openstack

I have a long running blog that I struggle to keep current. The blog centers on mountain bike racing scene here in Northern California, so the content needs to stay timely as there are races every weekend all year long. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of free time to devote to it. Long story short, I wanted to automatically create a post every Thursday morning to let people know what races were being held that weekend. [Read More]

Over the past three weeks, new Nova core developer Josh Kearney (congrats @jk0) and I have been working on adding runtime configuration of instance types (read the full specification) to the OpenStack Nova compute service. Instance types (or “flavors” as Rackspace calls them) are resources granted to virtual machines (“instances”) in the Nova cloud. In more specific terms, this is the size of the instance (vCPUs, RAM, Storage, etc.) that you will be launching. [Read More]

Coming from the ruby/ruby on rails world, i’ve been a bit lost when it comes to the python development process used in the openstack project. One of the biggest hurdles has been the usage of virtualenv in the workflow. Basically, virtualenv lets you create a stable configuration of python libraries (eggs) much like freezing gems in your rails application. The pitfalls here is that you need to integrate it’s usage into your development flow (activate/deactivate environments), it can take some time to recreate environments if you use a lot of eggs (like nova does) and it seems pretty fragile (it lives in repo and takes some chicanery to avoid duplicating in each bzr branch). [Read More]