Head in the Clouds

With CloudStack Acton now released, there's precious little time to stop and rest. Instead, we are already rapidly working on the next CloudStack release, codenamed Bonita.


As part of this release we are making a concerted effort to make the entire CloudStack development process far more transparent and inclusive. I do ask that you be patient with us in this process, the level of cultural change is massive. The first step is to at least let folks know what's going on - and Haroon (The project manager for the project) will be posting meeting minutes, status updates, etc. on the cloudstack-devel mailing list. Once we have communication down we'll work on making things far more inclusive and participatory.

So for Bonita - the status from a PM view will be here:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/display/RelOps/Bonita

You'll also note that Haroon has published meeting minutes from the few meetings that have occurred; for instance you can see Bonita Kick Off Meeting:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1344273

We welcome your participation as we start work on this release.

After many months of hard work and long weekend hours, we are finally releasing the Acton release.

This is the first major CloudStack release since our 2.2.x series and it includes many new features such as:

- - Network as a Service
- - Projects
- - LDAP Support
- - Openstack Swift Support
- - Netscaler MPX/VPX/SDX Support
- - vSphere 5.0 Support
- - XenServer 6.0 Support
- - Brand spanking new User Interface
- - and many others

I want to take a moment and thank the community for all of their help. The beta process resulted in hundreds of community discovered and reported bugs. This release also had a far greater level of non-Citrix contribution, from bug fixes and even some major feature contribution.

You can find the binaries here: http://bit.ly/x2svsr

One of the most powerful but lesser known features of CloudStack is it's ability to integrate with networking devices like F5 and NetScaler loadbalancers. 

With CloudStack 3.0 you can deploy NetScaler with core Load Balancing rules. The core protocols like TCP, HTTP and UDP are supported and you can use the load balancing algorithms like Round Robin, Source IP and Least connection. It also supports session persistency based on Source IP and Cookie.

There's a nice overview of how that works over on the Citrix blog. 

For those of you that are Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) users and are in Silicon Valley the CloudStack community team and some of our developers will be attending the Xen Hackathon at Oracle in Silicon Valley on March 6th-8th. If you want to help make Xen Cloud Platform a better hypervisor for your cloud come on in the XCP project lead Mike McClurg will be there as well for you to discuss where XCP is going. 

What is a Xen Hackathon?

The aim of Xen Hackathons is to give developers in the Xen community the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other Xen developers. It is a 3 day self-organizing event, where Xen developers work on concrete problems around the Xen codebase in small self-organizing groups.

Xen developers with the following expertise will be present: Xen Hypervisor developers, kernel developers (working on Xen components in the Linux kernel), XCP developers working on project Kronos and the Xen Cloud Platform. Xen on ARM as well is MIPS will also feature in the March 2012 Hackathon.

Xen Hackathons are also great opportunities for companies and open source projects, built on Xen, XCP or commercially based Xen products to test (and fix any issues in their products) against the latest open source baselines. You will have access and be able to work on concrete code problems with Xen developers at the Hackathon.