Increasingly, IT departments are competing directly against outside cloud providers for their organizations’ business. How can they offer far greater value than a monthly subscription plan?
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How to Build an Open Source Community
Community is vital to an open source project. An active and supportive community is the heart of the project. However, having an open source licence is not enough to bring users and developers to your project and build a community. This document looks at what makes a successful open source community.
Read more at OpenSource.com
More Changes Afoot at KDE
It’s been a real hub of activity over there at the KDE camp this week. First, they announced the release of KDE 4.11.1 bug fix and stabilization update on September 3. Then, on September 4 Howard Chan blogged about the new refined KDE release structure. And, as if that wasn’t enough excitement for one week, Carl Symons announced the release of Plasma Active 4 today. All this makes one wonder what tomorrow will bring.
KDE 4.11.1 Released
Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE community manager, announced the September monthly updates to KDE 4.11. He said KDE 4.11.1 received over 70 bugfixes including “improvements to the Window Manager KWin, the file manager Dolphin, and others.” He also said users can expect the desktop to start up faster, Dolphin to scroll smoother, and overall less memory use. Poortvliet continued, “Improvements include the return of drag-and-drop from taskbar to pager, highlighting and color fixes in Kate and MANY little bugs squashed in the Kmahjongg game. There are many stability fixes and the usual additions of translations.” See his post or the official announcement for more.
Read more at Ostatic
Linux Kernel 3.11 Release Boosts Performance, Efficiency
Linus Torvalds released the 3.11 “Linux for workgroups” kernel on Monday with many new features and fixes that improve performance and lower power consumption. Changes are also in keeping with recent industry trends toward the energy-efficient ARM architecture and the use of solid state drives (SSD).
Zswap is a new feature that tackles “one of the biggest threats to performance,” according to LWN Editor Jon Corbet: swapping. Using the existing Frontswap API, Zswap takes pages, or chunks of RAM, that are being swapped out to a pre-configured space on the hard disk and compresses them into “a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool,” according to the zswap documentation. (See this Linux.com article on how Linux swap space works.)
“zswap basically trades CPU cycles for potentially reduced swap I/O. This trade-off can also result in a significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are faster than reads from a swap device.”
Potential benefits include improved performance for desktop and laptop users with limited RAM, hypervisor guests sharing the I/O subsystem, and those using SSDs as swap devices “by drastically reducing life-shortening writes,” according to the documentation.
AMD Radeon DPM Support
Building on the improved Radeon graphic card driver support in 3.10, the latest release adds experimental code for dynamic power management (DPM) support of AMD’s open source Linux driver. This new feature allows the GPU core and memory frequencies to scale up or down depending on the load.
“The AMD Catalyst driver has long supported dynamic power management under the marketing names of PowerPlay and the like, but only now is the support coming to the open-source Linux driver for the HD 2000 series of graphics processors and newer,” according to Phoronix.
Phoronix early testing found that DPM can boost GPU performance and lower power consumption and temperatures, depending on the GPU boot clock speeds. Because the code is experimental, it is off by default. To enable it “pass the radeon.dpm=1 module parameter,” according to the changelog.
Low Latency Network Polling
This relatively small patch to the networking subsystem will potentially improve performance for users such as high frequency trading systems that require ultra low latency, wrote LWN’s Corbet in May.
“Most interface drivers will disable the per-packet interrupt when the traffic level is high enough and, with cooperation from the core networking stack, occasionally poll the device for new packets,” Corbet says. But for low-latency users, “The time between a packet’s arrival and the next poll is just the sort of latency that they are trying to avoid.”
The problem is that notifying the system of new packet arrivals would generate thousands of interrupts per second and severely degrade performance, according to the 3.11 changelog. “This release allows applications to request a per-socket low latency poll interval.”
KVM/ Xen support for 64-bit ARM
Support for the KVM and Xen open source hypervisors comes in advance of the 64-bit ARM architecture’s release into the wild. Touted as an energy efficient architecture, ARM has been widely used in mobile devices and made early forays into the server space. But support for ARM64 presages the broader adoption of ARM in the enterprise, with a “flood” of 64-bit ARM-based parts expected in 2014, according to EE Times.
ARMv8 with 64-bit support “enable(s) new categories of applications for superphone and tablet computing, while bringing the ARM benefits of efficient design and low power consumption to applications where 64-bit computing is already established, such as servers and network infrastructure, promising to revolutionize the data center,” reads ARM’s description of the 64-bit architecture.
Linux kernel support for KVM and Xen on the new architecture is good news, then, for data center managers who want to take advantage of the latest ARM hardware and still use an open source virtualization platform.
“Xen has been around for the x86 architecture for over 10 years but as the ARM processor starts to cream into the data center the need for virtualization on this new architecture is becoming evident,” wrote Mark Hinkle in a blog post earlier this week. “As ARM gains ground not only as a mobile platform but that of the server it’s going to be important to have the same virtualization capabilities as we have on x86.”
