Everett Toews

The goal of using a multi-cloud toolkit is avoiding cloud vendor lock-in. I examined why avoiding vendor lock-in is important in Keep the Cloud Honest. Toolkits such as Apache jclouds (Java), Apache libcloud (Python), Fog (Ruby), and pkgcloud (node.js) enable this by allowing you to write code that will work the same across multiple clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, and Rackspace.

Apache jclouds version 1.7.0 has been released into the wild. This is jclouds’ first minor point version release as an Apache top level project. Community development on the project is continuing to accelerate and there are some major additions I’d like to highlight.

Here’s how to deploy DevStack for OpenStack Havana including Neutron (Network) and Swift (Object Storage) on the Rackspace Cloud. You can use DevStack for testing/development of OpenStack or just learning a bit more about OpenStack and how all of the pieces fit together.

HackTX is the biggest hackathon in Texas. It’s a 24 hour annual hackathon hosted by the Hacker Lounge and Technology Entrepreneurship Society student organizations at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s made up of 500 hackers with $10,000 in prizes. By far, it’s the biggest hackathon that I’ve personally attended and I was pretty damn excited to represent Rackspace as a sponsor.

I spent the past week in Hong Kong at the OpenStack Summit. It was by far the furthest I’ve ever travelled for a Summit and by far the busiest I’ve ever been at a Summit. Here are some of the highlights.

The lower case j’s have been dotted and the t’s have been crossed. jclouds is an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Top Level Project (TLP)! With the closing of this issue and the resolution being set to “Fixed”, it’s officially and infrastructurally done. We’ve even dropped the “incubator” prefix/suffix from our DNS entries and various source code artifacts. You can now find us at our permanent home jclouds.apache.org. Huzzah!