When the iPad came out I wasn’t convinced that I wanted/needed one but as the days progressed and my co-worker flashed his cool new toy around, I decided to buy a 64GB Wi-fi model. After nearly five months, I am not advocating it as a laptop replacement or the must have gadget for everyone but I am convinced it’s the connected traveler’s best friend. As someone who has traveled over 150,000 miles this year and taken over 100 flights the iPad has been my most valued travel possession.

If you travel a lot you know that pulling out your laptop is a hassle in the airport and the plane. Nothing’s more frustrating when the person in front of you reclines and you need to tilt your screen at an unreadable angle. However, the smaller form factor of the iPad allows you to still use the device, and effectively process email, edit documents, read books and watch movies. Ironically, when I am home I don’t use it as much, I mainly use it to read electronic books (it’s awesome since the backlit screen allows me to keep reading after my spouse turns out the lights).

A number of my friends are buying iPad’s and asking me for tips, so I thought I would pull this together for them, unfortunately I have been keeping notes for the last few months so their might be some updates I am not aware of.

Hardware

Here are the accessories I am using including my iPad model I use though I am sure there will be many more.

iPad Model: 64 GB Wi-Fi

I chose the 64 GB model because I like to bring along movies on long trips and wanted the extra storage space. Though if you don’t have  a lot of multimedia like songs and movies you can probably get away with a 16GB or 32GB model. I guess the 3G model would be fine too but more on the connectivity below. (Cost $699)

The Case: Griffin Elan Passport Folio

There are tons of iPad cases out there but one of my requirements was to have a pocket and ideally a business card holder in my iPad case. The Griffin Elan Passport though not made of the finest leather is still nice enough. It provides a couple of business card size slots and a pocket that’s just big enough to hold my airline boarding passes. The folio also has a nice closure to keep things from falling out.  On top of that you can leave the folio part of the way open and stand it up in landscape view to watch movies on the plane or in your hotel room (Cost $49.99). If you really want a bluetooth keyboard with your iPad so you can use it as a true laptop replacement than I would probably recommend looking at the AidaCase which I don’t own but have been looking at seriously. The case includes a silicon bluetooth keyboard and case combo turning the iPad into the same form factor as a notebook PC. ($99.99)

Connectivity: Verizon Mifi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot

I originally was going to wait for the iPad 3G to come out but that’s one more data bill to pay per month. I already had a USB modem through Verizon but that was only good for my laptop, the solution was to convert to a Verizon MiFi 2200 so I could use it with my laptop, iPhone and my laptop at will. I also highly recommend the clear snap-on case ($14.99) that you can buy for the Mifi with a carabiner to snap it onto you bag or belt loop. ($269.00 or $49.99 with two-year contract)

The Stand: Umbra Facile Easel

When I get back from my trips set my iPad on my desk I don’t want it falling over so rather than dropping a bundle on a special iPad stand, I found this cool Umbra Facile Easel that allows me to rest my iPad in either portrait or landscape mode without taking it out of my case. ($16.00)

The Stylus: Pogo Sketch

One of my problems using the iPad is that I have big fingers and sometimes tap the wrong key. However, by using a stylus I can hold the iPad in one hand and type or navigate menus with the greater precision using the stylus. That’s why I chose to use the Pogo Sketch capacitive stylus. Ideally I would like something that has more of a pen point but the stylus seems to work well enough. The stylus itself works well with the the iPad but the stylus itself is pretty lightweight and I would prefer something with a little more heft. Also, the clip on the Sketch is plastic and tends to break rather easily.  ($14.95) If you are a little more enterprising you might want to make your own, which is what I eventually did, see my do-it-yourself stylus howto using a lead holder and some capacitive foam.

iPad Apps for Travel and More

Here’s my list of applications that help me stay connected when I am on the road. You’ll see from the list that I have a number of applications I depend on. By virtue of having the maps application already iPad is very helpful when you are in a strange city, and just having a portable web access point is helpful.

While not necessarily an  application TripIt is an excellent tool for any travel. TripIt gives you the ability to track all your travel plans in an easy to use portal. The free service allows you to forward confirmation emails from your lodging, flight, car rental and other travel vendors and then consolidates them into a neatly organized travel calendar. You also can create a network of fellow travelers so you can arrange meetings or have a meal with a friend or colleague when in the same city.

