Openstack on the Pangolin and beyond

It has been a while since I posted anything OpenStack related on my blog, so I just want to let people know what is happening with OpenStack on Ubuntu. A sort of development update if you will.

At UDS in October we had a session about the things we wanted to do for Openstack in Precise, the list of work items that we want to get through is found in the blueprint. Right now, in the archive we have again a weekly snapshot of Nova and Swift like in Oneiric, but we have also added a weekly snapshot of keystone, horizon, and quantum that is available as an apt installable package. Soon we will be adding Melange to that rotation since it is now packaged in Ubuntu as well. Please try them out and report any bugs in Launchpad.

On the Juju side, Adam has updated the charms for precise and have added a charm for keystone, I also believe he is close to finishing a charm for horizon as well. This will make installing OpenStack really easy since all the configuration is done for you in the charms.

Since Precise is an LTS release we care about the stability of the Openstack packages we are the middle of figuring out a way of doing on commit tests from the Openstack git repository. The way that this will probably work is that we will create packages from a commit that will happen, and the packages will get rebuild with a new snapshot and will use the charms to deploy Openstack on in the QA Lab. This will give us confidence that the packages and the charms are well tested before they are uploaded to the Ubuntu archive.

Looking back to Oneiric and the Diablo release, there were a lot of bugs that affected the stability and quality for production deployment. With that in mind we had a session at the OpenStack Developers summit about creating a stable release team. The team is responsible for accepting back ported patches from Essex into  Diablo, kind of like what the stable kernel tree maintainers do for the Linux kernel. The team is made up of people from both Fedora and Ubuntu, so it is nice to see some collaboration taking place. I do not have any statistics on how many patches were back ported from Essex to Diablo but I did review *alot* of patches. What that means for Ubuntu is that we have a stable diablo release for Oneiric that is available for testing in the proposed repository. To learn how to enable the proposed repository you can read the instructions on the Ubuntu Wiki.

With that I will be going on Christmas holidays near the end of the week, so I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays. I hope to have another development update soon.