Monday, March 14, 2016

OpenStack adventures part 3

Hi!

My Outreachy internship in OpenStack ended a week ago.

I wish the internship was longer. But for me mostly nothing has changed, I still continue contributing to OpenStack's Zaqar project like my internship still goes on and I still being paid for my work. Because, as I said earlier, the successful completion of internship is not my final destination, but just a step.

Monday, February 29, 2016

OpenStack adventures part 2

Hello

I'm doing good. My official internship task is done. =)

And in this post I'm going to describe how I made it.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Synchronize OpenStack code with Syncthing

Syncthing is free and open source cross-platform decentralized file synchronization program. It can be considered as open source alternative to btsync. And btsync in its turn is decentralized alternative to well known Dropbox.

It's very flexible program and it has many use cases. I use it on Windows 8.1, Android, Debian and Ubuntu machines to synchronize folders for more than half year and it seems pretty reliable. I even synchronize database passwords

As you may know, it is recommended to install and run DevStack on the virtual (or just dedicated) machine as it alters system configuration.
So I like to use Syncthing in my development process to synchronize the code I'm working on between my development machine and testing machines. For example, with Syncthing I'm able to modify the code on my development machine and, after automatic synchronization, quickly run this code on the virtual machine I created specifically for manual and automatic testing. The virtual machine may even reside on another physical machine, more powerful, for example, as long as it is accessible in the network (preferably local). The solution works nicely together with git: I'm able to perform git operations on development machine with configured Gerrit review system, and changes then are spreaded to testing machines.


After completing this guide you will know:

  1. Nice way to install Syncthing on Ubuntu (Installation part).
  2. How to synchronize OpenStack projects with Syncthing (Using Syncthing with OpenStack repositories part).
  3. Some tips (Useful tips part).

Monday, February 1, 2016

Zaqar: Writing stages for the storage layer pipelines

In my previous guide I promised that my next guide will be about using Syncthing file synchronization service in development process.

I lied. =)

Maybe next time.

Instead you can check out my new tutorial in the Zaqar official developer documentation on how to create external stages for the storage layer pipelines in Zaqar. The tutorial was originally intended to become a blog post, but I decided that it's not good to spread such information over the internet. Zaqar developer documentation is the right place for it.

I'm very unsure about if the topic sounds interesting for you. The words might be not even making sense to you, if you're not user or developer of Zaqar. But here it is:

Writing stages for the storage pipelines

Monday, January 18, 2016

OpenStack adventures part 1

Yes, right, adventures...

Oh, I should have written a post like this earlier.

Well, everything is alright and I'm enjoing my Outreachy internship with Zaqar project.

MRW I find a new bug (clickable):

 MRW when I find a new bug

Caution: GIF, 44 MB

Monday, January 4, 2016

Controlling DevStack with OpenStackClient (CLI), enabling Zaqar plugin

Introduction

In the previous post I described how to install and run DevStack and also how to access OpenStack Dashboard to control it.

In this post I will tell you how to use OpenStackClient which is actually command-line interface (CLI) to all OpenStack services and can be considered as an alternative to the OpenStack Dashboard (GUI). Also I will provide few important details on how it works.

CLI can do everything OpenStack Dashboard can and even more!
For example, CLI commands can be used in automation scripts. You are already familiar with one of them: stack.sh script uses OpenStack CLI commands to tune all OpenStack services it installs.

Also many of OpenStack services can be controlled by CLI only - they still don't have their respective panels in OpenStack Dashboard now.
One of these services is Zaqar aka Messaging and Notification service.
Let's enable this non-default service in DevStack and perform some actions on it by using CLI.