Travel Tools

• Flight Aware – This application lets you track the status of a flight. (Free)
• FlightTrack Pro – I like Flight track Pro to interact with my TripIt account. it will give me not only the status of my flight but an interactive map that shows the status of my flights in the air. ($4.99)
• AroundMe – This is an iPhone application but it allows you to locate local stores, restaurants and the a coffee shop. (Free)
• Yelp for iPhone – There is no Yelp app for iPad but when you are in a strange city the Yelp application is a nice quick application to get a restaurant review.
• 1000 Ultimate Experiences – This Lonely Planet application has some nice pictures and some tips on places to go but isn’t a very useful guide for traveling, just mainly eye candy so probably not worth what I paid. ($3.99)
• TripDeck – Another free application from Mobiata (they make FlightTrackPro) that gives you a neatly organized list of your itinerary as listed on TripIt. Also this is a application is only designed for iPhone so you’ll need to  (Free)
• Accuweather – There isn’t a native weather application on the iPad like there is on the iPhone so you need to add one or search via the web. The Accuweather application for iPad is beautiful allows you to add multiple cities, you can look-up the 15 day forecast, weather maps and tons of other content from the Accuweather website.  (Free ad-supported version, paid ad-free version available for $.99.)
• CoPilot - One of the more useful features of the Ipad is the GPS, and the Maps application works pretty well but CoPilot is a step avoe and really a good value at the price, there are also many in app upgrades that can be made (E.g. maps of Canada) to extend its capabilities. Still at this price you can hardly go wrong.($4.99)
• TripIt for iPhone – No iPad optimized application but another application that pulls your TripIt information into a cleanly formatted (Free)

Utilities

• Dropbox – Dropbox is a file sharing service that allows you to share files and folders across computers and mobile devices. The easiest way I have found for sharing documents between your desktop and your iPad and other devices. I work on documents on my iPad all the time then save them to my Dropbox on the iPad. (Free, requires free Dropbox account)
• MiFi (iTunes Store link) – If you go the way of the Mi-Fi for providing connectivity to your iPad this app (iPhone native) gives you a reading of the battery life and network signal. (Free)
• LogMeIn Ignition – Probably the most expensive of any application you might by for your iPad but it does give you access to your PC. I find performance to be slow but if you need remote access it’s decent. ($29.99)

Readers

• Amazon Kindle for iPad – As a former Kindle user I really loved bringing a whole library along on a trip without taking up a ton of space, that experience has informed my use of the iPad as a book reader.  I haven’t tried Apple’s iBooks yet other than the included Winnie the Pooh book but it seems to be a decently simple to use application.
• Instapaper – One of my favorite bookmarking applications is Instapaper, you can bookmark a page and Instapaper will store it for later reading. I use this all the time on my laptop. However, it seems like I get the most time to catch up on the plane. So having it sync’d and catch up on articles on the plane. Also the app keeps getting better and better. (Free, Instapaper free account required)
• NetNewsWire – Newsgator’s popular news reader for Mac, now runs on iPad you can use NetNewsWire to read your Google Reader RSS feeds and sync them to Google when you are connected. ($9.99 but soon going to $14.99)
• Pulse News – Since being featured in Steve Jobs keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference Pulse has been a media favorite as a visual news reader which allows you to read either clean text or click-through to the original content. You can also sync with Google Reader and Instpaper. I am not sold on this one yet, I am a NetNewsWire guy but this definitely takes the cake for eye candy. ($3.99)
• Flipbook – Yet another eye-candy app which takes your social media feeds and turns them into a eMagazine, ideally this would function offline so you can read RSS and other content offline but that functionality is limited.

Productivity

Notice that I include the Pages and Numbers applications from the iWork suite, but don’t include the Keynote application. I simply don’t edit Keynote or PowerPoint applications on the iPad so I just don’t know. You should be able to view Powerpoint presentations in Goodreader.

• Pages – The Apple iWork equivalent of Word is the best word processor for iPad but if you are going between Word and iWork formatting is going to be a little off. ($9.99)
• Numbers – The Apple iWork equivalent to Excel works fine on the iPad, if you need to edit spreadsheets it’s a must have for editing spreadsheets offline. ($9.99)
• Goodreader – Goodreader is the swiss army knife of document readers, that does everything from read large PDFs and TXT files, Office documents, high-res images, even audio and video. (Free)
• Evernote – One of my favorite applications, Evernote is a note taking application that syncs to a hosted service. You can then access Evernote from your computer or mobile device. The client for the PC has a better formatting editor but overall Evernote does a good job on the iPad. (Free, requires Evernote subscription which is free for the first 2GB of storage)
• Alarm Clock Pro – I have a hard time figuring out all the alarm clocks in the various hotels that I stay but with this app, you can turn your iPad into an alarm clock easily and choose to play a sound or music when you wake. I leave my iPad in landscape mode to make the numbers very readable. ($.99)

Entertainment

It’s nice to have a diversion on the plan or in my hotel after a long day, these are some of my favorites.

