Page History

We are into deep work The community is busy working on 4.2.0 and need your help in making the grade. There's a lot of , and there's much to be done before the release is ready. This week, we're taking a look at some of the interesting discussions going on into in the the community about the next generation of Apache CloudStack, and functionality we can provide, as well as some procedural adjustments changes that everyone should be aware of.

...

To help get information out a little more timely to key discussions and information that is going on in the community we are going to move the publishing of the weekly news to Wednesdays, starting with this issue on July 10th! If you'd like to help put the news together, please sign up for the marketing@cloudstack.apache.org mailing list and ask how you can get involved!

Major Discussions

In this section we look at major discussions that have happened on the CloudStack mailing lists. This is by no means a full summary of all discussions on the lists, but we try to hit the highlights that are relevant to the larger CloudStack community.

4.2 Status Update

Animesh Chaturvedi the release manager for 4.2 and is tracking the current status of the release. Testing, bug fix work, and documentation should be targeted to complete by code freeze on 7/28. Release is still on schedule to release by 8/19.Link and quote to be added after Animesh's night should be out tonight

We are now just 3 weeks from ACS 4.2 code freeze on 7/29. We have around 400 open defects with 100+ blockers and critical and I expect another 200 new defects to come in. As a community we have been fixing roughly 100 defects per week, in order to clear up our backlog I request you to help out on aggressively fixing the issues. The unassigned issue list is available at http://s.apache.org/BlH/. When you fix a bug in 4.2 please make sure it is also fixed in master.

Given the debate on system template changes in last few days of 4.1 requiring big testing effort and potential regression, I would like to see that as community we lock down system templates for 4.2 pretty soon. If any changes are needed we should call it out now and get them resolved.

As for bugs here is a summary for this week:

Bugs	This Week				Last Week
	Blocker	Critical	Major	Total	Blocker	Critical	Major	Total
Incoming	8	10	28	50	11	34	24	72
Outgoing	26	23	34	86	26	30	40	100
Open Unassigned	7	49	129	222	6	49	119	184
Open Total	25	84	232	403	25	80	218	385

The status for features or improvement is depicted in table below

New Features / Improvements	Today	Last Week
Closed	10	10
Resolved	59	57
In Progress	11	13
Reopened	1	1
Ready To Review	1	1
Open	20	20
Total	102	102

Swift Support in 4.2

On July 3rd, Edison Su reported that support for Swift is broken due to the object store refactor. There's been a fair amount of discussion on how an extant feature could be broken without being exposed via testing, and what should be done about it at this stage.

...

Sudha Ponnaganti posted a list of 543 defects that are in resolved state that need to re-validated, reopened or closed. Please look through this list and check to see if your you're assigned to any of these defects.

All,

There are 543 defects in Resolved state and not closed. Please make sure that you validate and close the defect if you are satisfied with the fix. If there are issues with the fix, pl reopen the defect. Pl note that these need to be validated in 4.2 branch as all are fixed in 4.2 ( should be applicable for master as well). You can prioritize these based on the blocker, critical, major etc. As team is already done with the features, this is good time to close these...

...

As open source projects mature and add new participants, it's occasionally necessary to send a gentle reminder of accepted conventions in the community. For example, Alex Huang opened a discussion about the CloudStack coding conventions on July 2nd, saying "Our [coding
conventions|https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/Coding+ conventions] have been going all over the place recently. Please take a look."

...

Can the bug reporters please mention the
reason as to how something :

a) blocks movement on the feature/installation/cloudstack in general
b) affects deployment and does not have workarounds via the API
c) troubleshooting done with respect to a and b.

Here's some light reading on how to have bugs resolved faster: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html^{Image Removed}

Chip replied:

+1 with an added "d)":

d) needs to be considered a release blocker for a legal, security or
trademark reason

Progress on 4.1.1 Release

Name space

Dharmesh Kakadia one of our Google Summer of Code participants has started a discussion on changing the future namespace convention for Apache CloudStack. The current namespace has been in place since the original Cloud.com implementation. As Dharmesh states, this is a big change, please join the discussion on how we can make this a successful switchover.

Since the cloudstack project has moved to ASF, the suggestion is to move
from com.cloud packages to org.apache java packages.(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-212^{Image Removed})

As you might be realize, this is pretty big change. And merging this
changes with a continuously updating master is non-trivial. So, here is the
planned strategy after discussion over IRC. I am starting this thread to
inform and know everyone's opinions.

1. I will be pushing code with new packages on branch "namespacechanges"
and will notify on this thread as each refactored module is pushed.

2. There will be a freeze on master branch commits for some time in which
"namespacechanges" will be applied to master. I suggest the date to be 20th
July.

3. All the branch-owner updates their branch for reflect new packages. It
was suggested that branch owners can look into the "namespacechanges"
branch as it grows and start doing the package changes early, although it
depends on branch-owners.

In-Development Release Naming

While we are still hard at work at getting 4.2 out the ready and out to the world, John Burwell has proposed moving to release naming until a release has gotten to feature freeze and it can be judged on what the semantic version number change should be. There's been a lot of discussion on this topic. We would probably look to start this in the next release if it can come to a vote.

Since we have adopted Semantic Versioning 1, it seems odd that we designate a release version before the final set of enhancements/fixes has been identified. For example, the release proceeding 4.2 may contain no backwards compatible API changes to be 4.3. Conversely, we may decide during the development cycle, as a community, to accept a non-backwards compatible change which would bump the version to 5.0.0. As such, it is difficult to know in advance what the proper semantic version number will be at when the work is released. We run the risk of confusing our users if we start calling a pending release say 4.3.0, and accept a change mid-cycle that will bump it to 5.0.0. To address this potential issue, I proposed that we refer to releases by a codename until feature freeze when we understand the complete scope of change and can apply the correct semantic version number. I further propose we codename the release directly proceeding 4.2 "Gamma Rays" or "Gamma Rays Gonna Get Ya".

CloudStack Planet

What's going on in the CloudStack community? While all the discussion happens on the mailing lists, we also encourage members of the CloudStack community to share what they're working on their blogs. In this section, you'll find posts by Apache CloudStack community members and interesting news that's relevant to Apache CloudStack.

SolidFire announces Announces Early Release CloudStack Storage Plug-in

Utilizing the new storage architecture in the 4.2 release, SolidFire the leader in all-solid-state (SSD) storage devices announced the early release of their storage plug-in that will be available in the 4.2 release.

...

to

...

Read the Press Release

Midokura Announces Integration with ACS

Midokura has announced the integration of it's flagship network virtualization product MidoNet with Apache CloudStack. Chip Childers commented:

...

CloudStack

...

Read the Press release.

CloudStack European User Group Summary

...

Joe Brockmeier talks a bit about Gene Kim's keynote at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference, "Why Every Company Needs DevOps Now."

Hackathon Storage Group Puts Out Discussion and Proposal

John Burwell who led the storage discussion group during the CloudStack Collaboration Conference Hackathon put out the first group discussion on the future needs and a proposal on how to better define storage for future versions of CloudStack. Read the and participate in the discussion and weigh-in on the proposal.

Interview with The Cloudcast (.net)

...