The second OpenStack summit is under way. So far the discussions appear to be very detailed, and have lots of contributors. There was quite a bit of debate around IPv6; As of this writing the Austin release of nova does not currently provide IPv6 support, however the Bexar release should contain “dual stack” which will allow it to support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This is a major step moving forward because of the well known IPv4 shortage. The faster we can implement a solid IPv6 solution within OpenStack the better. All in all the summit is going well, and it seems we are going to be...

So I figured I would write this article as a response to some questions and feedback I received from my earlier post “CloudFiles curl example” which outline’s some example usage to interact with the CloudFiles public API as well as some example code. Ryan over at http://www.ryanuber.com/ brought up some interesting questions that I left out in my original post based off of the assumption that the reading audience was already familiar with CloudFiles. Here are two very important and relevant questions that he asked: “What kind of output do you get?” “What kinds of...

I wrote the following script to simplify accessing CloudFiles container’s by utilizing cURL. This example will show you how to list your containers as well as their contents, via the command line without having to login to your control panel. This can also be a useful example to provide you with a sample code base to implement within your own infrastructure. CloudFiles uses a a “ReST” API which allow’s you to interact with it in a variety of ways by using curl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. This particular script was written in bash so that I could utilize it from a shell, however the...

So here is an example python script that you can use to build new CloudServers and then deploy software on them. This particular example is pretty basic and only installs either a LAMP stack or just a simple installation of MySQL. Don’t let the limitations of this particular script fool you into thinking that is all libcloud or python can do because that is not the case. You can do something pretty basic like this one, extend the script to utilize threading which will allow you to deploy multiple instances at a time, or simply have more complex software installations. Before you run the script...

This article is a follow up to my original called “Coding for the Cloud” which focused on a broad range of topics and provided a high level overview of how to use the cloud by scaling your application in a linear fashion rather than relying on heavy duty hardware to power your servers. This article is going to focus on figuring out if your application is a good fit for the cloud or if it should remain on a dedicated hardware solution such as Co-location, Managed Dedicated Servers, or Unmanaged Dedicated Server. So.. Is your application a good fit for the cloud? Here are a few questions you...