The conversation below took place right after Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote. Tim and Mark start off by talking about Mark’s persistence of vision and what keeps driving him. At the 2:00 minute mark they talk about Project Sputnik, the buzz around it at OSCON and where it has the advantage over Mac OS. From there they talk about bringing the cloud right to the desktop via Juju.
On the Thursday at OSCON, Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth gave a great keynote entitled, “Making Magic From Cloud To Client.” He did the entire keynote and live demo on a project Sputnik laptop (a Dell XPS13 running Ubuntu 12.04LTS)!
Here it is in its entirety:
Some of the ground Mark covers:
A fantastic demo on Juju and writing Juju charms showing how you can design a complex topology, deploy that in memory on your laptop and then map the whole shebang to the cloud.
How JuJu charms allow for “encapsulation and reuse”
The idea of crowdsourcing ops
A demo showing how, in realtime, you can map actual running infrastructure from one cloud to the next (in his demo he mapped it from EC2 to an HP cloud)
The idea behind Unity and the principle of having one UI that works across phones, tablets, desktops and even TVs.
The week before last I had a fantastic time at OSCON, seeing old friends and making new ones. As always, the hallway track was the one I found most enlightening.
On the second day we announced that project Sputnik would be going from project to product in the fall and got a fantastic response (see some of the articles written about it at the end). On the day of the announce Mike Hendrickson, O’Reilly’s VP of content strategy, interviewed me about the project (check out Mike’s project Sputnik review). That video is the first one below.
I also did a “cliffs notes” version with Janet Bartleson which clocked in at one minute and 47 seconds so if you’re short on time you can check out the second one.
Extra-credit reading
Slideshow: Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: OSCON 2012: The Open-Source Creative Engine Drives the Economy – eWeek
A couple of weeks ago we announced a Beta program for the four-month old Project Sputnik — an effort to investigate creating a developer focused laptop based on Ubuntu and Dell’s XPS13 laptop.
Since the beta announcement we have received thousands of applications from around the world. This tremendous response, on top of fantastic amount of input we have received on the Project Sputnik storm session, has convinced us to take this project from pilot to product.
This fall we will be offering an Ubuntu 12.04LTS-based laptop pre-loaded on Dell’s XPS13 laptop.
Going from skunk works to mainstream
Back in the Spring, project Sputnik was the first effort green-lighted by an internal incubation program at Dell. Thanks to the incubation program we got a little bit of funding and some executive advisers. This incubation program notwithstanding, project Sputnik has been a pretty scrappy skunk works effort to date.
The idea behind the incubation program is to harness that scrappiness and inventiveness to explore & validate new ideas & products outside mainstream Dell processes. Thanks to the tremendous amount of support both outside (you, the community!) and inside Dell, with today’s announcement, we will begin making our transition to an official, “mainstream” Dell product.
I should also mention, if its not obvious, that we have not been doing the work alone. Canonical has been “scrappin” right besides us, helping to drive the project and doing a ton of engineering on the software side.
Beta program
As I mentioned at the start we have been completely blown away by the number of applications we have received. We’re currently working through logistics of how to handle the tons of applications, we’ll notify all applicants soon, and intend to keep that process and the future product aligned with the spirit of the program.
To make sure that we are listening to your ideas, please continue to post any thoughts about what you would like to see in a developer laptop on our Storm session. If you have an XPS13 running Ubuntu and want to share your experience or report a bug or issue, see our forum on Dell Tech center.
Profile tool: a software management tool to go out to a github repository to pull down various developer profiles e.g. javascript, ruby, android.
Cloud tool: will allow developers to create “microclouds” on their laptops, simulating a proper, at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud.
Extra-credit reading
Press release: Dell Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Software, Developer Communities
Dell’s chief architect for big data, Aurelian Dumitru (aka. A.D.) presented a talk at OSCON the week before last with the heady title, “Hadoop – Enterprise Data Warehouse Data Flow Analysis and Optimization.” The session, which was well attended, explored the integration between Hadoop and the Enterprise Data Warehouse. AD posted a fairly detailed overview of his session on his blog but if you want a great high level summary, check this out:
Some of the ground AD covers
Mapping out the data life cycle: Generate -> Capture -> Store -> Analyze ->Present
Where does Hadoop play and where does the data warehouse? Where do they overlap?
Who owns your data? Hopefully the answer is you and while that may be true it is often very difficult to get your data out of sites you have uploaded it to and move it elsewhere. Additionally, your data is scattered across a bunch of sites and locations across the web, wouldn’t it be amazing to have it all in one place and be able to mash it up and do things with it? Jeremie Miller observed these issues within his own family so, along with a few friends, he started the Data Locker project and Singly (Data Locker is an open source project and Singly is the commercial entity behind it).
I caught up with Jeremie right after the talk he delivered at OSCON. Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the ground Jeremie covers:
The concept behind the Data Locker project, why you should care
How the locker actually works
The role Singly will play as a host
Where they are, timeline-wise, on both the project and Singly
Last week at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video. Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.
