Newbies guide to joining Cloud Ecosystem !!

Its been over a year i joined the cloud ride. I would be honest with reason to come up with this blog.

Folks walking in IRC channel asking questions which is more related to there OS than the cloud product.

It was like they just had a “joint” and in 30 minutes they want to have there Infrastructure as cloud service running (IaaS). I will not go in details as if it was his professor who forced him to do it in such short timeline or its his boss who wants him to look for FOSS alternatives to available proprietary products.  I have termed “Cloud Hippie”

This is why i am writing this blog, just don`t be one of the “Cloud Hippie” 🙂

                                   Before you jump on cloud
Points to ponder
1. building blocks of cloud
As far as i know these are the 3 main building block of IaaS
1.1 OS
Please spend sometime, in case you have never used any Linux Distribution and once your familiar with it move to next. In case you think WTF am talking about, yeah i have seen people wanting to deploy IaaS without basic Linux Admin skill set. 🙁
1.2 Virtualization
Try to read up on what Virtualization is? What is it all about.
Which one you want to use (Kvm/Xen). Basic concept behind it.
1.3 Networking
Its you who knows about your network architecture, number of interface cards you are using and all. How will i know about your routing and sub netting.
2. Knowing your IaaS
Market is full of alternatives Cloudstack/Eucalyptus/Openstack and others.
You have to understand what exactly you want to achieve, set your priorities in place.
2.1 Programming language its written.
It becomes easy to understand how things work if you go through the code.
2.2 Basic idea about each components.
Every IaaS has its own components. If your using Eucalyptus you will find
terms like NC/CC/Walrus & if using Openstack you will find
nova/glance/swift/keystone.  Go through the blog, basic install guide try to know some basics about the service you finally want to deploy.
3. What do you want finally?
So now once you have done your homework.
3.1 Hypervisor (Kvm/Xen)
You will be easily in position to decide what hypervisior you are going to use according to your internal needs.
3.2 Operating system (Ubuntu/Fedora/Redhat)
After reading through basic documentation you can easily decide which distribution it is more easy to deploy and maintain. Remember you also need to get regular security updates, bug fixes as well. 🙂
4. Getting Help
This is the crossroad. You tried everything still in pain/bleeding. It might be bug, your typo in config file or anything.
4.1 Forum
Most projects has a place where people discuss when they are stuck or even when they have something to share. Trust me in most cases many others would have stuck where you are currently.
4.2 Visit IRC
This is where the devs sit, don`t ask ASL there.  Trust me not everyone is paid to answer your questions unlike very few. So be polite and ask questions without demanding or cribbing 🙂
4.3 Go to the mailing list
 Join the mailing list of the project to know more whats happening inside.
5. Contribute
5.1 Report bugs, whats wrong/missing.
Every project needs people to find issues. Launchpad or other hosted platform has inbuilt bug reporting tool. 🙂
5.2 Write a blog explaining your install doc.
Please note any single achievement you have done is incredible, spreading it will help other newbie.
5.3 Help others at IRC/Mailing list.
This is your time to join the flock, help those who are stuck 🙂
5.4 Evangelism
Spread the word in your area, you might be only one with this expertise. It will be really cool to help and get more inside community. 🙂
In case i am still not able to make things clear follow big daddy`s guide ” How to ask question in smart way”

Event Report: Gnunify.in, Pune, India

Gnunify.in is one of the oldest FOSS event in India, this year it was scheduled on 10th and 11th Feb 2012 .

And yes this time i attended it as speaker after failing to qualify last year. 🙂

I spoke on Juju, Ubuntu Cloud Orchestration framework , presentation slides are available here

Few take away for me personally after attending the event :-

1. Moving out of the distro fanaticism.

2. Getting to know more about Mozilla and Wikipedia folks.

3. Socializing with Fedora folks.

4. Finally meeting Arky after 9 yrs. 😀

FOSS events are good way to meet old folks, chat/socialize and exchange ideas.

I met many old timers like mbuf, ramky, runa, karunakar, nager, shariq and greenmang0 , others apart from spending most of my time with Deependra the Eucalyptus magician.

Lastly big thanks to the volunteers and organizers, sponsors(Eucalyptus) for making this event a grand success.

Lastly thanks again to Deeprendra for getting me this shiny beer opener, i  badly needed this. 😀

 

Richard Stallman: Free Software, Freedom and Education

As per the schedule we were at IIT, Chennai to attend talk of Richard Stallman, founder Free Software Foundation and man behind the Gnu project. The title of the presentation was “Free Software, Freedom and Education”

 

 

The event had over 3000 participants mostly from various engineering colleges across the city and area nearby, apart from ilugc members and fsftn folks. People were in queue to enter inside the conference hall few hours in advance.

So this time he started with Facebook, and how dangerous it is to use/share information there and how federal agencies are using it to spy on you. Then he spoke about how new age programming has resulted into writing malicious javascript code which results in fetching many valuable data of the users. He urged not to use/post today`s conf photo there and make sure to use browser with disable javascript mode.

Then came the old propitiatory OS and the harmful effect of it and how society is getting affected from it.  He even mentioned about Android ported on/by different vendors on there hardware is not a free software. He also mentioned how close is kindle and like services. He was also very unhappy about SAS model, as your data is not secure.

After one and half hour of general philosophy about free software, proprietary, DRM he spoke about the need of Free Software in Education.

According to him if a education system is not imparting education on Free Software nothing is going in correct direction. I would agree to him on that. I just hope some day our Indian Government realizes and removes the mandatory teaching of non-free software with free software alternative. It will not only save lots of money but will also give more independence to a user to explore more.

