Tag Archives: Jorge Castro

Linux

Jorge Castro: Scaling down in the cloud with Juju

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I’ve talked in the past about The Way to Run WordPress in the Cloud. It looked like this:

juju deploy wordpress
juju deploy mysql
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
juju expose wordpress

But the problem with building tools that scale up is that we sometimes forget that people like to scale down too. Counting the bootstrap node that comes out to 3 instances. We default to m1.smalls so that comes out to about about $133 a month for an on-demand WordPress blog. Not very cost effective.

As of Juju 1.11.3 and newer, we can now deploy services to the same instance. How we express this is via the juju deploy --to command. Let’s look at our WordPress example again, this time, let’s save some money and run the entire thing on one node.

juju bootstrap
juju deploy --to 0 wordpress
juju deploy --to 0 mysql
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
juju expose wordpress

Then run a quick juju status to get the public IP of your WordPress installation, and you’re done. On reserved instances that comes down to $61 a year, or $5.08 a month! Commit to three years on AWS and it’s closer to $2.65 a month. Now we’re talking, just don’t forget to add the cost of bandwidth in there.

So what’s the big deal? Running these things on one instance isn’t exactly rocket science. Well ok. Your twitter moment has arrived and now you need to scale your blog. You need on-demand scalability:

 juju add-unit wordpress

Without the --to juju fires up a new instance of wordpress to help you scale. How famous is your new blog post? juju add-unit -n4 wordpress will fire up another 4. Now let’s scale back down, let’s remove units 3 and 4:

juju remove-unit wordpress/4
juju remove-unit wordpress/3

This brings us down back to nodes 0, 1, and 2 running. Keep on going until you’re back to just node 0 running everything. Start on one instance and be able to scale up and down based on traffic. Not bad indeed!

You’re not just getting some out of the box vanilla WordPress and MySQL either. You’re getting a battle-hardened scalable WordPress deployment that’s tuned to scale with nginx. If you want to turn the crank to 11 you can also deploy memcached with it for a really fast blog.

Some caveats; while this works with WordPress right now the individual charms are running on the raw instance, they are NOT in containers yet! That is, if you deploy multiple charms to one box they might collide and stomp on each other. So play with it, but I recommend waiting until the next release of Juju (next month) for containers to land so we have a nice clean seperation of the units on the instance. Work on that continues, along with adding this ability to the GUI. However WordPress works today!

In the meantime here’s how to Get Started with Juju. Happy Orchestrating!

References:

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jorge Castro: My FIRST robot competition

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I did the coolest thing last weekend, I volunteered as a judge for the FIRST Robotics Competition here in Livonia, Michigan. The short story is Dean Kamen, the guy who is most famous for inventing the Segway (even though his other inventions seem way more interesting) decided that young people should be motivated by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. So he created this idea of a robot competion. I know right?

So how it works is that high schools across the country make robots to compete against a certain goal. This year’s contest is called the Ultimate Ascent. The idea is that the robot not only shoots discs for points, at the end of the challenge for the max points it needs to ascend a pyramid. Check out the video, this is not an easy task.

My job was to judge the regional competitions, the winners would go on to the State champtionships, and from there, move on to the Nationals.

So … high schools, competing, with robots … count me in …

And to my luck, I even met a student at Code Red Robotics who know what Ubuntu was, here’s his picture:

I am really glad I got to learn what FIRST was. It is amazing to see what high school kids can come up with. When I was in High School my idea of “awesome” was a SEGA Genesis, and if lucky, I got to be in the Science Olympiad. Meanwhile these kids are making robots capable of shooting disks at over 65 miles an hour.

On top of that as a judge I got to meet some pretty amazing people. People from General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and Nissan, as well as other companies, I am really proud to be included with such accomplished engineers.

Over the next few days I will post videos from the competition, it gets pretty brutal to watch robots compete; and to me this is the best part, FIRST isn’t just a kid version of a robotic reality show, it has built in governance, with a concept of Gracious Professionalism. So it’s just not about building great robots, it’s about driving kids towards a greater good over elementary, junior high, and high schools.

Wanna get in on FIRST? It’s all over the US, get started here: http://www.usfirst.org/

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jono Bacon: Getting Started With The First Online Ubuntu Developer Summit

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Tomorrow we will be running our very first online Ubuntu Developer Summit. The event will take place over two days and span a range of different tracks: Community, Client, Cloud & Server, App Developers, and Foundations. We have never run an event like this before, but we have prepared extensively to deliver the best online UDS experience we can. When UDS is complete we will then review any rough edges and fix those up for the next event in May.

With this being a new event, I wanted to share some key tips about how to get participate.

