Returning to the familiar ground of MIT with a brand new topic for BLU

After a really busy year in Red Hat’s Ceph Storage team, I finally had some time to catch my breath and prepare a properly technical talk for my favorite local audience: the Boston Linux and Unix user group hosted at MIT.

We had enough time to go over Ceph’s project philosophy and foundational thinking before digging into its architecture. We continued with a few choice points aiming to showcase what makes Ceph such a promising and technically interesting storage technology. And, as always, the questions came from all corners — as you will see in the recording!

My slides for the event can be downloaded here as a PDF: Ceph Architectural Overview — or you can browse inline below.

Till next time!

UPDATE:
The recording of the talk is now live on BLU’s YouTube channel.

Greetings from Guadalajara, Part II

Recording of the Live Stream from OpenStack GDL yesterday

The second part of my intro talk to Ceph for the Guadalajara Stackers was also a remote delivery, but instead of the OpenStack Liberty summit in Vancouver, my favorite international user group caught up with me at Red Hat’s engineering lead office in Westford.

My slides for the event are posted here: Software Defined Storage: What Makes Ceph Special.

Hasta la próxima!

Today we are pleased to add Ubuntu 14.04 ‘Trusty’ binaries to our previously released Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3. Based on the same upstream Ceph Hammer codebase, this new release includes all the features already shipping in our RHEL 7 release and underwent the same exacting QA process.

Just as important, we are also happy to announce that going forward, future releases of Red Hat Ceph Storage will resume shipping simultaneously on all our supported platforms.

Starting today, you may download Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 for Ubuntu following this link. Ubuntu-specific installation and upgrade documentation is also available.

Release Notes: RHCS 1.3 (RHEL 7 and Ubuntu 14.04)
Errata: RHBA-2015:1883

We’re Always Ready to Support You

We will continue to support RHCS 1.2, our previous long-term support release, until May 31, 2016 — exceeding our release-time committment to support...

We are taking off the covers on what is the first enterprise-grade release of the Ceph Hammer codebase today — Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3, my first Red Hat product.

The Ceph Engineering team and all the supporting R&D functions ranging from QA to Documentation performed like clockwork, allowing us to hit an ambitious schedule on the head and announce today at the Red Hat Summit with simultaneous immediate availability. Now, that’s how it is done!

What’s new?

Advancing to Hammer from the upstream Firefly release that has carried all Ceph production customers to date has a significant impact across the board. The change brings many improvements in many areas, too many of them and often too technical to detail, but in the aggregate moving the state of the art forward — just like upgrading the Linux kernel would. The aggregated end result is that the system as a whole performs better and...

Fellow Ximian monkey Geronimo Orozco invited me to speak to his local OpenStack user group, and I was very happy to oblige. The calendar made for an interesting Google Hangouts session from the first day of the OpenStack Liberty design summit in Vancouver.

Aside from a few connection glitches, the meeting went surprisingly well! Lots of great questions from the Guadalajara Stackers followed my introduction to Software-defined Storage and Ceph’s design.

My slides for the event are posted here: Ceph Intro and Architectural Overview.

Hasta la próxima!

The Dragon Propulsion Laboratory recently acquired an Applied Micro Mustang board thanks to a developer promotion Jon pointed me to, and the arrival of the holidays finally gave me a chance to take the device for a spin.

The Mustang, or more properly the X-Gene X-C1 evaluation kit, is APM’s evaluation board for the APM883208-X1 processor, an 8-core, 64-bit ARM processor that is one of the earliest incarnations of ARM’s v8 architecture, ARM’s silver bullet for the server market.

Hardware Setup

The board is a mini-ITX form factor platform meant to evaluate the processor, and is not a production device. My Lian Li test bench was not designed for this form factor, but it was nothing that a quick drill and tap action would not swiftly rectify. I developed a deep-seated allergy to boards sitting free on my desk during my days an embedded developer - the sanity and consistency that a...

The Ubuntu Cloud Zeitgeist: a year in retrospective

The new year is a perfect occasion to reflect on the road we just covered and how far we have come just in this past year.

We opened 2014 shipping the new Ubuntu Server 14.04 on April 17, our third LTS release designed for the cloud. Including five years of support for OpenStack Ice House, it was shown time and again to be the most popular OS platform for OpenStack. We did not stop there: alongside a major set of improvements we included Docker, arguably the hottest cloud infrastructure technology available today – and one where Ubuntu is six times as popular a platform as the runner up. Not satisfied with that milestone, the Server team saw a million Vagrant installs in under nine months. Key author and OpenStack Community leader Kevin Jackson remarked:

“Ubuntu has helped establish OpenStack as the leading open cloud platform

Download your personal cloud architect

Last week, we released the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack beta. Consistent with Ubuntu’s heritage of making hard things simple, we created an intuitive way to provision our best-practices reference architecture of OpenStack, straight from bare metal, and to do it in a shorter time than you will take for your lunch break today.

We designed an intelligent OpenStack installer that is part of Landscape, our Ubuntu systems management product. This is a fully automated reference OpenStack deployment capability, built right into our systems management platform. We created it using Juju, Canonical’s amazing service orchestration technology.

With just a few clicks, any user can build a cloud reflecting the best practices learned through years of work by Canonical Technical Services’ cloud consultants while engaged in designing and building...

Canonical is delighted to welcome CloudSigma as its newest Certified Public Cloud partner. CloudSigma now offers fully optimised and supported Ubuntu Server images, including the latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. CloudSigma will also offer enterprise grade management, monitoring and commercial support direct from Canonical.

As part of the partnership, Canonical has validated and optimised Ubuntu Server guest images for CloudSigma’s public cloud platform. Customers benefit from frequent image refreshing, ensuring new instances are secure from the start. A local mirror of the Ubuntu archive will deliver a lightning-fast experience for software installation and patching.

CloudSigma is widely regarded as one of the most innovative cloud service providers in Europe, and is now expanding to four locations in the US. With a truly flexible IaaS instance architecture, delivering broad choice to...

Launching applications and workloads in the cloud should be a seamless experience – this is the aim of our Certified Public Cloud programme. So we are very excited today to welcome Brightbox as the programme’s newest partner and our very first European cloud partner.

Brightbox is a great match for us, with their strong reputation for ease of use and a loyal following amongst developers and devops practitioners alike. Brightbox was the first cloud provider to implement auto-registration of new Ubuntu cloud images, meaning that new versions of Ubuntu are available within minutes of being officially released by Canonical.

Jeremy Jarvis, Co-founder at Brightbox comments: “We’re big fans of Ubuntu and have a lot in common with Canonical, not least our mutual focus on user experience. Becoming certified by Canonical assures customers that they will receive the best Ubuntu experience at...