snap

Just got back from Fudcon Blacksburg. As always, it was a great time. Arrived after driving down (10 hrs) Thursday evening and crashed quickly after checking into my accommodations (The Inn at Virginia Tech). Friday, the first day, was hackfests, I attended the Fedora Infrastructure meeting and held a few sessions around Aeolus where I talked with passer by's about the project, my Snap subproject and what people were looking for out of an open source IaaS cloud abstraction platform. Specifically at FUDCon I aimed to find out how people wanted to interface w/ the cloud on the Fedora desktop and how they wanted to use the Aeolus stack. We ended up modifying Snap a little to add some command line options and began
messing around w/ mycloud a c level cloud computing API I started throwing together to meet people's needs. Dinner that night was at a good indian place.

The second day was the barcamp sessions, I volunteered to do another session on Aeolus, which went well, there were plenty of newcomers interested in the projects and I was able to share what was in development and upcoming things on the platform. After lunch several of us from the ruby-sig met to hold the now traditional ruby-sig meeting at FUDCon (we held one in Toronto, one was held in Milan, and now this was the third at Blacksburg). We got alot done including:

• tested out the new Ruby 1.9.3 repository (messed around w/ getting Aeolus working on MRI 1.9.3)
• discussed updates to the new packaging guidelines, and updates to the the ruby stack
• looked into possibly using macros to assist w/ building gems for multiple ruby interpreters on Fedora (jeroen volunteered to start investigating thing one, this would be a feature coming furthur down the pipeline)
• discussed the rvm / bundler ecosystems, and again how to drive and market the Fedora philosophy of a single supported stack while delivering the ultimate development platform for the ruby-community
• looked into continuing building tools and applications which to enhance the Ruby experience on Fedora, I volunteered to build a isitfedoraruby website (akin to itisruby19.org) to demo and highlight fedora on ruby and to start reaching out to the cloud-sig and other Fedora communities to promote and highlight the product/platform.
• continuing to extend / expand / improve gem2rpm, polisher, and other gem/rpm interoperability tools

Next I attended the session on OpenStack, a popular build-your-own-cloud platform (one of the platforms supported by deltacloud) and learned a bit more about the internals and how it is constructed. Finally the lightning talks session was the last on Saturday, and a must for any FUDCon attendee. There were many pitches, including several for new fedora components including hosted instances of mock infra apps, a discussion on what motivates and how to drive open source contributions, a demonstration on how to inject code into running Python processes using "parasite" by lmacken, an overview of foss@rit by remmy dekaukusburg and the narcissus web visualizations by ralph bean. I ended up pitching mycloud and snap again as well as my own Nethack Encyclopedia project, inviting fellow explorers of the mazes of menace to bring the guide :-)

FUDPub was fun, as always a good time, featuring bowling and lots of tastey food and held at the Blacksburg student center this time around.

I'm writing this from my hotel room Sunday morning as I pack up and prepare for the 10hr drive hack. Overall a great time, have plenty to keep me busy going forward, and am looking forward to the next FUDCon!

Alot of great development on Snap! recently. Here are some updates (see the commit log for the full list):

- incorporated full test harness
- many documentation improvements / fixes
- many code cleanups / optimizations
- starting adding ability to migrate snapshots between OS's (for example Ubuntu to Fedora and vice-versa)
- pushed snap into Fedora! (simply install via 'yum install snap' on Fedora15+ and RHEL6, should be pushed into Debian / Ubuntu soon)

Stay tuned for more updates!

I had such a great time at the last FUDCon I attended, Toronto '09 that I decided to return for Blacksburg '12 this upcoming January 13th-15th in Blacksburg, Virgina. Some of you may recall, during the last FUDCon, I gave a presentation on deltacloud, the core component of Aeolus the Open Source Cloud Computing API.

Alot of great work has went into the project over the last couple of years, and I've decided to submit a few hackfest proposals around using some of the tooling in unique ways. With the first proposal, I aim to go over the various projects that exist under the Aeolus umbrella, and use them to build some simple tools to deploy and monitor cloud provider instances in interesting ways. With my second proposal, I intend to take my subproject Snap (the modular system snapshotter for Fedora/Ubuntu/Windows/etc) and expand it with more custom snapshot targets. I have a bunch in mind, but I'm more than eager to help anyone write a plugin to take a snapshot of their own custom software (these are very easy to write and integrate into the project).

In any case, the conference should be a really fun time as always, and I'm really looking forward to it! Hope to see you all there!

I've added Windows support to Snap, now making it possible to take snapshots of a Windows machine using the same simple tooling as with Linux. Thus it is now possible to move both Windows and Linux instances across disparate VM hypervisors and cloud providers. You may download the windows installer here

Snap not only permits moving an instance between any two generic hypervisors and/or cloud providers, but between any physical or virtual machines as well as well as taking and restoring generic system snapshots.

I've submitted Snap to Fedora and Ubuntu, package reviewers would be more than appreciated.

Stay tuned for more updates!

In the past when evaluating cloud providers, one had to to make a critical decision right up front, to select the provider that offers the features needed at a price that is agreeable to the end-user. If the provider changed their terms of service and/or pricing scheme, the sysadmin/developer was more or less stuck with their choice, unless they made the painful effort of manually migrating all software and data to another provider. Well not anymore.

I'm pleased to announce that with the assistance of Aeolus, Red Hat's Open Source Cloud API, and Snap! a system snapshotter and restoration utility (started as my Masters project in '07), it is now possible to migrate cloud instances of any type across cloud providers (currently supported distros are Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and CentOS with more and Windows support in development / coming soon).

For details, see the following step-by-step guide complete w/ screenshots of how to migrate instances between Amazon EC2 and Rackspace (this will work for migrating instances between any cloud providers supported by deltacloud, the core Aeolus component/api). Everything will be migrated from the source instance to destination on the fly (no instance downtime), from package repositories and installed software, to files modified outside the package management system, to services and their configurations, etc.

Stay tuned for more updates. To the cloud!