A question was just posted to the OpenStack mailing list – and this is not the first time I have seen this request.

Can openstack conference video files be downloaded?

A while back I wrote a post about how you can download all the vBrownBag sessions from the past OpenStack summit.

Same thing applies here, with a slight syntax change.

You can use the same tool – youtube-dl (just the version has changed since that post – and therefore some of the syntax is different as well).

Download youtube-dl and make the file executable

curl https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2015.06.25/youtube-dl \
-o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

The videos are available on the OpenStack Youtube channel.

What you are looking for is all the videos that were uploaded from the Summit, that would mean between May 18th, 2015 and May 30th, 2015.

The command to do that would be

youtube-dl -ci -f best --dateafter 20150518 \
--datebefore 20150529 https://www.youtube.com/user/OpenStackFoundation/videos

The options I have used are:

-c - Force resume of partially downloaded files. By default, youtube-dl will resume downloads if possible.
-i  - Continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist.
-f best - Download the best quality video available.
--dateafter - Start after date
--datebefore – Up until date specified

Be advised.. This will take a while – and will use up a decent amount of disk space.

Happy downloading !!

I have been home for just over a week from my trip to Vancouver for the OpenStack Kilo Summit (or Liberty Design Summit – take your pick).

It was a whirlwind of week, jam packed with sessions, conversations, meetings, presentations and community events.



There were a number of insights that I took with me and I would like to share with you in this post, and also in some upcoming posts in the future.

1. OPs is a real thing

There was a dedicated OPs track at the summit. Before we go into what actually happened there – I would like to clarify what I mean as OPs and if this is any different to the perception of how it is defined by the OpenStack community.

For me an operator is primarily the person that has to actually maintain the cloud infrastructure. This could be a number of things:

• Create packages for installing OpenStack
• Actually installing OpenStack
• Making sure that OpenStack keeps up and running
• Monitors the infrastructure
• Upgrades the infrastructure

There are also end-users, and these are the people that actually use OpenStack:

• Provision instances
• Deploy applications on top of those instances
• Create tenants/users/projects

For the OpenStack Community – sometimes these two groups are one and the same, and in my honest opinion they definitely are not – and should not be treated as such. It is taking time, but I think that the community is starting to understand that there are two distinct groups here, which have very different sets of needs, and should be catered to quite differently

There was a significant amount of discussion of how Operators can get more involved, and honestly I must say that the situation has improved – drastically – in comparison to the situation 12 months ago.

There are a number of working groups, the Win The Enterprise WG, the Product WG, the Monitoring and Logging WG, all of these have been meeting over the last year to try and hash out ways of getting more involved.

One of the interesting discussions that came out as a result (well perhaps not directly but I assume that I had something to do with it) of me running for the OpenStack TC was how does the OpenStack Community want to acknowledge those people that are not committing code but are contributing back into the community. To get some more background – I refer you to these threads on the mailing list.

• Who is allowed to vote for TC candidates
• TC Candidacy

Something that kept on coming up again and again in sessions was that the Project groups are looking for more and more feedback from the people operating and deploying OpenStack, but the process of getting that feedback is broken/not working/problematic.

I do understand that the TC (and OpenStack) would like to protect the most valued resource that OpenStack has – and that of course is the people writing the code.

But there has to be an easier way of allowing people to submit the feedback – and perhaps there is…
A way for Operators/Users to submit feature requests.

2. Vendors are involved in OpenStack – and they are here to stay

They are not there for the good of their hearts. They are there because they want to make money, and a lot of it. That is one (but not the only) reason why they contribute to open source projects.

OpenStack is no different. Each and every one of the vendors involved (and I will not name companies – because the sheer size of the list is just too long) are there to increase their market share, their revenue, their influence.

And that is a difficult dance to master. They are the ones providing resources to commit code and there are times where the agenda behind that is not purely community driven. This post – sums it up pretty well.

As OpenStack has grown he says its turned into a corporate open source project, not a community-driven one. He spent a day walking around the show-floor at the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver and said he didn’t find anyone talking about the original mission of the project. "Everyone’s talking about who’s making money, who’s career is advancing, how much people get paid, how many workloads are in production," McKenty says. "The mission was to do things differently."

OpenStack is not a small community project any more – where everyone knows each other by name/face/IRC handle. It has grown up, come of age.

For better or for worse. Stay tuned for more.

As always please feel free to add your thoughts and comments below.

This is a re-post of my interview with Jason Baker of opensource.com

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are changing the way software developers create and deploy software. For many developers, Jenkins is the go-to tool for making CI/CD happen. But how easy is it to integrate Jenkins with your OpenStack cloud platform?

Meet Maish Saidel-Keesing. Maish is a platform architect for Cisco in Israel focused on making OpenStack serve as a platform upon which video services can be deployed. He works to integrate a number of complementary solutions with the default out-of-the-box OpenStack project and to adapt Cisco's projects to have a viable cloud deployment model.

At OpenStack Summit in Vancouver next week, Maish is giving a talk called: The Jenkins Plugin for OpenStack: Simple and Painless CI/CD. I caught up with Maish to learn a little more about his talk, continous integration, and where OpenStack is headed.

Interview

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect to learn from your talk?

The attendees will learn about the journey that we went through 6-12 months ago, when we looked at using OpenStack as our compute resource for the CI/CD pipeline for several of our products. I'll cover the challenges we faced, why other solutions were not suitable, and how we overcame these challenges with a Jenkins plugin that we developed for our purposes, which we are open sourcing to the community at the summit.

What affects has CI/CD had on the development of software in recent years?

