AMI-to-EMI: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

The ami2emi project has been moving along. As in, it actually works for a number of cases now. Configure cloud parameters for AWS and Euca, run a script, and boom: your chosen AMIs are brought to life on your Euca cloud. When it works, it Just Works. It’s cool. 🙂

Note that these cases do *not* yet cover configuration of the applications themselves — just the images.  The bits might still need to be twiddled to get the apps working properly, but all of the actual bits are successfully transferred into the new image, and the new image successfully spins up instances, and you can ssh to them and everything.

The AMIs that can currently be auto-slurped into Eucalyptus successfully share certain characteristics:

1. They carry their own kernels inside the image. On the AWS side, that means they’re linked against the stock pv-grub kernels, and we link them similarly to the kexec-loader kernels on the Euca side.

2. They’re instance-store images, rather than EBS-based images. At least so far.

You can find the list of currently tested images here. That list will expand rapidly as we have time to run more test cases.

Note the large number of Bitnami instances in this list. That must be because they’re Crazy Awesome.

So, give it a whirl. Patches exceptionally welcome, since it’s heinous bash scripting and I can use all the help I can get. At least I document my code, sorta. 🙂

Nurse Euca is here to help you.

“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.  –Marie Curie”

Automated installers are great. When they work, they work really well — but when they don’t, not only do they not work, but they bring great sadness to the hopeful user who trusted your automated installer.  Tragic!  Heartbreaking.

So why don’t automated installers work, when they don’t work?  In almost every case, it’s because there’s a condition your installer assumes that isn’t met.  And in this day and age, you don’t have just one installer for your software, you’ve got multiple potential install+config tools: multiple package managers, multiple configuration tools, multiple permutations of hardware, multiple permutations of hypervisor, multiple permutations of network topology.  Which means that you’d better do a *great* job of figuring out your environment before you try to lay down and configure your bits.

Enter Nurse Euca.  Nurse Euca will run before any install and take everyone’s temperature, offer an aspirin or a splint where needed — or will let you know if one of your requirements is Dead On Arrival.  (“I’m sorry, Doctor, but em1 appears to be in septic shock. I recommend against resuscitation.”)  (That’s totally gonna be an error message, btw.)

Awesome, right?  Well, it will be when we write it.  We’ve got bits and pieces of these kinds of checks in various places.  On Friday we will be having a hackfest to pull these threads together and get Nurse Euca jumpstarted.

Hey, here’s a mostly-empty Github repo!  By the end of Friday, it won’t be.

We’ll be on freenode, #eucalyptus-devel, at 7am Eastern US time.  Yes, it’s early; we’ve got some friends in the Old World who will be hugely helpful, so we’ve chosen the time to accommodate them.  See you then.

Today is the day.

Eucalyptus 3.1 is open for business.

No more artificial separation between Enterprise and Community.  No more frenzied checkins to the “enterprise edition” while the separate-but-equal “community version” atrophies.  No more working on new features behind closed doors for months on end.  No more wondering about what’s on the roadmap.  No more going weeks without any publicly visible check-ins.  No more.

Today is the day that we release Eucalyptus 3.1, and reassert our position as the world’s leading open source cloud software company.  With the emphasis on open source.  We’ve been working to get to this day for months, and now, the day has come.

For those who want to get started with the new bits immediately, the Faststart installer can be found here.  With two virt-capable laptops installed with Centos 6.2 minimal, you can have a private cloud running in 15 minutes if you follow the directions — and a few hours if you don’t.  🙂

Package repositories for the various distributions can be found here.

Source code is on Github. Here’s a look at all the recent commit activity.

Anyone who has questions can ask them here or here.

A list of all currently known bugs in 3.1 can be found here.

The list of features we’re currently scoping for 3.2 can be found here.

We have lots of other projects moving forward on Github as well.  Projects like Eutester for automated testing of Eucalyptus (and Amazon) instances, Recipes for automated deployments of Eucalytpus (and Amazon) instances, our nextgen installer Silvereye, and many others.

All of these projects are open to community participation and transparently managed.  We hold weekly meetings on IRC.  You can find the weekly meeting schedule here.  Minutes for all meetings for the past six months can be found here.

We’re also hiring.

“Build together. Run together. Manage together.”  That’s been the mantra for this release, and it speaks directly to the culture of our company.   If I learned anything at Red Hat, it’s that company culture matters.  It literally makes or breaks the company.  Especially in open source: either you’re an open source company, or you’re not.  We are deeply committed to the open source model, because we believe that it creates the best software, and we’re going to prove it.

The most exciting thing about today’s release, to me, is that we’re only getting started.  It’s been a long climb to get to this plateau. We’ve still got a lot of mountain yet to climb, though, and we’re looking forward to the challenge — but that can wait for another day. Maybe two.  Today is about appreciating where we’ve been, and enjoying the view.

Well done, Eucalyptians.  Well done.