• NetFlix – Probably one of my most used applications on the road. I like to stand up my iPad and watch an episode of 24 or a movie on demand while working on my laptop. (The application is free but you will need a Netflix account to view content)
• Plants Versus Zombies – I wasn’t keen on trying this game due to the goofy name but after reading a few reviews I caved in. The premise is that zombies are attacking your house and your defense is to plant organic defenses around your house to prevent them from eating your brains. It turns out that the game is really well done and you get a ton of game play with progressive levels and other challenges. ($9.99)
• Field Runners – Field Runners is a “tower defense” style game where you create mazes of weapons to waylay invading soldiers and prevent them from reaching your base. Though originally developed for the iPhone this game is awesome on the iPad with numerous improvements to take advantage of the iPad platform. Fieldrunners sports incredibly good graphics and many game boards.  This game will give you hours and hours of game play and their are multiple skill levels so you can ratchet up the difficulty as you get better at protecting your base. I think this is one of the most entertaining  ($7.99)
• Scrabble – Just like the Hasbro board game, Scrabble works on the iPad in single player (against the computer ) or multi-player mode(you can also play with your Facebook friends). There are very few deviations from the board game other than the “Best Word” feature which will suggest the best scoring word with the tiles in your rack (you have up to four times to use this helper per game). ($9.99)
• Conquist – What can I say I loved to play risk as a kid, I like this knock-off, the graphics are nice and the game play is a bit easy but good and the price is right. ($0.99)

I am sure there are plenty of other applications that are helpful to travelers and I will probably update this post as I discover them. Feel free to leave me a note on other applications you find helpful.

Related Articles

• Trying to make iPad run my Road Trip (news.cnet.com)
• Apple iPad (64GB) (cnet.com)
• iPad Hacked with Verizon Mifi Innards (tauw.com)
• Stylus recommendations? (blogs.adobe.com)
• Project Guttenberg Will Work on iPad (tuaw.com)
• Yelp for iPhone Updated! (yelp.com)
• Ten Stellar Apps that Will Blow You Away (wired.com)
• Why e-Readers are a Worthy Investment (washingtonpost.com)
• An In-Depth Look at How People Are Using the iPad (mashable.com)
• 10 Useful Apple iPad Tips and Tricks (mashable.com)

Technorati Tags: applications, iPad, MiFi, Travel, wifi

I like my iPad for traveling as it gives me easy access to read and reply to email. However, I don’t like to type on it the same way I would on a regular keyboard, I prefer to use a stylus to hunt and peck rather than my fingers. I also like to draw and take notes that way too. In addition, since the iPad is prone to smudging the stylus keeps the amount of fingerprints to a minimum.

I have been using the Pogo Sketch stylus by Ten One Design which works well but it’s rather small, and the plastic clip breaks very easily.  What I really want is a full-size writing instrument. So I have been trying to make my own stylus, and have come up with a couple of solutions.

I am of the firm belief that for the stylus to be responsive the tip needs to be made of conductive foam not conductive hard plastic/rubber like is used on some styli. In my experience the hard plastic/rubber doesn’t slide well on the iPad, and you need to press extra hard to type.  So here are some of the styli I made on my own.

Writing Instrument Modifications

First you need to understand that you need to be able to conduct a small electric current from your body to the capacitive touch screen on the iPad, an important consideration when choosing what kind of instrument you modify.

Pen Modification

Modified Pen Stylus next to Pogo and generic styli

If you have a favorite metal barreled pen you can remove the ink cartridge and spring and insert a piece of conductive foam through the tip. I used a cool pen (pictured at the bottom) with a metal tube. Look at the top of the pen and you can see it is black plastic. If you wanted to hold the stylus that way it wouldn’t work.

To modify the pen below I took about a 1/2 inch long piece of foam trimmed down to about a 1/4 in diameter and the pulled it through the empty pen tip.   This gave me a pretty small point but was pretty effective for drawing. If your pen has a very narrow opening for the point you can cut the end with a rotary tool and expand the opening. The advantages of this approach is that if you like a clip on your pen or want a familiar pen, you can choose the type of writing instrument you prefer. The downside is that if the hole is small it will probably cause the tip to be deformed. I actually got a sort of fan effect from mine but it works very well. You can always trim the tip with scissors or a finger nail clipper to get the shape you want.

