FewBar.com – Make it good

One of the really cool things about using the cloud, and especially juju, is that it instantly enables things that often times take a lot of thought to even try out in traditional environments. While I was developing some little PHP apps “back in the day”, I knew eventually they’d need to go to more than one server, but testing them for that meant, well, finding and configuring multiple servers. Even with VMs, I had to go allocate one and configure it. Oops, I’m out of time, throw it on one server, pray, move to next task.

This left a very serious question in my mind.. “When the time comes, will my app actually scale?”
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A few weeks ago I gave a live demo during Canonical CEO Jane Silber’s keynote at the Essex OpenStack Conference, which was held in Boston October 4-7 (See my previous post for details of the conference and summit). The demo was meant to showcase our new favorite cloud technology at Canonical, juju. In order to do this, we deployed hadoop on top of our private OpenStack cloud (also deployed earlier in the week via juju and Ubuntu Orchestra) and fed it a “real” workload (a big giant chunk of data to sort) in less than 5 minutes.

I’ve had a few requests to explain how it works, so, here is a step by step on how to repeat said demo.

First, you need to setup juju to be able to talk to your cloud. The simplest way to do this is to sign up for an AWS account on Amazon, and get EC2 credentials (a secret key and a key ID is needed).

If you install juju in Ubuntu 11.10, or from the daily build PPA in any other release, you’ll get a skeleton environments.yaml just by running ‘juju’.

Once this is done, edit ~/.juju/environments.yaml to add your access-key: and secret-key:. Optionally, you can set them in AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY in the environment.

Now, you need the “magic” bit that turns juju status changes into commands for the “gource” source code visualization tool. Its available here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~clint-fewbar/juju/gource-output/view/head:/misc/status2gource.py

(wgettable here)

You’ll also need to install the ‘gource’ visualization tool. I only tried this on Ubuntu 11.10, but it is available on other releases as well.

Make sure your desired target environment is either the only one in .juju/environments.yaml, or set to be the default with ‘default: xxxx’ at the root of the file. You need ‘juju status’ to return something meaningful (after bootstrap) for status2gource.py to work.

Now, in its own terminal, run this, note that cof_orange_hex.png is part of the official Ubuntu logo packs, but I forget where I got that. You may omit that commandline argument if you like, and a generic “person” image will be used.

python -u status2gource.py | gource --highlight-dirs \
--file-idle-time 1000000 \
--log-format custom \
--default-user-image cof_orange_hex.png \
--user-friction 0.5 \
-

This will not show anything until juju bootstrap is done and ‘juju status’ shows the machine 0 running. If you already have services deployed, it should build the tree rapidly.

So next if you haven’t done it already

juju bootstrap

Once your instance starts up, you should see a gource window pop up and the first two bits, the bootstrap node and the machine 0 node, will be added.

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According to NASA, 70% of the earth is covered by clouds. Apparently, at least 70% of our computing needs can be covered by clouds as well. That seems to be the shared belief by the rather large crowd that gathered in Boston last week for the Essex edition of the OpenStack Design Summit and subsequent OpenStack Conference.

The amount of energy and corporate investment in OpenStack is staggering when one considers that it didn’t exist 2 years ago, and didn’t really do much more than spawn VM’s and store objects until this month with the Diablo release, which added some more capabilities, but from my point of view, mostly just refined those abilities and set the stage for the future.
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I took a little trip down to San Diego yesterday to see what these CloudCamp events are all about. There are so many, and they’re all over, I figure its a good chance to take a look at what might be the “Common man’s” view of the cloud. I spend so much time talking to people at a really deep level about what the cloud is, why we like it, why we hate it, etc. This “un-conference” was more about bringing a lot of that information, distilled for business owners and professionals who need to learn more about “this cloud thing”.
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If you came here between April 28 and about an hour ago, you got a “couldn’t connect to database” error. Oops! Seems my limited memory EC2 instance got a little overwhelmed by php processes and decided the db server, drizzled, should die to make more room for PHP. Ooops! Time to drop pm.max_children.

I don’t have any monitoring setup for the site, so I just now figured it out. Until I get proper monitoring, I’ve installed this fancy bit of duct-tape upstart magic:

start on stopping
task
script
env | mail -s "$JOB is stopping!" me@myemail.com
end script


What does this do? Well is emails me whenever upstart gives up respawning something, or I manually stop a service.

Its not monitoring. I need monitoring. But this is a nice little hack to prevent a regression while I figure that out.

Since we’re just about to 11.04 beta2, I figured its high time I start using Ubuntu Server for my personal blog.

What? Almost a year at Canonical and my blog wasn’t on Ubuntu server? Well, for over 5 years now, a personal friend has provided me with a free Xen virtual machine to run my blog on. I migrated it off of Debian then, which was sad for me, but back then I was so focused on working I didn’t have time or resources to be picky, so I said OK.

Fast forward to now, I’ve been working on Ubuntu Server and getting ribbed by my co-workers about that “crappy CentOS xen box” they’d see me logged into.

Well thats all over now. I decided to marry all the new tech I’ve been playing with lately into one glorious blog migration. Continue reading

I’ve begun a migration of fewbar.com to a new box.. more details to follow… the site may be a little weird for about 1 hour while DNS propagates.

Seems like eons ago (just under 6 months..) when I joined Canonical, and hopped on a plane headed for Brussels and UDS-Maverick.

What a whirlwind, attending sessions, meeting the real rock stars of the Ubuntu world, and getting to know my super distributed team.

One of the sessions was based on a blueprint for load balancing in the cloud. The idea was that rather than rely on amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, you could build your own solution that you could possibly even move around between UEC, EC2, or even Rackspace clouds.
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