We saw  St IGNUcius in the last part of the session. It was all about Emacs. It was different RMS which i had seen before, the lighter side of him and i liked it.

Lastly came Q/A session he answered more than 20 questions. Lastly yes i became FSF-India member finally. 😀

2011 passed, 2012 welcome!!

Been a while i wrote anything on my blog. So time to review what all i did/happened in 2011.

Firstly “happy new year 2012” to all my friends whom i did not call/sms/tweet blehh blehh , i was partying with my friends in jungle of Lonavala.

Mithesh Greenmang0 and friends at Lonavala !!

Okey lets begin :-

Moved to Chennai in feb 2011 and joined www.csscorp.com open source support team, thanks to @kiranmurari for giving me this opportunity. 🙂

I have completed almost 1 year here and to be honest second place after www.newsx.com where i have stayed for over an year. 😀

I been told a lot about Chennai, especially about people/food/weather but i am lucky 2 have awesome office folks and friends  i managed all of this and had no difficulty in adjusting with/to it. Autowallahs are morons all across India and  Chennai is no exception.

FOSS Confs :-

Thanks to KDE for sponsoring me during Desktop Summit, Berlin to present a talk It was great place to meet people whom i been chatting via IRC for many years. 🙂

I was also at Software Freedom Day celebration at Jaya FOSS club, Chennai. Thanks to the organizers for this wonderful event.

Travelling :-

As a amature photographer i did traveled across Chennai(TN) thanks to @suseendranrb @johnson81385 @eternaltyro  thyagoo for all the trips, many more are in pipeline for 2012 😀

After Desktop Summit in Aug 2011 i took a week off and traveled few places in europe like Athens/Rome/Madrid, I admit am lazy, still i have put some photos of my trip at http://www.atuljha.com/photos

Technology:-

Before coming to Chennai i was a simple Linux sysadmin and FOSS advocate. Things are better now, 😛 I have started coding and working around open source cloud computing platform like openstack and eucalyptus.

I was lucky to contribute few patches 2 Ubuntu openstack packages, any patch is a patch i been told. 😀 Most of my contribution are at lauchpad I am currently spending some time playing with juju and owncloud, i will be presenting some workshop on the same in coming months. 🙂

Reading:-

Well most of my friends would be surprised to hear that am reading fiction/short stories instead of only reading tech books. I am totally addicted to Khushwant Singh and finished 5 of his books so far, hoping to get few more next month via @flipkart

2012?

Well 2012 wishlist includes learning Python and Hadoop apart from travelling some awesome place like Ooty/Kundapura/Munnar/Cochin in India.

Looking forward to make 2012 another rocking year of my life!!

EOF

2 minutes guide to getting started with Launchpad/Bazaar via Lucid Ubuntu 10.04

I just added some contents from allready existing 5 minutes guide to make it 2 mins and work on Lucid. 🙂

Before i start you need to have 2 things allready done,
1. $ apt-get install bzr
2. A launchpad account.
3. Your public key submitted at launchpad.
It means create a key is you don`t have allready
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

you will see in /home//.ssh/rsa.pub created paste its content there.

4. bzr lp-login john.doe  <replace it with your username>

Adding your own info

$ bzr whoami "John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>"

You can check what identity is stored in Bazaar’s configuration:

$ bzr whoami
john.doe

Starting New project

bzr init-repo myproject
cd myproject
bzr init trunk
cd trunk

Adding Files

bzr add hello.txt

and then commit, which saves a snapshot of all versioned files:

bzr commit -m “Added first line of text”

Pushing your branch on Launchpad

Replace john doe with your username.

bzr push bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~john.doe/+junk/myproject
your done.
Pushing the changes in existing branch.
bzr push




Original post :- http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/mini-tutorial/


thanks @jelmet on #juju helping me.





	


	







	

		
Oneiric release party across India
	


	
	

		
So what i did is, asked for of my friends in Mumbai, Hydrabad and Delhi share there event related photos of Oneiric release party.


That is what i will be doing mentioning about them. 🙂


INMANTEC




 




 


Gaurav is assistant dean IT and a Open Source freak who is trying his best to turn his college into a FOSS friendly institute.   I was  there at a workshop and felt great. They have nice FOSS lab in place as well with students working on Ubuntu and web technology stuff. Recently they have applied for Loco team hope it will be approved soon. 🙂


 


 JMI-Lug


Jmi stands for Jamia milia islamia a university in Delhi. I met Sheel and the team in feb this year during workshop in there college. These guys are doing really great and am sure of getting upstream contribution from these folks.






VIT, Mumbai


Mehul my Fossy & Biker friend told me about them and i was introduced to Rigved and am happy to know about the event they had.Looking forward to meet the folks during my Mumbai trip sometime soon.


Oneiric Release Party was held in Mumbai on 19th October 2011 at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology (VIT).


The event was attended by students of VIT, an ex-student Rigved Rakshit and the Ubuntu Indian Loco contact Nitish Mistry. The event started around 1730 IST.


Rigved showed a demo of using a Ubuntu LiveCD. Then, he went on to show how to install Ubuntu in various (only-OS-on-the-system/dual-boot) configurations. Ubuntu 11.10 LiveCDs were handed out. Also, Rigved gave out two official Ubuntu 10.10 CDs and ISO images of Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, Ubuntu 10.04 Server and K/L/Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop.


You can find complete event details here


 




 




Telegu Loco, Hydrabad


Pavi mailed in the mailing list of mukt.in announcing the event. It was very short notice and i missed it. I would have to to visit hydrabad and meet my old friends.


 




I will populate this place if i get details of other Oneiric release party around. 😛