Euca hackfest achievement: unlocked!

Well, that was fun.  🙂

Some lessons learned from this week’s inaugural Eucalyptus hackfest:

1. Make sure we’ve got the right image prepped.  We could have sworn that we needed F17 for OpenShift Origin — turns out we needed F16.  We were halfway through our allotted time before we had a suitable F16 image.

2. Openshift Origin is *big*.  There are a *lot* of packages. There are the packages you need to install to get rake working, and then there are the packages that the rake script installs… and *then* there are the packages that rake *builds* (which is why it installs mock on your instance — we were wondering about that, and then we found out.)  My large image couldn’t keep up; Andy finally had some success with an x-large image.

3. I like cloud-init in F17 way better than I like it in F16, because it gives me better log files.

4. Two hours isn’t enough time to finish a hackfest, but it’s definitely enough time to get a good start, and to get excited on what you’re working on.  Next up: tackling configuration issues.

Thanks to all the folks who showed up.  Looking forward to next week’s hackfest, whatever that may be.

Next Euca hackfest: OpenShift integration

We’re going to be starting up our weekly IRC hackfests on #eucalyptus-devel next week.

There’s a lot of cool integration work of various kinds that we want to do with Eucalyptus, and it’s the kind of work that’s best done with many hands.  A lot of it is just “getting X to run on Eucalyptus,” and we want to fill in as many possible values of X as we can.  Thus, hackfests.

The goal is to have at least a couple of hours of non-interrupted hacking time every week, and we’re going to aim for end of week, either Thursday or Friday afternoon.  Figuring out timing is always an issue, so far now we’re just going to pick a time and see how it works out.  The first hackfest will be noon-2pm Pacific time on Thursday, August 2nd on #eucalyptus-devel.  This will overlap somewhat with the standing recipes meeting, but since we’ll likely be working on recipes much of the time, I think we can swing it.  We expect to have a few core people present at these hackfests every single week, but of course, the more the merrier.  It’s also perfectly fine for people to drop in and drop out as they may be available.

Our first target will be OpenShift Origin integration — so we’ll be all over the #openshift channel on freenode, and dragging as many of you as we can to #eucalyptus-devel in the process.  🙂

(update: what we’re working on is actually integration of “OpenShift Origin” — the bits that are used to make the OpenShift service, which is trademarked by Red Hat, etc., etc.  Must respect the brand. Post updated accordingly.)