but participating and belonging are not pre-requirements to help and understand.

I'm curious about how he stores the hydrogen. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store. How does he keep the indefinite cycle going with hydrogen in a sealed chamber if the hydrogen is constantly leaching through the walls of the chamber?

No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).

I've found that developing against a VM is a great tool for a dev. For OpenStack swift, we develop all of our code against a VM. Since we deploy on debian and I develop on a Mac, I can use OS X tools to develop (TextMate, etc) and code against an environment similar to our production. After code works on a VM, we can move to a lab or a staging environment to do more scale testing before deploying to production.

Developing against a VM is not something I did before working at Rackspace, and I find the practice so useful that I will do what I can to continue doing it no matter where I work in the future.

http://i.imgur.com/b1oLx.png is what I see when I visit the site

why are you trying to save db on my disk?

I've met the Nasuni guys, and they have a product that I'm really excited about. If they can get something that is for consumers (rather than businesses), I will be a customer. They have exactly what I am looking for: a local cache of cloud storage that can be accessed at local net speeds and has the scale of the backing cloud storage.

Looking at the independent claims, it seems like this is a patent on reverse engineering (with a computer!) something, then getting a patent on it, and finally licensing that patent to the owner of the system that was reverse engineered.

exactly what wrs said.

I run znc on a small VPS instance that is always running, always up, so I don't have to worry about keeping my connection to an IRC server open. ZNC (the bouncer) keeps me logged in to the IRC server, and I connect to ZNC when I need to be in contact with others.

I use znc running on a slice. (http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC)

I've also heard of Bip (http://bip.t1r.net/), but I've never used it.

I use an IRC bouncer to stay logged in to the IRC servers. I connect to the bouncer, which replays anything I missed on the IRC server while I'm not logged in to the bouncer.

IRC is an indispensable part of my work. The team I'm on uses a private server for team discussions (works great when someone is working remotely), and we also are in a few public channels on freenode. On freenode, I'm in #openstack to talk about cloud object storage infrastructure, #eventlet to learn more about it, and #cloudfiles for Rackspace product-specific questions. #openstack has been pretty active in the last couple of weeks (since we released the code) and has been pretty good for helping people who are learning about the systems. Internally, I can't imagine not using IRC. If I choose to work remotely, or if I'm working odd hours, it becomes a very important tool to keep up with what the other devs are doing.

To stay in the channel when I'm not online, I use an IRC bouncer (znc running on a slice, for me). When I log back in on my computer, I have the conversation I "missed" played back for me. I know other people that use irssi in a screen session to accomplish something similar.

We've been waiting for it to put in to swift (openstack storage) since we heard about it. It should really help performance on container and account operations.

Interestingly, our first implementation of Cloud Files was based on MogileFS. It's a decent design, but it doesn't scale to the levels we need. The central DB that stores the metadata was the bottleneck.

swift is built entirely in Python using libraries like eventlet, greenlet, and WebOb.

Because benchmarks are very sensitive to deployment details, the only thing I can point you to is comparisons between Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon S3. Of course, even then there are all kinds of variables like cluster size and network connectivity.

Eucalyptus tries to match Amazon's APIs, and (from hearsay) it doesn't scale well.

Openstack doesn't match Amazon's APIs. Nova (compute) is used by NASA and will be used by Rackspace Cloud Servers. Swift (storage) is currently used by Rackspace Cloud Files. Swift (my area of expertise) is production-ready code that is scalable to massive levels (think 100-petabyte clusters and 100000 requests per second).

swift is the storage piece (think S3 or Cloud Files). In fact, it is what is running as Rackspace's Cloud Files right now. Although it is listed as 1.0 and a developer preview release, it is production-ready code that is currently being used.

I'm a developer on swift (OpenStack storage == Rackspace Cloud Files). We've been pretty excited about opening this, and I'd love to answer any questions you have.

Swift documentation is at http://swift.openstack.org. Check out the "SAIO - Swift All In One" page to see how to set up a VM to run it. With some very small tweaks, you can also run it on a single slice (mount a loopback device rather than another virtual drive).

Although I don't know as much about it, the compute docs are at http://nova.openstack.org

Because the hope is that openstack will do for cloud hosting what Apache did for single-server hosting. And now you can install it locally on your own laptop or on a cluster of your own or pay someone else to host it.