On OpenStack again. Glance is the component in charge of hosting the images (and image snapshots) to be cloned for the ephemeral instances. Images usually are just some random big files so it makes perfect sense to use Swift for such an object (a File Object storage)!

As usual, some assumptions before we start:

• you're familiar with the general OpenStack architecture
• you have already some Glance image node configured and working as expected

This said …

Following my first post of the series discussing how to scale OpenStack Cinder to multiple nodes, with this I want to approach the configuration and usage of the multibackend feature landed in Cinder with the Grizzly release.

This feature allows you to configure a single volume node for use with more than a single backend driver. You can find all about the few configuration bits needed also in the OpenStack block storage documentation. That makes …

With this being the first of a short series, I'd like to publish some articles intendend to cover the required steps to configure Cinder (OpenStack block storage service) in a mid/large deployment scenario. The idea is to discuss at least three topics: how to scale the service by adding more volume nodes; how to ensure high-availablity for the API and Scheduler sub-services; leverage the multi-backend feature landed in Grizzly.

I'm starting with this post …

I know there are plenty of Emacs related blogs discussing every single trick (including the easter eggs) so this won't be another. I don't have the skills for that either but I got to know Emacs better recently and decided to share my (hopefully nicely) commented init.el file.

Why? Because it took me some time to find in the Emacs docs what I wanted. A readable, well commented config file would have helped so …

UPDATE (June 2013): this post has been published on the RDO site and is now maintained there.

Heat provides orchestration of composite cloud applications using the CloudFormation API and templates; it is an incubated project of OpenStack. Its development cycle is to be Integrated in Havana and follow the full OpenStack release process. I want to go trough the steps needed to install and configure it as the official documentation is still scarce on the …