Lead Holder

Alvin Pro-Matic Lead Holder Converted to a Stylus

This is my favorite approach to making a iPad stylus, it uses a 2mm lead holder (used for drafting) and some conductive foam. I used an Alvin Pro-Matic Lead Holder that I picked up at a craft supply store for $6.79 ($8.48 with a 20% off coupon). The key was that this model had a metal barrel and a four way vise grip point that could grab my conductive foam point. I then went to Radio Shack and bought an inexpensive IC (about $.80) that was packed in high-density conductive phone. I trimmed a small piece of foam and then put it in the jaws of the lead holder. With this approach I feel like you can really control the size and shape of the point since you don’t have to squish the foam to get it through another opening. Additionally, you can leave the lead in the pencil and remove the foam if you need an antiquated paper writing instrument. the only downside to this approach is that if you click the top of the lead holder the jaws open the foam can fall out.

Lead Holder Styli with Conductive Foam Tip

These DIY styli are both superior in weight and length to the other styli you can buy, plus they are both much cheaper.  I  like writing with both of them but ideally I would like to figure out how to attach a 3.5-mm stereo jack and string  to the stylus so I could affix it to my iPad’s headphone port. Maybe that’s the next project.

Stylus Friendly iPad Apps

Once you have the stylus you want you I recommend two of my favorite programs that are particularly suited to using a stylus.

• Autodesk’ SketchBook Pro – SketchBook Pro is similar to the Adobe suite of desktopproducts as it lets you draw on multiple layers using various types of brushes. There are also templates for the backgrounds that resemble notepaper and other documents.  If you like to sketch this is a pretty decent app. I hear that Brushes is pretty popular too, but haven’t use it.
• WritePad for iPad - This application is an excellent handwriting recognition application and allows you to author documents or emails using a stylus. I find I can write faster than I can type on the iPad and it allows me to hold the iPad in the crook of my arm while I write with the other, perfect when I am a plane or sitting in the airport.

Other DIY iPad Stylus Ideas

There are quite a few other DIY Stylus projects out there if you aren’t keen on my idea you can have a go at these.

• Static Sock and an Ink Pen – I had lousy results with this one, it could have been the sock I used but it was pretty laggy and performance was inconsistent
• Plastic pen, conductive foam and wire – I prefer using a metal barrel pen as I like the weight but this will work too.
• Sausage Stylus – This is just plain ridiculous, but funny
• Review: Ozaki iStroke M+L Stylus – I was tempted to give this a try but it’s a little on the expensive side, iLounge has a decent review

[Note: I guess I am not as clever as I though as I was adding this blog post I found Crabfu's DIY iPad Stylus video with the same idea to use a lead holder with capacitive foam though he has some different caveats like gluing the foam to a cotton swab stick to allow the lead holder to grip it, not sure if you really need that step.]

Technorati Tags: apple, DIY, iPad, lead holder, modifications, pen, Pogo Sketch, styli, stylus, Ten One Design, Touchscreen

There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be? I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.

Today Rackspace has thrown their hat in the ring with their new OpenStack initiative in collaboration with NASA — as in rocket scientists, smartest guys in the world. Unlike Amazon’s EC2 which preaches open APIs, Rackspace is working to develop an open source platform that compliments their hosted cloud offering. They also have a strong open source partner in NASA who has been working on their own cloud computing platform, NASA Nebula. NASA Nebula will now become the cornerstone for the OpenStack initiative.

The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. The project boasts both a compute and storage component. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers and is available as a developer’s preview with a release target of October. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Also available as a developer preview the OpenStack Storage project expects to release a production ready version in mid-September.

Adding the Rackspace hosting model to a strong open source project makes this approach to cloud computing especially interesting. Giving private cloud users a logical migration path to public cloud use. The question effect will this initiative have to truly drive open cloud computing standards.

OpenStack, A Foundation for Hybrid Clouds?

This initiative while founded on open source is not necessarily the cure for lock-in but it does go much farther than anyone else offering a fully accessible reference architecture available as open source. The closest comparison I see is Eucalyptus that is mimicks the Amazon EC2 cloud compute architecture (though not Amazon S3), though Amazon and Eucalyptus don’t seem to share a commonly agreed upon road map but rather a leader-follower relationship.

OpenStack’s formula is more coordinated and with a respectable user to champion it, NASA. The U.S space agency has one of the most compelling publicly documented private cloud computing stories.  NASA has gone so far as to package their solution in small footprint shipping containers to distribute among NASA research centers. These portable data centers are a model that many organizations looking to build private clouds are watching with interest.

I like that private clouds built on the OpenStack reference architecture should be fully compatible with Rackspace hosting services. Giving users the choice to run their own cloud or host or adopt a hybrid model. It’s not unlike open source adoption models were users download a free software version that has compatibility with a commercially supported version.  Plus this is not Rackspace’s only foray into open source distributed computing as they support the Apache-hosted Cassandra project, a highly scalable distributed database, and have been showing their support at numerous cloud and open source events.

