OpenStack at the CephDays Paris

Save the date (September 18, 2014) and join us at the new edition of the Ceph Days in Paris. I will be talking about the new amazing stuff that happened during this (non-finished yet) Juno cycle. Actually I’ve never seen so many patch sets in one cycle :D. Things are doing well for Ceph in OpenStack! Deploying Ceph with Ansible will be part of the talk as well.

The full schedule is available, don’t forget to register to the event.

Hope to see you there!

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OpenStack: use ephemeral and persistent root storage for different hypervisors

Computes with Ceph image backend and computes with local image backend. At some point, you might want to build hypervisor and use their local storage for virtual machine root disks. Using local storage will help you maximasing your IOs and will reduce IO latentcies to the minimum (compare to network block storage). However you will lose handy features like the live-migration (block migration is still an option but slower). Data on the hypervisors will not have a good availability level too. If the compute node crashes the user will not be able to access his virtual machines for a certain amount of time. On another hand, you want to build hypervisors that where virtual machine root disks will live into Ceph. Then you will be able to seemlessly move virtual machine with the live-migration. Virtual machine disks will be highly available so if a compute node crashes you can quickly evacuate the virtual machine disk to another compute node. Ultimately, your goal is to dissociate them, fortunately for you OpenStack provides a mechanism based on host agregate that will help you achieve your objective. Thanks agregate filters you will be able to expose these hypervisors.

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Back from the Juno summit Ceph integration into OpenStack

Six months have passed since Hong Kong and it is always really exciting to see all the folks from the community gathered all-together in a (bit chilly) convention center. As far I saw from the submitted and accepted talks, Ceph continues its road to the top. There is still a huge growing interest about Ceph. On Tuesday May 13th, Josh and I led a (3 hours long) session to discuss the next steps of the integration of Ceph into OpenStack. To be honest, back when we were in Hong Kong, I believe that we were too optimistic about our roadmap. So this time we decided to be a little more realistic and took a more step-by-step approach rather than “let’s add everything we can”. However, this does not mean that the Icehouse cycle was limited in terms of features, not at all! Indeed the Icehouse cycle has seen some tremendous improvements. I don’t know if you remember my last year article right after the Icehouse summit, there was a feature that I wanted so much: RADOS as a backend for Swift. And yes, we made it, so if you want more details you’d better continue the reading :).

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Don't burn down your OpenStack cloud

t burn down your OpenStack cloud

Managing an OpenStack public cloud can be tough and building it properly is even harder. You can not predict the workload of your platform, customers do what they want (yes they pay for this!). So yes, cloud performance are often unpredictable! Recent studies showed that while running a long-standing benchmark on several cloud platforms, they experienced a performance drop-down of 40% (crazy isn’t it?). However, there are some simple facilities in OpenStack that allow you to have a better control of the resources that you offer to your customers/users. This is what I am going to briefly explore in this article.

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Back from Icehouse OpenStack summit: Ceph/OpenStack integration

The summit was exciting and full of good things and announcements. We had great Cinder sessions and an amazing Ceph/OpenStack integration session. I’ve led the Ceph/OpenStack integration session with Josh Durgin (Inktank). We had a good participation from the audience. I would like to specially thank Sage Weil, Haomai Wang, Edward Hope-Morley for their good inputs. The main purpose of this session was to gather ideas to improve the Ceph integration into Openstack. Eventually, we built a draft of the Icehouse’s roadmap. For those of you who were not attending the session and are curious to learn more about what’s going to happen in the next few months this article is for you!

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