Blog

Over time, networking in OpenStack has been evolving from a simple, barely usable model, to one that aims to support full customer isolation. To address different user needs, OpenStack comes with a handful of “network managers”. A network manager defines the network topology for a given OpenStack deployment. As  of the current stable “Essex” release [...]

In collaboration with Cisco’s OpenStack team and a number of other community members, we’ve started socializing a set of blueprints for an elastic load balancer API service – LBaaS. With LBaaS, the API for tenants is abstracted away from the actual API of underlying hardware or software load balancers, in consistent fashion.

Is the Nicira acquisition good for OpenStack? Definitely. But before I defend my assertion, let’s look at why this is good news. I’ll start with Microsoft (though the old-school tech guys who need to pay attention are at Cisco; more on that in a moment). Microsoft don’t get no respect in the infrastructure business — [...]

This week Boris Renski and I are visiting OSCON 2012 in Portland, OR. So far it’s been a lot of fun. One of the guys we met here was Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, who gave us an invitation to join their contest. The rules were very simple. You had to write an obfuscated program [...]

Today I am at the OpenStack day at OSCON… spending the day chatting with developers and OpenStack community stakeholders. Here are some real-time thoughts, directly from the trenches of the open source ecosystem… There appears to be many disagreements about code maturity of the OpenStack projects and the number of OpenStack production deployments. However, everybody [...]

Overview When using cloud storage, such as OpenStack Swift or Amazon S3, at some point you might face a situation when you have to upload relatively large files (i.e. a couple of gigabytes or more). For a number of reasons this brings in difficulties for both client and server. From client point of view, uploading [...]

One of my favorite business-technology-society-history books is The Machine that Changed the World, by a bunch of guys from MIT — Womack, Jones, et al. In it, they describe the technological and organizational breakthroughs behind what we now know as lean, that revolutionary, begin-with-the-end-in-mind approach that drives agile thinking and end-user centric design, engineering and [...]

If you’ve ever tried to explain what you do for a living for someone who’s not in tech, you’ve probably been challenged to make it relevant to their day-to-day life. Steve Jobs did a lot to ameliorate that. But even as we are accustomed to the rate of transformations made possible by the technology we [...]