The OpenStack Web Interface

The strong message accompanying the launch is one of open standards and prevention of cloud lock-in. Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace states this clearly that OpenStack wants to prevent vendor lock-in:

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies.”

This is not unlike VMware who echoed that sentiment with an announcement this spring to collaborate with Google AppEngine.  VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod stated that they too were committed to open standards and preventing login:

“Our shared vision is to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. The rich applications should be able to run in an enterprise’s private cloud, on Google’s AppEngine, or on other public clouds committed to similar openness.”

So with all this openness and commitment to open standards is the ability to move from cloud to cloud seamlessly just around the corner? This remains to be seen it but the initiatives all seem to be well-intentioned and moving in the right direction.

Does Open Source Prevent Cloud Lock-in?

I don’t know whether Rackspace’s OpenStack will truly prevent cloud lock-in but it does seem to be well-intentioned. Though I  believe the following things need to happen to insure cloud lock-in doesn’t become a rampant problem:

• Virtualization Portability – At a very simple level users need to be able to move from virtualization technologies including those hosted in the cloud need to be able to migrate seamlessly, that includes VMs running in VMware , Xen, HyperV and KVM. Then once in the cloud they need to be able to move across clouds both public and private unencumbered — Amazon, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and others. Adoption of a widespread virtualization standard like Open Virtualization Format (OVF) could help (OpenStack does seem to already support OVF, a good sign).
• Data Portability – Just as compute environments move so should data, but not only move but be accessible across network and cloud infrastructures with high fidelity.  Security of that data goes without saying but adds another layer of complexity.
• Cross Environment Tools – Finally, the tools to managing these environments need to manage both cloud and legacy architectures to insure that  the management of these new computing paradigms don’t make things even more complicated.

I hope OpenStack helps drive this vision. However to deliver on the true vision of true portability across cloud platforms other cloud providers and vendors other than Rackspace will have to participate.

Related Articles

• Rackspace’s Open Stack Makes Cloud Storage Personalized (fastcompany.com)
• NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility (zdnet.com)
• RackSpace’s OpenStack Targets Cloud Lock-in (pcworld.com)
• Rackspace Launches OpenStack – Open Source Cloud Computing Software (openstack.org)
• Robert Scoble: Rackspace ends cloud lock-in (scobleizer.com)
• OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem (readwriteweb.com)
• OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud Project Emerges (gigaom.com)
• OpenStack – an open source cloud platform (redmonk.com)
• Rackspace Launches OpenStack To Open Source The Cloud (laughingsquid.com)
• Rackspace, NASA launch OpenStack: Can it prevent cloud lock-in? (zdnet.com)
• Rackspace and The OpenStack Project (thetechscoop.net)
• NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer (go.theregister.com)
• Announcing Open Stack – Open Cloud Computing Standards (blog.zenoss.com)
• Opening the Rackspace Cloud (rackspacecloud.com)

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, data, lockin, NASA, nebula, Open Source, OpenStack Compute, OpenStack Storage, ovf, platform, portability, Rackspace, VMware

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management.

In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of maintaining server configurations started to really come to light for me.

The Challenges of Server Configuration

A large part of configuring infrastructure is repetitive and time consuming. Many sysadmins rely on their own scripts to help manage the process but it’s still a one-off for each administrator and their individual knowledge seldom if ever gets institutionalized throughout the entire organization.

Having a framework for maintaining configuration data is important. Configuration scripts are often authored as shell scripts or Perl or even Python but are seldom maintained or used beyond the original author. Some technologies use plugins that could be used to abstract configuration variables, users and systems then shared among users of the technology but plugins are often specific to a given technology and non-transferrable.

Despite the breadth of this problem there are relatively few solutions that can easily be consumed by medium-sized enterprises outside of large management suites available from the Big Four (HP, IBM, CA and BMC). The independent software vendors have all been consumed by bigger less focused organizations including Opsware (acquired by HP), Bladelogic (acquired by BMC) and Configuresoft (acquired by by VMware). In my opinion there is no real leader in this space.

In a conversation with Opscode CEO, Jesse Robbins, he shared his experience maintaining availability for web properties at Amazon.com. As a top ops guy and “master of disaster” at Amazon.com he had no access to these tools, they were simply sold in a way that was inconsistent with the way he evaluated and consumed products and services.  Opscode, a relatively new company develops the open source Chef project, which automates IT management via a client-server platform.

