jclouds 1.6.0 has been released! Since 1.5.0 I’m both proud and (antonymically) humbled to have become a committer. We’ve done a lot of work since then, including adding new features and an extensive refactoring aimed at simplifying the code base and removing cruft. I’m pleased to announce that full support for Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers and Cloud DNS has been added. That brings the list of supported APIs to:
- Cloud Servers
- Cloud Files
- Cloud Block Storage
- Cloud Load Balancers
- Cloud DNS
Here’s how to get started with Rackspace and jclouds 1.6.0. To get familiar with the new APIs check out the examples for Cloud Load Balancers and Cloud DNS.
Rackspace has literally doubled-down on jclouds by adding another contributor, Zack Shoylev, to the open source project. Zack is currently arm pits deep in adding support for Cloud Databases.
Denominate
With the addition of Cloud DNS to jclouds 1.6.0, it’s now possible for a Netflix OSS project known as Denominator to use Rackspace’s DNS service. Denominator is a portable Java library for manipulating DNS clouds. Denominator has pluggable back-ends, initially including AWS Route53, Neustar Ultra, DynECT, Rackspace Cloud DNS, and a mock for testing. Demoninator is led by Adrian Cole, the founder jclouds.
I confess I was pretty excited to get my first pull request accepted and become a contributor to Netflix OSS. It gave me the chance to learn how to use MockWebServer for unit testing and dip my toe into Gradle too. Right now it’s support for read-only so there’s still a lot TODO but one day (maybe) my code will be used when you go to watch something on Netflix.
The Apache Software Foundation
jclouds 1.6.0 marks the last release of “jclouds”. The next release will be as Apache jclouds!
With a huge thanks to Becca Wood, jclouds entered the Apache incubator with an impressive 15 binding votes and 9 non-binding votes. The fledgling incubator page can be found here. As you can see, there is a lot of work to do and such things take time. The first release of Apache jclouds won’t happen until we’ve left the incubator and become a top-level project. We expect the process to take 2-4 months but are cautiously optimistic we’ll be on the lower end of that range.
Coda
It’s going to be an interesting ride having front row seats to a project entering the ASF. There’s excitement and some trepidation as we learn how to work best within Apache and their processes. At the end of it, I think this will be a huge step forward for the jclouds community.