Here is what the always entertaining Josh had to say:
Some of the ground Josh covers:
What, in a nutshell, will Piston be offering?
Josh’s work at NASA and how got involved in OpenStack
Timing around Piston’s general release and GA
The roles he plays on the OpenStack boards
What their offering will have right out of the shoot and their focus on big data going forward
I saw a great talk today here at OSCON Data up in Portland, Oregon. The talk was Practical Data Storage: MongoDB @ foursquare and was given by foursquare‘s head of server engineering, Harry Heymann. The talk was particularly impressive since, due to AV issues, Harry had to wing it and go slideless. (He did post his slides to twitter so folks with access could follow along).
After the talk I grabbed a few minutes with Harry and did the following interview:
Some of the ground Harry covers
What is foursquare and how it feeds your data back to you
Dell has been a part of the OpenStack community since day one a little over a year ago and today’s news represents the first available cloud solution based on the OpenStack platform. This Infrastructure-as-a-service solution includes a reference architecture based on Dell PowerEdge C servers, OpenStack open source software, the Dell-developed Crowbar software and services from Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.
Crowbar, keeping things short and sweet
Bringing up a cloud can be no mean feat, as a result a couple of our guys began working on a software framework that could be used to quickly (typically before coffee break!) bring up a multi-node OpenStack cloud on bare metal. That framework became Crowbar. What Crowbar does is manage the OpenStack deployment from the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary OpenStack components, allowing users to complete bare metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds in a matter of hours (or even minutes) instead of days.
Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the complete solution, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.
Code to the Community
As mentioned above, today Dell has released Crowbar to the community as open source code (you can get access to it the project’s GitHub site). The idea is allow users to build functionality to address their specific system needs. Additionally we are working with the community to submit Crowbar as a core project in the OpenStack initiative.
Included in the Crowbar code contribution is the barclamp list, UI and remote API’s, automated testing scripts, build scripts, switch discovery, open source Chef server. We are currently working with our legal team to determine how to release the BIOS and RAID which leverage third party components. In the meantime since it is free (as in beer) software, although Dell cannot distribute it, users can directly go the vendors and download the components for free to get that functionality.
More Crowbar detail
For those who want some more detail, here are some bullets I’ve grabbed from Rob “Mr. Crowbar” Hirschfeld’s blog:
Important notes:
Crowbar uses Chef as it’s database and relies on cookbooks for node deployments
Crowbar has a modular architecture so individual components can be removed, extended, and added. These components are known individually as “barclamps.”
Each barclamp has it’s own Chef configuration, UI subcomponent, deployment configuration, and documentation.
On the roadmap:
Hadoop support
Additional operating system support
Barclamp version repository
Network configuration
We’d like suggestions! Please comment on Rob’s blog!
Last but not least in my series of interviews from last month’s Cloud Summit at OSCON I present to you my conversation with Simon Phipps. Simon, who until earlier this year was the chief Open Source officer at Sun Microsystems, recently joined the start-up ForgeRock as their chief strategy officer. Here is what Simon says:
Some of the topics Simon tackles:
ForgeRock offers access management and authentication software based on open source code that was developed at Sun.
Since the software is open source you can download it for free at ForgeRock.
ForgeRock makes its money by selling subscriptions that provide various grades of SLAs.
Even though they are 4 mos old, they already have 20 customers including the world’s largest gambling exchange.
J.P. Rangaswamy is British Telecom’s chief scientist and a very interesting fellow. At the Cloud Summit at OSCON last month he delivered a talk on the future of the cloud. I was quite intrigued so I grabbed him during the break to learn a bit more about a few of the concepts he presented.
Some of the topics that J.P. tackles:
Many of the best utilities we’ve built: Internet, Web, wireless environment etc are built on fundamentally frail best-effort infrastructures.
In order to gain predictability you sacrifice a lot of the original value eg. QWERTY
He’s not against SLAs, J.P.’s against the throwing away of value under the guise of false beliefs in SLAs.
What is the key area in the cloud that needs to be shored up? Interoperability. Security is overplayed, just look at the development of the Web.
Need to concentrate on federation as a mind set — the ability to create services that are daisy chaining select pieces from a variety of each, vs integrated vertical stacks.
He’s worried about SLAs because the things people are doing to stop SLAs from being light weight are actually things that prevent interoperability.
After the cloud summit last week at OSCON, I sat down with Neil Levine of Canonical to see what was in store for Ubuntu cloud-wise (Canonical is a partner of ours in our cloud ISV program). Neil is the VP of Canonical’s corporate services division which handles their cloud and server products.
Here’s what Neil had to say:
Some of the topics Neil tackles:
The next Ubuntu release “Maverick Meerkat” and its geek-a-licious launch date: 10.10.10.
Look for Maverick to make Eucalyptus even easier to deploy and use.