Opscode’s approach to server configuration challenges is to use recipes written in Ruby, the chef domain specific language(DSL). Then these cookbooks can be executed securely by the Chef client-server architecture and finally Chef is available as open source software to download, use and redistribute. In a nutshell Opscode met the following criteria is what interested me about their technology which is relatively easy to use, share configuration recipes and consume.

Chef, The Open Source Project

Chef is a systems integration framework released under the Apache License Version 2.0.  Chef, can manage servers by writing code in Ruby stored in configuration recipes called  cookbooks. Chef can integrate with existing infrastructure like LDAP via libraries using arbitrary Ruby code, either to extend Chef’s or to implement custom classes. Users can also configure applications that have dependencies on other parts of the infrastructure like databases and discern that information via the Chef server. However, I like Robbins’ description of Chef — sysadmin robot performing configuration tasks automatically and much more quickly than a single admin could ever hope to.

Though Chef was only released on January 15^th , 2009 it has gotten rapid adoption and gained a large number of contributors. According to the Opscode wiki there are 157 approved contributors to Opscode projects and well over 20 companies. Beyond that the #chef IRC channel is typically attended by over 100 users and Opscode staff, signs of a healthy, growing open source community.

Opscode, The Platform

The Opscode Platform is the commercial offering from Opscode Inc. It is a centrally managed data store hosted by Opscode into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, OS versions and more delivered as infrastructrue-as-a-service (IaaS). This data on the Opscode Platform can be accessed and becomes useful in the following ways:

• Search-based Automation: All the data collected by the Opscode platform is indexed and searchable. Users can dynamically query this data from within Chef recipes to configure services that require complex configuration.
• Role-based Access Control: The data index is has an access control system enabling administrators to centrally manage the level of infrastructure access.
• Portability: The data stored on the Opscode Platform serves as a virtual blueprint of a given infrastructure, making it much easier to create perfect clones of a production environment.

The Opscode Platform is in a free beta release for the next 60 days. After the trial period, participants can manage up to 20 nodes on the Platform for $50 per month and $5 per month for each additional node. Pricing and availability information is available on their website.

Opscode, The Company

Opscode was founded in 2008 by Jesse Robbins and Adam Jacob, both experienced web operations leaders. Since then they have recruited a top notch team including cloud and systems management expert John Willis, Adrian Cole leader of the jclouds project and Christopher Brown a Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Opscode today announced that they closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures (who also was an investor in BladLogic before it was acquired by BMC)  and includes a follow-on investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson(DFJ) whose other open source investments include SugarCRM and Fonality. DFJ led Opscode’s Series A round of funding of $2.5 million, bringing the total amount raised for the company to $13.5 million, a sizable amount of capital to bring this technology to market.

Opscode is also seeing good adoption of Chef, not only do they have a few thousand active users on their wiki plus chef is currently in production at numerous top websites, including 37Signals, Etsy, IGN Entertainment, Scribd, and Wikia. Not only are web jockeys using chef but other large infrastructure providers are contributing to the project. Engine Yard, Rackspace, RightScale and the Springsource division of VMware have signed on to contribute to the project. They are even being very public about it as seen in this endorsement:

“We are excited about the open source contributions the Springsource Division of VMware has made to Opscode Chef.” said Javier Soltero, CTO of Springsource Management Products at VMware. “Chef is an important tool for automating infrastructure management and we look forward to its continued growth and success.”

Making Sysadmins into Superheroes

Opscode Chef is a hugely powerful tool that can greatly amplify the knowledge an effectiveness of systems administrators by automating a significant number of their maintenance tasks, improving their productivity and allowing them to focus on higher value tasks. Not only does Chef provide a framework for building systems but repairing them, keeping availability high and time to resolution low. This gives IT professionals a lot of leverage in getting their tasks done, allowing them to solve a problem once and then automate the process going forward. In other words Chef can turn systems administrators into super heroes by vastly improving their productivity and overall quality fo service.

The need that Opscode addresses can be filled to some degree through other software. Cfengine, Puppet and bcfg2 are all open source software solutions that address server configuration needs and have been around for some time. As mentioned above there is also large management suites that handle the same problems though they are expensive and have their own limitations. What is unique about Opscode approach is that they offer a robust, fully featured software platform as open source and a commercial offering that has full compatibility with the open source project.

This is somewhat unique as many commercial open source projects have a specific feature set that are only available to their enterprise customers. In a conversation with Opscode VP of Service, John M. Willis we discussed those users who are not interested in the Opscode platform but still want commercial support. He said that Opscode is building a select high-quality partner network that can handle these requests. Most recently Opscode has announced a partnership with DTO Solutions who employ members of the Control Tier project and is a big proponent of the DevOps approach to infrastructure management. Other partners will soon be onboard as well.