I think that CI/CD has allowed software developers to provide a better product for their customers. In allowing them to continuously deploy and test their software, they can provide better code. In addition, it has brought the developers closer to the actual deployments in the field. In the past, there was a clear disconnect between the people writing the software and those who deployed and supported it at the customer.

How can a developer integrate OpenStack into their Jenkins workflow?

Using the plugin we developed it is very simple to integrate an OpenStack cloud as part of the resources that can be consumed in your Jenkins workflow. All the users will need is to provide a few parameters, such as endpoints, credentials, etc., and they will be able to start deploying to their OpenStack cloud.

How is the open source nature of this workflow an advantage for the organizations using it?

An open source project always has the benefit of having multiple people contributing and improving the code. It is always a good thing to have another view on a project with a fresh outlook. It improves the functionality, the quality and the overall experience for everyone.

Looking more broadly to the OpenStack Summit, what are you most excited about for Vancouver?

First and foremost, I look forward to networking with my peers. It is a vibrant and active community.

I would also like to see some tighter collaboration between the operators, the User Committee, the Technical Committee, and the projects themselves to understand what the needs are of those deploying and maintaining OpenStack in the field and to help them to achieve their goals.

One of the major themes I think we will see from this summit will be the spotlight on companies, organizations and others using the products. We'll see why they moved, and how OpenStack solves their problems. Scalability is no longer in question: scaling is a fact.

Where do you see OpenStack headed, in the Liberty release and beyond?

The community has undergone a big change in the last year, trying to define itself in a clearer way: what is OpenStack, and what it is not.

I hope that all involved continue to contribute, and that the projects focus more on features and problems that are fed to them from the field. It is fine line to define, and usually not a clear one, but something that OpenStack (and all those who consider themselves part of the OpenStack community) have to address and solve, together.

At all technology conference I always like to go on to Floor / Marketplace / Solutions Exchange – where vendors try to get your attention and market their product.

Going over the list of vendors from Summit site, the list below are some of the less know companies (at least to me) that caught my eye and I would like to go over during the summit and see what they have to say.

** The blurb I posted is something that I found on each of the respective sites, and does not necessarily provide a comprehensive overview of what each company offers **

Stackato
Stackato allows agile enterprises to develop and deploy software solutions faster than ever before and manage them more effectively. Stackato provides development teams with built-in languages, frameworks and services on one single cloud application platform, while providing enterprise-level security and world-class support.

Akanda
Akanda is the only open source network virtualization solution built by OpenStack operators for real OpenStack clouds. Akanda eliminates the need for complex SDN controllers, overlays and multiple plugins for cloud networking by providing a simple integrated networking stack (routing, firewall, load balancing) for connecting and securing multi-tenant OpenStack environments.

Appcito
Appcito Cloud Application Front-End™ (CAFE) is an easy-to-deploy, unified and cloud-native service that enables cloud application teams to innovate faster and improve user experiences with their applications.

Appformix
Operators and developers can use AppFormix’s versatile software to remove and prevent resource contention among applications from the infrastructure without being invasive to applications. The real-time, state driven control provided by AppFormix’s intuitive dashboard allows efficient management of all I/O resources. For deeper control and customization, access to API driven controls are also easily accessible. Plan infrastructure intelligently and remove the guess work involved in managing finite server resources to create fully optimized data center infrastructure.

Caringo
Caringo Swarm leverages simple and emergent behavior with decentralized coordination to handle any rate, flow or size of data. Swarm turns standard hardware into a reliable pool of resources that adapts to any workload or use case while offering a foundation for new data services.

Cleversafe
Cleversafe’s decentralized, shared-nothing storage architecture enables performance and capacity to scale independently, reaching petabyte levels and beyond.

GuardiCore
Covering all the traffic inside datacenters, GuardiCore offers the only solution combining real-time detection of threats based on deep analysis of actual traffic, real time understanding, mitigation and remediation.

OneConvergence
One Convergence Network Virtualization and Service Delivery (NVSD) Solution takes a policy driven approach and brings in the innovative concept of “Service Overlays” to go along with “Network Overlays” to virtualize networks and services. The solution innovates and extends SDN with Service Overlays for delivering L4 to L7 services with higher-level abstractions that are application friendly.

Quobyte
Quobyte turns your servers into a horizontal software-defined storage infrastructure. It is a complete storage product that can host any application out-of-the-box. Through fault-tolerance, flexible placement and integrated automation, Quobyte decouples configuration and operations from hardware.

Scality
The RING is a software-based storage that is built to scale to petabytes with performance, scaling and protection mechanisms appropriate for such scale. It enables your business to grow without limitations and extra overhead, works across 80% of your applications, and protects your data over 200% more efficiently at 50–70% lower cost.

Scalr
The Scalr Cloud Management Platform packages all the cloud best practices in an extensible piece of software, giving your engineers the head start they need to finally focus on creating customer value, not on solving cloud problems.

StorPool Storage
StorPool is storage software. It runs on standard hardware – servers, drives, network – and turns them into high-performance storage system. StorPool replaces traditional storage arrays, all-flash arrays or other inferior storage software (SDS 1.0 solutions).

Stratoscale
Stratoscale’s software transforms standard x86 servers into a hyper-converged infrastructure solution
combining high-performance storage with efficient cloud services, while supporting both
containers and virtualization on the same platform.

TransCirrus
Core, storage and compute nodes connecting via Extreme Networks

Tufin
Security Policy Orchestration for the World's Largest Enterprises.
Managing security policies on multi-vendor firewalls & cloud platforms.