Good to have you back :-) Cheers,
Hugo Sent from my iPhone On 21 aug. 2013, at 21:16, Darren Shepherd <[email protected]> wrote: > All, > > I want to introduce myself to the Apache CloudStack community. I've have > had a long love/hate relationship with CloudStack over the years, but > recently I've decided to fully dedicate myself to working on this platform > (again). > > Just a little about me, well okay, this might be a little long. I've been > a Linux user for a good amount of time. I've ran Linux as my primary OS > for over 15 years. Both personally and professionally, my desktops/laptops > have always ran Linux. As soon as I discovered Linux I also fell in love > with virtualization. I've ran the gamut in terms of virtualization > technologies. Type 1, Type 2, containers, etc. I have a particular > fondness for Xen though. I've been a Xen user since the 2.x days. > > Couple years after I got into Linux I discovered programming. After so > many failed "./configure && make" I figured I'd should probably learn C/C++ > to figure out why the heck nothing ever "make'd" right. I worked for > awhile running a lab for developers that were writing stuff in Java. Again > I learned Java to figure out why the heck their stuff kept failing to build > and run. After I learned Java I took the professional route of leaving the > sysadmin stuff and started programming distributed systems. > > As means to an end I developed a system that would take code builds, deploy > them to Xen thin provisioned VMs. So a developer could go to a portal, > click some stuff and get a clean VM that optionally had a code build on > it. We would then running automated integration tests against it. This > was around 2006. About a year or 2 later I discovered EC2 and was like > "holy crap, that's exactly what I want." Then I found eucalpytus and > realized there was a whole industry around this stuff. IaaS is basically > the trifecta for me. I get to combine my love of Linux, virtualization, > and programming distributed system. Basically since then I've been > absolutely obsessed with IaaS. > > Around 2010 I got a job at Go Daddy specifically to build their public > Cloud product. Before I even got there they had already decided to go with > vmops/cloud.com. I'm pretty sure they were already cloud.com when I > started. At Go Daddy with a core team of about 5 guys (1 UI guys, 2 java > guys, 2 sysengs) we built three generations of clouds. The first > generation of cloud was basically CloudStack 2.2++. It was CloudStack 2.2 > with a new UI, billing system, storage subsystem, and a tons of operational > tools. That was the initial public launch of our Cloud. > > The second generation was "CloudStack like." Basically we had a lot of > problems with CloudStack at the time. First, it was just a complete pain > to operationalize. Trying to hand off CloudStack to our ops and support > teams was practically impossible. Basically our level 1 and 2 support > would be very efficient at escalating all issues to level 3 (my team). > Typically the sysadmins would see something is stuck, they'd look at a log > (that made no sense to them at all), see a 100 line stack trace and then > they'd just toss the issue to the developers. Also, their was no > visibility to the general health of CloudStack. If you asked ops, "How's > production doing right now?" Their answer would be, "Well I can ping the > UI and the java processes are still running." In developer terms that is > kinda like saying, "Well it compiles so it must work fine." > > Secondly, we had a hard time extending the platform. We always seemed to > be a little ahead of the curve in how we wanted to implement the cloud. > How we wanted to run storage and networking didn't match at all what > CloudStack was at that time. So we embarked on improving it. It was just > way too difficult. Basically we felt like 70% of our dev time was just > fighting the framework. So we made the choice to abandon the platform. We > started rewriting the the entire platform. We did this piece meal over > time. We'd redo a subsystem, put that in production, and then move onto > the next subsystem. This ended up being very tricky because we had mixture > of CloudStack and our own stuff. We also always tried to do no downtime > deployments. So we would almost never lock people out of the UI and most > deployments were during business hours. We basically finished most of this > work around summer last year. I gave a talk at OSCON 2012 [1] regarding > what we built. A couple months later, solely based on business direction, > we decided to stop selling the public cloud (it really wasn't shutdown > until about May this year. I'm proud to say it ran for almost 8 months > with live customers, some quite large, with no incident and no dedicated > ops team). > > After we shutdown the public cloud, we turned our effort to building a > private cloud to run Go Daddy on top of it. This marked the third > generation of the cloud. At this point the IaaS system was 100% our code. > The problem was it inherited the CloudStack DB schema and with it a lot of > cruft in dealing with being compatible with CloudStack. So we started a > clean up of the code, which ended up being a huge refactor. Our goal was > to be able to support all of Go Daddy running on it. That meant we needed > a very flexible and extensible platform to support a very heterogeneous > environment. (We had a very scalable L3 network design that I've yet to > see any IaaS system be able to support too.) Additionally it needed to > plug into all other systems in Go Daddy for monitor, tracking, and network > management (IPAM, etc). This was by far my favorite cloud to build. > Really, really complex. The goal was to build a system that could deploy > over 1 million VMs in less than a day. (I think we did it too, > unfortunately I quit before I could fully prove it. We got the system to > the point of deploying 1000 real VMs in 1 minute. I just never had the > time to fully run the 1m test). > > So I've done a lot with cloud provisioning systems. I was given an > incredible opportunity at Go Daddy that most people don't get. I was > allowed to build an IaaS system from scratch and given millions and > millions in hardware to build and test it out and run real production work > loads on it. I very much liked my cloud I built. Unfortunately, despite > my best efforts, it was all proprietary. I've decided to abandon all the > proprietary stuff I've done and try to do my best to help out the open > source IaaS landscape. After looking at all the stacks out there, I > honestly believe CloudStack is the best one. I reached out to Citrix and > they have been so gracious as to employee me full time to work on > CloudStack. > > So expect to hear a lot from me. I'm initially very interested at > improving the core architecture of CloudStack. Just a couple random > things. 1) I'm here to code. Talking is great, collaboration and > information sharing is important, but I'm not here just to talk. I'm here > to actually get stuff done. 2) I've only ran production clouds. None of > this dev/test/poc "optimize for innovation" crap. I want a system I can > run in production. So stability, upgrades, making sysadmins happy, is very > important to me. 3) I'm very pragmatic and practical about how I > implement stuff. I always have the 2 year vision, but I'm very interested > in what I can deliver in the next 3-6 months. I enjoy delivering solutions > far more than coding. 4) I'm really bad at typing emails and make tons of > typos and forget important words like "not" or "no" all the time. > > I really look forward to gaining the trust and respect of this community > and, more importantly, improving CloudStack. I'm based out of Phoenix, AZ > area, if anybody happens to be in this fabulous part of the country hit me > up and we'll get together. > > Darren Shepherd > > [1] You can see my crappy slides for my OSCON talk at > http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/24035 . They were > really bad, basically I created them the night before. Did I mention I'm > good at procrastination too. Also that has the only known picture of me on > the internet.