I am very much a fan of Opscode and there approach though my description probably doesn’t do it justice. Theoretically, a systems administrator who successfully implements automation tools such as Opscode can improve not only their productivity but the uptime of servers by improving speed to resolution for outages.  Opscode has a great opportunity thanks to a talented team, a novel go-to-market plan and a real need for these types of tools among IT professionals.

Related Articles

• The Origins of Amazon’s Cloud Computing (GigaOm.com)
• Chef Wiki (opscode.com)
• Understanding cloud and devops–part 1 (news.cnet.com)
• 3 Companies That Tackle Complexity in the Cloud (readwriteweb.com)
• Opscode Unveils Funding, Hosted Platform (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Opscode Gets $11M to Take on IBM and HP Management Software (gigaom.com)

Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Chef, Configuration Management, Iaas, Open Source, Opscode, PaaS, Puppet, Systems Management

I saw this presentation linked from my new co-worker  Josh’s blog, it’s Simon Sinek’s TED talk on How Great Leaders Inspire Action. He uses Apple as an example of a success and Tivo as an example of a failure. Sinek asserts that leading companies lead because of the why they do what they do not the what or the how. His golden circle theory says that most companies start by talking about the what they do, followed by how they do it and then talk about the why. Great companies and leaders flip that using the example of Apple’s why, “Think Different” and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” not “I have a plan”.

I have always believed that the why is most important part and have been recently struck by Tony Hseih’s, CEO of Zappos, assertion that delivering happiness (the why of Zappos) was the catalyst for their success and their eventual $1.2 billion dollar acquisition by Amazon. It’s what separated them from the thousands of other online retailers.

I really like Sinek’s talk and have listened to it many times over the last week.  It also reaffirms what I believe about open source– the reason open source software development works is because people believe in the way that it’s developed. Agree or not I think the talk is very good and worth the listen.

I wrote this post for the Zenoss community blog today, on cloud lock-in today. Rather than cross-posting I’ll just give you the lead in and you can read it there if you like.

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold. Despite a widespread interest in cloud computing there may be some pitfalls including cloud lock-in.

Just like the web boom of the late 1990s it’s being powered by open source software with Xen and KVM hypervisors, Hadoop mapreduce, memcached and a proliferation of the NoSQLnon-relational databases whose numbers seem to be growing by the day.

Not only is open source software helping to power the cloud infrastructure but contributions from growth companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and RackSpace are at an all-time high

Read Three Cloud Lock-in Considerations on the Zenoss blog

Zenoss Core Dashboard

This week I am very excited because we released Zenoss Core 2.5.2 with a cool new feature,  Xen hypervisor monitoring.

I am very happy to see Zenoss put this out as open source software, because it’s the beginning of what could be a great piece of software. Now that this is out there for anyone to use I expect to get lots of feedback to extend and improve it.

This extension to Zenoss Core discovers guests on Xen para-virtualized hosts and provides monitoring of performance and availability via SSH. While the Xen hosts run on physical servers, the virtual guests are listed per host and linked back to any discovered instances on the network. Admins can quickly find the associated hosts and guests and monitor their Xen virtual infrastructure along side their entire physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environment through a single interface.

I really think this is the beginning of a lot of virtualization and cloud monitoring capabilities from Zenoss Core. In recent weeks we got a couple neat extensions for virtualization and cloud monitoring including Amazon Web Services,  Google App Engine, libvirt (a virtualization library favored by Red Hat) and Ganglia integration.

Technorati Tags: Hypervisor, Monitoring, Xen, Zenoss Core

On February 6, the White House Open Government Initiative launched a government wide public participation opportunity.  As part of the Open Government Directive issued in early December, every major agency published an open government website.

In response the Open Source for America (OSFA) initiative has submitted their:  “Proposed Guidelines for Open Government Plans” to the Obama Administration for consideration. These plans are meant to encourage the government to embrace the open source ideals of participation, collaboration and transparency.

The proposal notes that there is, ” ….a tremendous opportunity to capture the innovation and ingenuity of government employees, who have the means to create their own tools to make themselves more effective, rather than waiting for a cumbersome and unresponsive procurement process. Open source software is, in fact, the most concrete form of participation available to the government’s constituents and its employees”

To get involved the Administration has invited public comments on each agency’s open government page through March 19, 2010. Open source advocates are encouraged to visit these agencies listed on the White House website and share their opinion.

