Author: anke

Enhancing OpenStack Swift to support edge computing context

As the trend continues to move towards Serverless Computing, Edge Computing and Functions as a Service (FaaS), the need for a storage system that can adapt to these architectures grows ever bigger. In a scenario where smart cars have to make decisions on a whim, there is no chance for that car to ask a data center what to do in this scenario. These scenarios constitute a driver for new storage solutions in more distributed architectures. In our work, we have been considering a scenario in which there is a distributed storage solution which exposes different local endpoints to applications distributed over a mix of cloud and local resources; such applications can give the storage infrastructure and indicator of the nature of the data which can then be used to determine where it should be stored. For example, data could be considered to be either latency-sensitive (in which case the storage system should try to store it as locally as possible) or loss sensitive (in which case the storage system should ensure it is on reliable storage). Continue reading

How to Write a Cinder Driver

After too many hours of trial and error and searching for the right solution on how to properly write and integrate your own backend in cinder, here are all the steps and instructions necessary. So if you are looking for a guide on how to integrate your own cinder driver, look no further. Continue reading

On-storage computation for a serverless environment

The serverless architecture is getting a lot of attention and there is a lot of talk going on about it (forbes, gigaom, techbeacon). This new architecture is especially useful for developers since there is no need to worry about deployment or interactions between different servers. The developer only needs to worry about the code, a function. Functions are the way applications are written in this architecture, otherwise known as Function as a Service (FaaS).

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Software-release “powdernote – Notes. Simplified.”

Today the ICCLab introduces a new way on how to interact with your notes.

http://icclab.github.io/powdernote/

What is powdernote?

Powdernote is a note-taking, cloud-based application for the terminal.

Why powdernote?

Because we never leave the terminal, not even to read our notes or create new ones.

This tool is for busy engineers, developers, power users, devops, …

Our target is to have an un-cluttered, distraction-free application to solve the simple task of taking notes and having them available everywhere (storage is on the cloud)!

Main functions

  • Create, edit, delete, print, tag notes
  • Search content
  • Browse versions of notes
  • Export/import to/from powdernote files

How to set up a standalone Swift installation in a VM and test it

In this tutorial, we will be speaking about a “Swiftbox”. This is nothing more than our terminology for an Openstack installation that only needs and uses Swift and Keystone. The use and setup of this Swiftbox will be explained in this article.

The reason why someone might want a stripped-down OpenStack installation with only Swift and Keystone running, is that it allows easy testing of Swift services. A Swiftbox can be used to try understanding how object storage works. Also, having an independent object storage, is a good perk: it allows testing or running various different projects, with only one Swiftbox to be configured for everything.

A use case for this standalone Swift installation is to reproduce an isolated and potentially local environment to test applications that need or want to use Swift as their object storage backend. This can prove useful to experiment with the technology as well as to debug or exercise existing applications.

For the simplified nature of the Swift installation here described (everything runs inside a VM and not over a cluster of nodes!), this procedure should not be considered to run Swift for anything else than a stubby backend for a testing environment.

The main steps to set up a Swiftbox are:

  • Creating and configuring a VM (we will use Vagrant and run a Ubuntu Server 14.04 box)
  • Configuring Devstack
  • Configuring a Keystone endpoint for Swift
  • Testing Swift
  • Some troubleshooting

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Gabriel Ankeshian

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Gabriel is an assistant at ZHAW InIT Cloud Computing Lab who started as an intern in August 2014. He finished his high school education to become a developer. He now started studying in the field of computer science and works part time at the lab.

Gabriel is working on the Cloud Storage initiative with Vincenzo Pii.