Friday, May 29, 2009

Bad journalism that's suprisingly related to my project

These guys could do at least 10 minutes of research before writing an article. The AWS APIs are already 'open source', you're allowed to write free-software tools that use them. They're out in the open, with no NDA or anything attached. Eucalyptus also exists, which is a pretty darn good reimplementation of EC2. The only real impediment to an 'open' (you meant free, right?) cloud is that you can't use ec2-tools with it unless you want to fight off a pack of female Amazon warrior-lawyers. I hear their punches can leave a mark.

I'm too lazy to send them an e-mail, and the Slashdot comments are already calling 'em out anyway.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

awstool.py

Since I can't use a Eucalyptus cluster without breaking the usage restrictions on the default ec2-tools apps, I'm writing a set of Python scripts to do the same job. The APIs that the tools use are well-documented and don't have onerous hand-tying usage restrictions.

So that should be 'fully functional' by next week. By fully functional I mean being able to bundle an AMI, upload it to a cloud, and manage it's instances without crashing or screwing up. I'm probably not going to bother supporting stuff that Eucalyptus doesn't support, since the main focus of this is Eucalyptus and not Amazon EC2.

I'll also include a command for saving cloud settings, i.e. "awstool savecloud --ec2-cert --cert --url rightscale" which then lets you do something like "awstool upload-image --cloud rightscale debian-lenny.ami".

Also, pkg-escience has agreed to host the Eucalyptus integration project, so you can follow along at:

git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-escience/awstool.git

Ignore the first commit's e-mail address of 'kmeisthax@Lappy-486'; I forgot to set some config somewhere before I did the initial push.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

I can't believe it did that

Please excuse the double-post. I added the tag "eucalyptus-integration" to my previous post in order to ensure that I could separate the feed going to Debian's GSOC planet, and the public project feed. "To-debian"/"to-debian-gsoc" is for posts that appear on the Planet, and "eucalyptus-integration" is for posts relating to the integration work itself, and -that- feed will be going on the public project page on socghop.appspot.com.

For example, this is one of those things that ONLY appear on Planet Debian/GSOC, since I just double-posted accidentally.

It appears that Planet assumes that any change in a post is a new post that needs to be pushed to the front of the site. I'll refrain from editing old posts, then.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Sound Check

Now that Arthur got my blog on the GSoC planet, I can finally post updates about Eucalyptus and Debian. Speaking of which, after installing Debian, that makes it, what, four OSs on my laptop now?

One thing that's really bugging me, is ec2-tools. To reiterate my point, the license says plain and simple you can only use it with Amazon EC2, yet Ubuntu's community documentation clearly recommends installing them and using them contrary to the license terms. I've heard the only reason why the ec2-tools software even has a license at all was at the behest of Canonical or something. Has anyone seen something that duplicates the ec2-tools functionality as a command line tool?

At any rate, I won't be updating this blog much until finals season ends and the GSoC project officially 'starts'. In completely off-topic thoughts, since when were the Jonas Brothers considered a high-trend Twitter topic? I thought little kids weren't allowed to have Twitter accounts.