Technorati Tags: government, Open Source, United States

In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Mini Conferences

On the Friday before the main SCaLE expo and speaking program starts many people hold mini-conferences and the SCaLE staff has been excellent at helping to organize and promote the events. I conducted a  Zenoss Community Day that Friday with phenomenal attendance and enjoyed meeting a great group of open source management users. I also peeked in on Ubucon which had a standing room only crowd of Ubuntu users. There were also quite a few other special events that seemed to be well attended.

The Keynotes

I got to watch both keynotes this year and they were both excellent. Here’s a little recap.

Karsten Wade’s – Being a Catalyst in Communities – The scientific facts about the open source way

Karsten’s a bona fide community builder helping drive the growth of the Fedora project, an open source distribution sponsored by Red Hat. His talk was a great overview of how to drive community participation and better yet, what results not to discount. He also announced the newly published free book, The Open Source Way – Creating and nurturing communities of contributors. A blue print of how to apply open source principles to communities and facilitate participation. In his presentation he made reference to an initiative sponsored by Red Hat,  Professors Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), to help professors understand how to get their students involved in open source which was very cool.

He also made some interesting references to research done by Etienne Wenger on Communities of  Practice, which are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Which is part of the science indicated in the time of the talk.

Tarus Balog’s – So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business

Tarus is the lead of the OpenNMS project which he maintains in conjunction with a services business, The OpenNMS Group. He offers a very candid tale of his starting the OpenNMS group using the board game, Life, as a metaphor. It was very clever. Tarus and I share a common interest in open source IT management given the companies and projects with but we have some different philosophical views on how to develop those companies and communities. Despite that I really respect his passion for his project and his company. I thought his presentation was very well done and really enjoyed his talk.

Both keynotes are available here on UStream.

Sessions

I got to sit in on Stephen Spector’s presentation on Xen and had a lot of time to talk to him through out the show. Xen fascinates me as a open source virtualization technology it’s used everywhere and even serves as the infrastructure for Amazon EC2.

I was there to man the Zenoss booth so I missed out on a couple of scaling and cloud presentations but the word was they were all great:

• Ari Lerner’s presentation on Pool Party. Written in ruby, PoolParty provides a nice domain specific language for describing a repeatable, declarative cloud computing infrastructure. Mainly focusing on amazon’s EC2 offering, the presentation will cover basic concepts of cloud computing, how PoolParty works and how you can get into the clouds in one command
• Scaling Facebook via Open Source – Given their use of  of the following open source projects in highly available deployments I thought this would be interesting: Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Scribe, and Thrift.

If you are an open source fan or vendor and can make the trip, I highly recommend attending to SCale 9x next February.

Related Articles

• SCaLE 8x Report – (linuxjournal.com)
• Improving the FLOSS legal landscape (iquaid.org)
• SCALE8X Day 2. Ubuntu Kernel Hardware Compatibility Testing. (canonical.com)
• SCALE8X Final Day Ubuntu Hardware Compatibility Testing. (canonical.com)

Technorati Tags: Fedora, LInuxfest, Los Angeles, Open Source, OpenNMS, SCALE8x, Xen

How do you build one of the busiest websites on the Internet? You wouldn’t guess the right answer to be, “You download some free software and hack  it”…Actually  the question is how do you build one of the world’s busiest websites that will scale affordably? You use open source software.

Twitter showed everyone their cards recently by publishing all the open source projects that they are contributing to. This is the picture of how open source software should work.

Organization has a a big, hard problem to solve. They write some software or update existing software and then publish what they did for others to use.

The people writing the software are writing it to solve a real problem. Not to sell it to people with real problems or to prevent the problems a clever sales guy manufactures. Given Twitter’s massive amount of users and traffic it’s probably one of the most demanding IT environments in the world. If these are the people making the software than you have some idea that it an stand up to scalability issues in other use cases (Failwhale’s not withstanding).

Not only do the Twitter engineers donate their work to the open source community they also share their insights on what happens in their environment on the Twitter Engineering Blog.

As I look at what the Twitter guys are working on it’s pretty impressive and has a fairly substantial impact on high availability computing. Some of the projects that caught my attention:

• scribe.gem – A Ruby client for the Scribe distributed log server.
• contributions to memcached.gem – An interface to the libmemcached C client. (memcache is a distributed systems for improving performance across dynamic web apps)
• contributions to cassandra – A highly scalable second-generation distributed database.
• contributions to hadoop – A platform for analyzing large data sets.
• contributions to pig – A platform for analyzing large data sets.

Any how it’s good to see open source users giving back their improvements, I love it when a plan comes together.

Related Articles

• Twitter Loves Open Source And Launches A Directory To Prove It (techcrunch.com)