Data processing and data analytics is one of the key use cases in the cloud and Canonical is looking to move up the stack and provide deep integration for other apps like Hadoop and NoSQL.
What are some of the areas of focus for next year’s two releases i.e. 11.04 and 11.10.
Project ensemble: what it is and what its goals are.
At OSCON last week I ran into a compadre from a previous life, Fred Kohout. Fred is now the CMO at UC4, a pure play software automation company, and he, like I, was in Portland to attend OSCON and the Cloud Summit.
At the summit Fred did to me what I’ve done to so many others, he got me on the receiving end of a video camera to talk about where Dell plays in the cloud and how we see the cloud evolving.
You can check out Fred’s blog from the Summit where he posted my video as well as the interview he did with another former compadre, Peder Ulander, CMO at cloud.com.
Don’t touch that dial
If you’re interested in OSCON be sure to stay tuned. I’ve got four more interviews from the event that I will be posting soon.
Tuesday after the OSCON cloud summit I sat down with Rick Clark over a well deserved beer. Rick is the chief architect and project lead for the OpenStack compute project that was announced on Monday.
Last week I interviewed Rick on the first day of the inaugural OpenStack design summit and I wanted to catch up with him and get his thoughts on how it had gone. This is what he had to say:
Some of the topics Rick tackles:
How it went engaging a very large technical group (100+) in an open design discussion patterned after an Ubuntu Developer Summit.
Some of the decisions he thought would be no brainers, turned out differently e.g. OVF (open virtualization format) and keeping the storage and compute groups separated.
Since the summit involved representatives from over 20 companies, some of them competitors, how good were people at putting away their business biases/agendas?
How far they got (hint they got requirements from everyone for the first release).
They’ve already gotten their first code contributions.
How they plan to build a community: actively looking to hire a community manager. In the meantime its actively growing and in a week they’ve gone from 10 people in the IRC channel to 150 on Tuesday.
The first code that is available from the OpenStack project, and its available today, is the code for the storage effort, “Object Storage.” The man at the technical helm of this effort is Will Reese of Rackspace. Will’s daytime job is development manager and system architect for Rackspace’s Cloud Files, the source of the code for Object Storage. Will and I grabbed some time at last week’s design summit and he briefed me on the project:
Some of the topics Will tackles:
Object Storage is based on the open sourced code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files.
Rackspace will lead the project to get the community kick started but is looking for the community to take over.
Storage and Compute will each have their own tech boards made up of members from Rackspace, NASA and the community.
In the second half of the interview Will takes us through a quick overview of the cloud files architecture which is written in python, leverages eventlib, and borrows concepts from memcache and some key-value stores –> To learn more, check out Will’s talk at OSCON this Wednesday.
The concept of community is one that has been around for quite a while (see image at left).
Originally at least partially defined as a group that shared a common physical location, this term over the last decade, with the help of the Internet, has vastly expanded to include virtual communities. (Obviously other media before the Net like radio, TV, snail mail and smoke signals have helped to knit together physically separated individuals, however the Net has simply done it on a much larger and more immediate scale).
Powering Software and Presidents
As for its power, it was the Community that became the central driver behind a “new” model of Software creation, Free and Open Source Software. No longer was code solely written by a group of engineers holed up in a room and fed pizza by sliding it under the door. It was written collaboratively by a community of mostly volunteers located around the world. And in a very different arena, it was the power of community that recently helped propel our current President to the White House.
Now with tools like Twitter and Facebook new communities are being created by the minute and companies and causes all want to know how to harness and leverage the power of community. Marketing guru Seth Godin has even jumped on the bandwagon with his book “Tribes” an inspiring but content lite work discussing how ideas, people and leaders can be brought together to accomplish big things.
“I’m in charge here” doesn’t work for a Community
Although it may be obvious to some, the most important thing to know about a community is that its about influence and not control. You can’t direct a community to do anything. What you can do is provide great products, ideas etc that your community can get behind, promote and help make better. Its about acknowledging their help and providing the tools and resources to help them help you. As Max Spevack, the former Community Manager for Fedora Linux once told me, “It’s about the power of persuasion and ‘thank you.’” Or as the motto of Obama’s field campaign states: “Respect. Empower. Include.” [Note: this paragraph is recycled from a previous entry]
Learn How to Community
If you want to learn more from the folks actually doing it you may want to check out The Community Leadership Seminar that is being held on July 18-19 in San Jose, CA. The event is the brainchild of Ubuntu Community manager Jono Bacon and is supported by O’Reilly events. As the website says
The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.
In true community fashion the majority of sessions will be an unconference format where the topics for discussion will be decided on the day and will be characterized by discussions as opposed to lectures.
And the cost — FREE. So if you’re heading out to OSCON, which runs from July 20 to 24th, you may want to come out a couple days early. Or you may just want to attend the event. Its got an amazing list of attendees already signed up.
Posted by Barton George 
