CloudStack Collab Conference 2014

CloudStack State of the Code will present the current state of the code and architecture and the changes made in the last two years since CloudStack joined Apache foundation. It will also go over the things that remains to be done.

On request by internal users at Schuberg Philis I set out to add a feature to Cloudstack. It was a seemingly simple question; create the possibility to use the new nicira based networks, as used by client networks, to be used by VPC private gateways. This seemed simple enough but turned out to be a cross cutting problem. It turned out to be a tour across the corners of the code and of the community. Both the practices used or lacking and the code in merrit and drawbacks.
In this talk I will explain how I implemented my code and ported it to several releases before it became part of the main code distribution, and how it kept haunting me after finally committing it. In the course of telling this I will touch on process issues as the review process and mail-/netiquette.

Apache CloudStack does a number of things but does a few things very well: compute, storage and networking. While other services such as monitoring, auto scaling are available, they are either rudimentary or not flexible enough. One way to enhance CloudStack is to provide these services outside of CloudStack but use the same API services (including authentication). StackWatch is a prototype service that behaves similar to AWS CloudWatch using open source monitoring systems as its backend. It integrates with Apache CloudStack by re-using the API credentials in CloudStack and makes it possible to provide an autoscale service in conjunction with CloudStack.

Building a user friendly and technically capable web interface for CloudStack is not a small undertaking. In this presentation, David Grizzanti and Bill Jones will discuss the interesting challenges faced while building a modern web application that interfaces with the CloudStack API and presenting real time notifications to users via the CloudStack event bus. Topics covered include developing a fully featured Ruby client for the CloudStack API, building a real-time notification system for asynchronous jobs, and all the open source tools used throughout the development process.