S3QL is a file system that stores all its data online using storage services like Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. S3QL effectively provides a hard disk of dynamic, infinite capacity that can be accessed from any computer with internet access running Linux, FreeBSD or OS-X.

S3QL is a standard conforming, full featured UNIX file system that is conceptually indistinguishable from any local file system. Furthermore, S3QL has additional features like compression, encryption, data de-duplication, immutable trees and snapshotting which make it especially suitable for online backup and archival.

My goal in this guide is both to answer these questions, and, more importantly, provide an overall framework you can use to think about how to answer these questions.

Having gone through all the pain of polishing an OpenStack installation, I can see why it might seem like a better idea to grab a couple of beers in a local bar than spend additional hours fighting Nagios or Cacti. In the world of bare metal these tools seem to do the job—they warn about abnormal activities and provide insight into trend graphs.

With the advent of the cloud, however, proper monitoring has started getting out of hand for many IT teams. On top of the relatively predictable hardware, a complicated pile of software called “cloud middleware” has been dropped in our laps. Huge numbers of virtual resources (VMs, networks, storage) are coming and going at a rapid pace, causing unpredictable workload peaks.

Proper methods of dealing with this mess are in their infancy – and could even be worth launching a startup company around. This post is an attempt to shed some light on the various aspects of cloud monitoring, from the hardware to the user’s cloud ecosystem.

OpenDaylight is an open platform for network programmability to enable SDN and NFV for networks at any size and scale. The community’s second release “Helium” comes with a new user interface and a much simpler and customizable installation process thanks to the use of the Apache Karaf container.

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OpenDaylight software is a combination of components including a fully pluggable controller, interfaces, protocol plug-ins and applications. With this common platform both customers and vendors can innovate and collaborate in order to commercialize SDN- and NFV-based solutions.

Google not only reserves the right to take away or vaporize our data for any reason, but it also reserves the right to discontinue services, the means to access it, whenever it wants. It does this more often than you probably realize and most recently with Google Reader, which disappears on July 1.

lc-tools is a set of command line tools to control various clouds. It uses libcloud for cloud related stuff so should support as much cloud providers as libcloud does.

Dewpoint is a command line tool for interacting with cloud servers.

Usage: dewpoint [options] ...

Commands:

create-node Create a new node

destroy-node Destroy an existing node

find-node Find an existing node by name

list-nodes List all existing nodes

list-sizes List all valid server sizes

list-images List all available server images

help Return more detailed help on command

I was going to write something like this myself (for an experimental fully automated continuous deployment pipeline using only open-source tools) but this looks promising so maybe I won't have to.

Tahoe-LAFS is a Free and Open cloud storage system. It distributes your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to function correctly, including preservation of your privacy and security.

A one-page summary explains the unique properties of this system.

Deltacloud provides the API server and drivers necessary for connecting to cloud providers.

Deltacloud maintains long-term stability for scripts, tools and applications and backward compatibility across different versions.

Using single API Deltacloud enables management of resources in different clouds.

Start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on EC2 or RHEV-M.

A list of links to tutorials and documentation on how to install and deploy OpenStack.