Archipelago: officially open source

Hello everybody,

We are pleased to announce that today we are releasing our custom storage layer, Archipelago, as open source software under a 2-clause BSD license. Archipelago has been running in production for over half a year without problems, so after a substantial cleanup we decided to open it up to the public.

Archipelago is a new storage layer that decouples Volume and File operations/logic from the actual underlying storage technology, used to store data. It provides a unified way to provision, handle and present Volumes and Files independently of the storage backend. It also implements thin clones, snapshots, and deduplication, and has pluggable drivers for different backend storage technologies. It was primarily designed to solve problems that arise on large scale cloud environments. Archipelago is written in C.

Please check out the official documentation:

http://www.synnefo.org/docs/archipelago/latest 

You can try it out for yourself, following the instructions found here:

http://www.synnefo.org/docs/archipelago/latest/archipelago_deploy.html

You can also find the code here:
https://code.grnet.gr/git/archipelago

Debian packages can be found on our apt repository under unstable. Add the following to your sources to use them:

deb http://apt.dev.grnet.gr unstable/

deb-src http://apt.dev.grnet.gr unstable/

Finally, on the apt repository, we provide an Archipelago ExtStorage provider, for those that want to use Archipelago with Ganeti.

We hope Archipelago is going to prove useful to others as it did to us.

As always, for comments, questions, or bug reports feel free to contact us at:
synnefo@googlegroups.com

Enjoy,

the Synnefo team

Synnefo @ USENIX ;login: (Oct '13 issue)

Hello everybody,

The October issue of USENIX ;login: is out!

And it features an article we've written about Synnefo. Good news is that it is open for everybody, not only USENIX members. So, go ahead and check it out. It is entitled:

"Synnefo: A Complete Cloud Stack over Ganeti"


Enjoy,
Constantinos

Synnefo @ Ceph Day London

Hello everybody,

The schedule for Ceph Day London has just been announced!

What's more, we will be presenting Synnefo at the event showing how we manage to unify cloud storage (Files, Images, VM disks) using

Synnefo + Ganeti + Archipelago + RADOS in production.

We are also really excited to meet the guys from Inktank and other Ceph users, learn and exchange opinions.

So, if you are in London and the above sound exciting, please join us at the event.

See you in London.

A great GanetiCon 2013 has ended

Hello everybody,

as you already know, the first Ganeti conference, GanetiCon 2013, took place last week in Athens. We were extremely happy to be part of it, not only during the organizational procedure, but most importantly during the conference itself, participating in the various design discussions and user reports.

It was great meeting most people from the Ganeti team and other Ganeti users from Greece and abroad. We also had double the pleasure to meet in person happy users of Synnefo, too.

The conference went smoothly from beginning to end and everybody seems to have enjoyed the event. The venue, food and schedule were great, since everyone tried their best and that really showed.

All in all it was a wonderful 3-day event.

For all of you that couldn't make it, please take a look at the updated GanetiCon site for photos and presentation slides.

Let's hope we made a good start for Ganeti this year, and more GanetiCons are ahead the next years to come.

See you all at the next GanetiCon,
Constantinos


P.S.: a special thanks to the guys from Inktank and especially Patrick for sending us all the great Ceph swag, even though they couldn't make it to the event.

Switch from okeanos.io to demo.synnefo.org

Hello Synnefo users,

You may have noticed that lately, we have been trying to separate the Synnefo software from the IaaS service it powers, ~okeanos. The latest step towards this direction is the rename of our demo deployment of Synnefo. The demo has been called okeanos.io for a while now and has now changed to demo.synnefo.org. Also, to ease the transition, the okeanos.io URLs now point to the synnefo.org page.

What does this change mean to you? Well, mainly two things have changed:

1) The NAT gateway of your VMs has now changed from gate.okeanos.io to gate.demo.synnefo.org. This change affects the hostname you SSH to.
2) The authorization URL that grants API access has changed to https://accounts.demo.synnefo.org/identity/v2.0/. This is especially important for all the users that have been using kamaki. These users will need to do the following:

1) Get the correct authentication URL and token from your API access page.
2) Create (or edit) an entry to your .kamakirc like the following:

[cloud "demo"]
url = https://accounts.demo.synnefo.org/identity/v2.0/
token = myT0k3n==

3) Check if you can authenticate with your credentials:

kamaki user authenticate --cloud demo

For any problems or questions, you can consult our support page.

Synnefo Live CD Released

Hello everybody,

We have some exciting news for all of you that want to try out our latest Synnefo software: οur team has managed to bundle it into something as small as a USB stick. That's right, there is now a Debian-based, Live CD edition of Synnefo which can be deployed from your server or even your home computer!

The key features of this Live CD are:

1. It just works!
2. The ability to create and run Virtual Machines depending either on Debian Wheezy (included), one of our pre-configured images or one of your own.
3. Create private virtual networks and connect your Virtual Machines.
4. Test Archipelago, our new ultra-fast volume layer.
5. Use Pithos, our storage service based on the OpenStack Object Storage API.

Moreover, we have stayed true to the plug-and-play nature of Live CDs, meaning that you will be able to experience Synnefo straight from the Live CD, without installing it or doing any configurations to your machine.

So, grab a copy (1,3GB, .iso image) from the Synnefo page (or directly from here), boot it and experience all the latest features of Synnefo!

For those unfamiliar with the Live CD process, you can follow the instructions below:

1. Burn the image either to a DVD or USB medium. The image file is ready to be burnt in a DVD but, for those that want to write it in a USB stick, there are several ways, depending on your Operating System:

For Linux, you can use dd:

dd if=/path/to/Synnefo-LiveCD.iso of=/dev/sd* bs=4M && sync

where /path/to/ is probably your Downloads folder and /dev/sd* your unmounted USB device.

For Windows, you can use one of the programs in this list.

2. Plug your Live DVD or USB and change the boot sequence in BIOS/UEFI to primarily boot from DVD or USB.
3. Once the Live DVD or USB has booted, choose the "Default" option and in less than a minute, you will be greeted with a Firefox session that will give you a brief description of your live environment. From there on, you can freely experiment with Synnefo.

Caveats:

1. Only 64-bit CPUs that have virtual extensions are supported
2. Since this is a Live CD, the VMs' disk storage will also reside in RAM. This typically means that you can create only a small amount of VMs. VMs created with Archipelago however, are far less constricted by this.
3. The Debian image is Squeeze, so the latest Nvidia/AMD GPUs may not be supported.

Finally, note that the Live CD is still work in progress. If you find any bugs or want to leave some feedback, you can contact us at synnefo{at}googlegroups{dot}com.

Enjoy,
the Synnefo team

Synnefo @ CloudOpen Europe 2013

Hello everybody,

the schedule for LinuxCon/CloudOpen Europe 2013 has just been announced and we are more than pleased to be a part of it. Vangelis from our team will be giving a talk/demo about Synnefo on Tuesday.

So, join us at CloudOpen 2013, to learn more about Synnefo and see how it is used in large scale production environments.

See you all in Edinburgh,
Constantinos