This post only briefly touches on the many new features in Linux 3.11. For the full list visit kernelnewbies.org.
Enterprise Cloud “Tipping Point” Boosts Open Source Cloud Expectations
Between January 2012 and June 2013, cloud-based memory use increased by 100 percent, cloud storage increased by 90 percent, and enterprises increased their average monthly spending on cloud by 45 percent, according to a recent report. If “enterprise cloud has reached a tipping point,” as the report says, what does it mean for open source cloud projects?
Granted, Verizon’s 2013 State of the Enterprise Cloud Report only details the rapid growth of enterprise cloud adoption based on its own cloud services customers, but the report also sheds light on the changing expectations for cloud services. The report lists cloud characteristics in order of importance, with uptime and general availability of cloud services as the highest priority for cloud customers, followed by performance, specifically the speed of processing, storage, and network resources. The design and ease of use for the customer portal and application programming interfaces finishes out the list.
“With more critical applications residing in the cloud, uptime and availability are now essential,” the report explains. Additionally, security and compliance requirements are hot issues as enterprises move more business-critical applications and functions to the cloud.
And, of course, big data is a huge deal. “Customers repeatedly cite the need to prepare for an oncoming flood of big data, and they’re preparing by moving workloads to the cloud so they can store, access, and process massive amounts of data more easily and cost-effectively,” the report explains.
Open Cloud Implications
For open source cloud services this “tipping point” in enterprise cloud adoption means more customers and also more pressure to deliver the kind of results companies have increasingly come to expect from any enterprise cloud platform whether it’s open or propietary.
“It means that projects like CloudStack and OpenStack will get more developers contributing and more funding,” explains Emil Sayegh, CEO of Codero Hosting and one of the “fathers of OpenStack”. Prior to his role at Codero, Sayegh worked as the Vice President of Cloud Services at HP, and Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud Computing division at Rackspace. “More importantly, it means that valuable features will start to get added to ensure those projects meet real-life customer needs and real-life use cases,” Sayegh adds.
“For Eucalyptus, reaching this tipping point in cloud adoption translates to our users and customers running more demanding workloads and applications that their businesses depend on,” says Andy Knosp, Vice President of Product at Eucalyptus. “Therefore, we’re focused on providing a cloud platform that is resilient, performant, and scalable and can handle the demands of these applications.”
“Apache CloudStack continues to be installed and used in more and more environments around the globe, helping drive enterprise adoption,” says Chip Childers, Vice President of Apache CloudStack at the Apache Software Foundation. Childers expects to see a significant increase in the adoption of CloudStack as more enterprises move from experimentation to production with their private clouds.
Meeting Customer Demand
How will open source projects ramp up to meet the rapidly growing demand and high expectations for cloud services?
Sayegh stresses the importance of listening to customer feedback. “Too often open source projects focus on obscure features that few customers benefit from, or that are technically challenging,” he says. Most of IT spend is in enterprises, and most of the market remains untapped, according to Sayegh.
Knosp says that Eucalyptus’ strategy is to provide a private cloud platform that complements AWS (Amazon Web Services) and is compatible with many of AWS’s services and APIs. “This approach provides users with flexibility and choice as to where they choose to deploy applications — either in the public cloud or on a private cloud — based on the availability, performance, and security requirements of their applications,” Knosp says.
Apache CloudStack is already deployed in several large cloud service providers (CSPs), and those CSPs continue to help push the project to reach new levels of scalability, according to Childers. “With the largest deployment at around 40,000 physical hosts today, CloudStack is already easily able
to handle the majority of private cloud scaling requirements,” he says. Childers says that CloudStack has been architected to support workload styles that require per-VM availability, while at the same time allowing consumers to easily deploy cloud-native applications that have been designed to survive individual VM failures.
Ensuring Security
One concern with the open source cloud is security, especially as more enterprise services and data move to the cloud.
“Security is all about end-user policies when it comes to these cloud stacks and the security policies of a provider you are hosting with,” he says. Sayegh says that open source projects are more secure because more developers are looking at and contributing to the code.
“Leading public cloud service providers are working extremely hard to address perceptions and concerns regarding security by providing secure access to their services, VPNs, multi-factor authentication, and physical and industry-specific certifications,” Knosp explains. He says that Eucalyptus addresses security for private clouds by providing policy-based identity and access management controls, built-in firewalls, and encryption, and also provides a security response team.
“Apache CloudStack enables cloud operators to offer a number of security-related services to their consumers,” Childers says, adding, “This is especially true in the area of network isolation technologies, since Apache CloudStack supports orchestration of a range of network isolation models from traditional VLANs for small environments to multiple network virtualization products.”
Childers says that Apache CloudStack project developers are exceptionally conscious of the software’s role in securing access to resources under its management domain, so they have implemented a clear process for handling new vulnerability reports as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Sayegh says that if open source cloud projects stay true to their roots and listen to customer needs, the sky is the limit. “I believe they can have an impact of the same magnitude as Linux did.”