Another exciting episode of Upstream, piping hot from Red Hat Summit. Joe Brockmeier tracks down Colin Walters to discuss the newly launched Project Atomic. Walters talks about rpm-ostree, the atomic update model, Project Atomic, and re-thinking the update model for applications and the operating system.

To learn more about Project Atomic, visit projectatomic.io, and read Announcing Project Atomic: An Operating System Concept for Running Docker Containers

Follow the Project Atomic on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

If you’d like to keep up with the Upstream podcast, keep an eye on this blog, our @redhatopen Twitter feed, Facebook page, iTunes feed, and RSS Feed.

Upstream Archives

• Upstream: Episode 4. Interview with Shane Curcuru
• Upstream: Episode 3. Interview with Ohad Levy
• Upstream: Episode 2. Interview with Bradley Kuhn
• Upstream: Episode 1. Interview with Leslie Hawthorn

A year ago today – April 15, 2013 – we announced the RDO effort. We started the project in an effort to make it less painful to deploy an OpenStack cloud on CentOS, Fedora, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A lot has changed over the past year, but our mission remains the same.

We’ve grown from a handful of people to more than 2,000 people registered on the forum and wiki. We’ve also got a following on Twitter and Google+, and an active group of experts fielding questions on the ask.openstack.org Q&A website.

In that time, Red Hat participation in the OpenStack project has grown, too, with Red Hat being the top contributor to the OpenStack code in the Folsom, Grizzly, Havana and (so far) Icehouse releases.

In the coming year, we’re looking forward to Juno and whatever the K release ends up being called, and the innovation around cloud computing. We’re hoping for — and working toward — big strides in ease of deployment and configuration, better metering, and all sorts of other improvements. Want to get the latest on RDO? Follow us on Twitter @RDOCommunity. Come join us as we help create the future of cloud computing.

In our fourth episode, Joe Brockmeier talks to Shane Curcuru, Vice President of Brand Management for the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Joe tracked down Shane at ApacheCon North America 2014 in Denver to discuss brand management and trademarks. In this interview, Shane explains the importance of branding your project, and how Apache deals with trademarks differently than other open source projects do.

Visit the ASF Web site to learn more about Apache trademarks and projects.

If you’d like to keep up with the Upstream podcast, keep an eye on this blog, our Twitter feed, Facebook page, and RSS Feed.

Upstream Archives

• Upstream: Episode 3. Interview with Ohad Levy
• Upstream: Episode 2. Interview with Bradley Kuhn
• Upstream: Episode 1. Interview with Leslie Hawthorn

Since Red Hat started discussing Software Collections (SCLs), a lot of folks have expressed interest in building or using community-driven Software Collections for Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today, we’re happy to take the wraps off of SoftwareCollections.org – a project dedicated to helping the community create, maintain, and distribute SCLs. 

What’s SoftwareCollections.org?

As you already know, Software Collections make it possible to use different versions of system software like newer (or, perhaps, older!) versions of Python, Ruby, MySQL, and so on. You can already find quite a few SCLs for Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. But what if what you’re looking for (or looking to provide) isn’t one of those collections? That’s where SoftwareCollections.org fits in.

In this episode of Upstream, Rich Bowen interviews Ohad Levy of the Foreman project. Levy discusses using Foreman to deploy OpenStack, and more!

Currently, Levy is helping organize the OpenStack Israel event, which will be held June 2. The Call for Papers is now open. 

To learn how to deploy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform with Packstack and Foreman, attend Rob Locke and Forrest Taylor’s OpenStack Summit talk on May 13, 2014.

If you’d like to keep up with the Upstream podcast, keep an eye on this blog, our Twitter feed, Facebook page, and RSS Feed for the Upstream podcast. In the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you interviews with folks from our CentOS Dojos in Santa Clara and Denver, ApacheCon, and Red Hat Summit. 

Upstream Archives

• Upstream: Episode 2. Interview with Bradley Kuhn
• Upstream: Episode 1. Interview with Leslie Hawthorn

The community has been vital part of oVirt since its beginning. Recently, we started a new community metrics page, which gathers information on activity in the oVirt community.

