Last Day at Linux.conf.au

Those interested by the previous part of the story can read the previous article on LCA14.

Time goes quick ! It was already time to pack and prepare to fly back. But before, a full day of interesting sessions was ahead of me.

And the first one, the keynote, was particularly impressive. EVen if I must confess that space never really made me dream that much (sorry dale !), I was pretty impressed by the work done to send 15cm3 satellites, that Jonathan Oxer called ArduSat (in reference to the Arduino project), and the willingness to open source everything.

Jonathan explained how he worked with the NASA in order to be able to launch his stellites alongside a more “normal” one, in order to benefit from an existing launch. I think that his idea to make them accessible to schools so they can create their own usage of such “tool”. He also underlined that satellite are still considered as a weapon in the USA and thus it wasn’t possible for him to disclose all what he would have liked to do. He mentioned that he is working with Bdale Garbee on trying to relax this.

I then attended a session on “Building APIs Developers Love”. While the presentation gave good overall recommendations, I’d have expect a bit more concrete examples, mention of tools to help you doing so, and a bit more code examples.

After this, I was again more interested to follow closely what happens on the OpenStack side, so I followed the 3 sessions around that topic which were following.

The first was from Robert Collins, HP around Diskimage-builder. I was curious to see the commonalities with what I do around MondoRescue. But in fact the tool is really focussing on an OpenStack environment (as it should !) and they don’t need to manage physical setup, as they target virtual machines (IIUC). Also they really build the target image, not analyze an existing content to create an image from it, so the architecture i pretty different. For example when looking at their way to get the kernel needed, they use a qcow2 container in which they look for the kernel they want. On my side, I look in the local file system to do the same. So this shows that we could probably merge some techniques used, but it would take time and need some work. Maybe I can take that in account when refactoring mindi’s code, as I started to do with the new 3.0 version.
Anyway, again another tool to put on the TODO list and to look at.

Next one was about Log content analysis in the continuous integration process of OpenStack by Clark Boylan, HP. Clark explained the tools they used and integrated to support this activity (Gearman, Logstash, and ElasticSearch), and as usual in the open. In particular, he showed how to extract useful information from billions of lines of log in their CI process.

Finally, the last session was on Bare metal provisioning with OpenStack by Devananda van der Veen, HP, who is the PTL for this Ironic project. Again my interest is also in relationship with MondoRescue which does similar stuff. But yet again from a different angle: deploying OpenStack with OpenStack. The project is still new, but progressing rapidly. It aimed at replacing crowbar typically. I really like the way Devananda present as I feel much clever at the end of his presentation, as this is always very clear and easy to get ! He even finished earlier his talk (which was very convenient for me as I had to leave quickly to catch my plane !). He could hav used that time for a short demo (I like demos it help me understand better !)

As you can see, HP’s involvement in OpenStack is really strong and not only throwing money in the project (thing that we also do !) but bringing expertise, project lead, build resources, code to it.

LCA is really a great event, focussing on various Open Source and Linux communities. It’s also one of the oldest worldwide, and the locations are always very nice, and people are just awsome there ! That’s why I’ll continue to submit proposals and hopefully be able to attend again in the future if they are retained. However, while I think that LCA’s reputation is well deserved, I think the largest event today for our communities is FOSDEM in Europe, attracting more than two thousands people each year only over a week-end however, but maybe without the same involvement of the Linux Kernel community. I won’t be there this year due to a conflict with another HP event, but I also recommend you to attend as a lot happens there as well.

Reminder, all the photos I took during the event are available at https://plus.google.com/photos/+BrunoCornec/albums/5966194867275136465