Monthly Archives: September 2012

Two open source projects that I’m proud to be a part of have just had major releases within days of each other.

There’s OpenStack, which powers the Rackspace open cloud, with its eagerly anticipated Folsom release. This release sees the introduction of the Network Service (Quantum) and Block Storage Service (Cinder) among many other additions and improvements. For an overview of all of the components and projects it’s tough to beat Ken Pepple’s OpenStack Folsom Architecture post. I made it onto the contributor list this time around for fixing a minor bug and it’s an honor to be on that list with so many great developers. To get an idea of the scope of contributions to OpenStack just spend some time Looking at the Numbers.

Then there’s jclouds, the Java cross-cloud toolkit with its release of their 1.5 branch. I’ve made a fair number of contributions to this project by improving the support for OpenStack and Rackspace. During that time I’ve become part of their community and  have seen first hand the passion and commitment they have toward releasing a high quality toolkit. The jclouds user base is growing rapidly and it’s easy for me to see why.

To top it all off I get to present jclouds directly to the OpenStack community in a workshop titled Control the Clouds: Developer Experience with jclouds at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. The workshop is on Thursday, October 18 at 3:20 pm. We’re going to be writing some writing some Java code to fire up some servers. If you’re attending the Summit, please join us!

Coda

So is it a coincidence that OpenStack and jclouds had major releases with days of each other? Yes, definitely, absolutely it was. But for me it was more like serendipity. These two great projects have truly come into their own and these releases are well deserved milestones on the road ahead.

I’m attending the OpenStack Summit from Oct. 15-18 in San Diego. I’ve submitted a session titled Control the Clouds: Developer Experience with jclouds. Sessions are voted in so, if you’re inclined, please vote for my session. You’ll need to do a Find in Page for “jclouds” on the voting page. The deadline for voting is Sept. 13 and here’s a description of the session.

In this session, you will learn how to write code that can control any cloud with jclouds.

Developers tend towards cross-platform solutions. Many popular languages and toolkits can run on many operating systems and devices. HTML and the web browser are the prime example of this trend. The benefits are clear, it gives developers the most bang for their buck when it comes to learning new skills and reaching the widest audience.

The cloud has emerged as the next major platform. So where do developers turn for cross-cloud toolkits?

For Java, the answer is jclouds. jclouds is an open source cross-cloud toolkit that works with both public and private clouds, enabling hybrid cloud workloads. The list of supported clouds includes AWS, Azure, vCloud, HP Cloud, OpenStack, and the Rackspace Open Cloud. There is a great community behind this toolkit working together to provide a better experience for developers in the cloud. Their goal is to simplify the control of many different clouds while still giving you the freedom to use cloud-specific features. The result is a toolkit that allows developers to write better code, in a shorter period of time, that works with any cloud.

In this session, I will demonstrate these qualities of jclouds. If you’re so inclined, you’ll be able to follow along with the demostration and write your own code that works with any cloud (hotel wifi permitting

Prerequisites if you choose to follow along:
* JDK 1.6
* Cloud accounts such as:
trystack.org
hpcloud.com
rackspace.com/cloud/public/

If you’re going to be at the Summit as well and you’d like to meet up, just let me know in the comments!