The table below shows the total contributions for oVirt in March 2014 in terms of authors, commits, and mailing list particpants:

*oVirt Project Stats on 3/21/2014

March was a relatively busy month for the oVirt crew, what with getting oVirt 3.4 ready and all. We were happy to see a lot of new features in oVirt 3.4, with some contributed by developers outside Red Hat, including PPC64 support from IBM for both the oVirt engine and VDSM.

There is a perception out there that oVirt is a Red Hat-only project, but in reality there are many contributors and participants from the community who have contibuted code to oVirt: Intel, Dell, NetApp, and SUSE.

Admittedly, there is a ways to go. Community diversity is a priority for oVirt, because it’s not just enough that users experience this powerful datacenter management platform. We want as many people as possible involved to help make oVirt a better platform that will serve their needs and the broader user community.

To get involved with the oVirt community, visit: http://www.ovirt.org/Community

The OpenStack Summit 2014 takes place May 12-16 in Atlanta, Georgia and this year’s schedule is chock full of panels, workshops, and presentations by Red Hatters involved with OpenStack. . 

If you’re at OpenStack Summit, you can catch talks on plans for OpenStack Neutron, how to use OpenDaylight with OpenStack, how Heat will help simplify deployment and management of cloud workloads, using Packstack and Foreman to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and much more.

Last week, the oVirt Project delivered a new version of its open source virtualization management system, complete with a feature I’ve eagerly awaited for the past two years. The feature, called Hosted Engine, enables oVirt admins to host the system’s management server (aka the engine) on one of the virtualization hosts it manages.

While oVirt was designed to run across separate management and virtualization hosts, it’s been possible from early on (version 3.0) to hack up a machine to serve both roles. In subsequent releases, the project approved and refined this installation option into an easy-to-use All-in-One (AIO) installation plugin.

The problem with AIO is that it leaves you with one of your most important workloads (the oVirt engine) stuck running on a single piece of hardware, where it can’t easily be moved around – a very un-virt scenario. Hosted Engine gives those of us interested in getting oVirt rolling on a single server a new deployment option, and one that promises to scale out more nicely than possible with the AIO plugin.

In this post, I’m going to walk through the installation and first steps of a basic oVirt install using the Hosted Engine feature.

oVirt 3.4 is finally out on the virtual shelves, an achievement of many hours of work from a global team of developers who are continuing to improve a virtual datacenter platform that’s getting more attention all of the time.

If you could pick a theme around the efforts of the oVirt team, it would probably be lowering the barrier of entry. What can be done not only to make oVirt more useful, but also easier to install and implement?

The new hosted engine, for instance, enables the oVirt engine to be run as a virtual machine (VM) on the same host it manages. Hosted engine solves the classic chicken-and-the-egg problem you have when solving the basic challenge of deploying and running an oVirt engine inside a VM. This will streamline installation and make oVirt easier to deploy.

Work contributed from IBM and the El Dorado Research Center in Brazil gives oVirt 3.4 PPC64 support, making oVirt a true cross-architecture virtualization platform. At the same time, we’ve made efforts to continue integrating with other projects and solutions that users want, such as oVirt guest agents for openSUSE and Ubuntu.

Here’s the long-awaited second installment of the Upscale podcast. Long-awaited in no small part because it’s taken a little longer than it should to do the editing and put it online! But it’s well worth the wait, we promise. In this episode I talk to Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy(SFC).

Kuhn and I sat down for a few minutes at the 12th annual Southern California Linux Expo(SCALE 12x), and had quite a good conversation about what the SFC is doing these days, the push for a free software accounting system that can be used by non-profits, and much more.

If you’d like to keep up with the Upstream podcast, keep an eye on this blog, or our Twitter feed and Facebook page. In the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you interviews with folks from our CentOS Dojos in Santa Clara and Denver, ApacheCon, and Red Hat Summit.