For Everyone

UDS takes place on Tues 5th – Wed 6th March 2013 from 2pm UTC. Please note: the original time was 4pm UTC, but we brought the event forward by two hours.

The full event is taking place online and everyone is welcome to join, irrespective of whether you are an active contributor to the community, a partner, a business, an enthusiast, or anyone else. We will be using Google+ Hangouts On Air to stream video from the active participants in the session, and we also provide quick embedded access to IRC, note-taking, and more.

The event will kick off on Tuesday at 2pm UTC with a keynote session. There will then be two hours of sessions, then an hour of plenaries, and then another two hours of sessions. On the Wednesday we will kick off into sessions at 2pm, and have lightning talks in the normal plenary slot. Jorge Castro is taking care of the plenary talks and lightning talks; reach out to him if you want to run a lightning talk.

There are five tracks, with each (apart from Foundations) having two video streams. Each track has two track leads:

  • Client – Jason Warner, Sebastien Bacher
  • Server and Cloud – Antonio Rosales, Daviey Walker
  • Community – Jono Bacon, Daniel Holbach
  • App Developers – Alan Pope, David Planella
  • Foundations – Steve Langasek

You can find all sessions listed at summit.ubuntu.com. Just visit the session you are interested in at the time of the session to view it; everything is included on the session page. You don’t need anything other than a web browser to view sessions but you will need a Google+ account to actively participate in a hangout.

For Track Leads

You should have all received an email from me about how to schedule sessions and how to start and stop the video streams.

Remember to ensure your Google+ is verified (Michael Hall should have checked this with you).

You and your co-track lead should pick one of the two tracks you have for your track and take care of setting up those streams.

Five minutes before a session (e.g. 1.55pm) is due to begin you should start the video stream and update the session in summit.ubuntu.com with the hangout and broadcast URLS. Likewise, 55 minutes into a session (e.g. 2.55pm), be sure to stop the hangout. We need to start and stop the video streams to ensure the recordings are broken up into the different hour long chunks. Required participants will automatically see a …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Dylan McCall: I typed this standing up

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The result was modest, but I'm happy with it! Dads are great.

Almost five months ago, I switched to a standing desk. I am in love.

Yes, it is absolutely sane to be in love with a desk.

We made a standing desk out of processed trees. The result is modest, but I’m happy with it! Dads are great.

The idea with a standing desk is your body stays more active while you are at your desk, so you can read those health warnings about sitting all day with a sense of superiority. And we all like to feel superior. But I didn’t switch to a standing desk because of articles pointing out that everything is killing us. When I started, I had a few reasons of my own! When I sit, I end up sitting wrong within minutes. This is a problem, because my choice of obsession (and profession) means I am doomed to a lot of fooling around with computers. For a long time, I assumed that doom required equal amounts of sitting. During my little internship at the David Suzuki Foundation, one of my awesome coworkers was thrilled with her standing desk, so that finally got the wheels turning for me.

Meanwhile, I was noticing that I never really solve much while I’m sitting at a desk. My brain works a lot better when I’m at least moving. The problem is my work environment wasn’t really made for moving around. There was a giant, allegedly comfortable chair in the way, all in the name of enhancing the computer. I say “allegedly comfortable” because this is one of the other neat things: I was thinking about getting an actually comfortable chair, then I realized I could change my desk, instead. Hundreds of dollars in savings (maybe).

I started off looking at different articles around the web for inspiration. Jorge Castro wrote a blog post about his own adventure building a standing desk on top of a metal frame, and Priceonomics has a nice article with different ways of putting together a standing desk from Ikea stuff. I momentarily entertained the idea of buying from Geekdesk, but, besides the price, I decided I would prefer to jump in head first with something that is not adjustable to sitting. If I make it easy to go back, I probably will.

So, I was looking at different bits of Ikea furniture that I could somehow jam together into something coherent, and soon enough my dad talked me out of all that. Instead, we (mostly he) built a new desk frame from scratch. This way we could get something at the right height from the start. After all, you don’t want to stand at an uncomfortable desk, and unlike sitting on a fancy chair, you can’t really adjust your standing height. There’s a sort of general guideline that the desk should be at a height where you can look straight ahead with your elbows at a 90° angle, and we ended up with something pretty close to that for me.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Randall Ross: Jamming? We Need Your Photos!

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Are you Jamming this weekend? Take photos!

Post your Jam photos to your favourite photo sharing service (Pictag: ubuntu) and also to Planet Ubuntu. Show the world the wonderfully awesome project that is Ubuntu.

Thank you!

—

Someone famous once said that “If there are no photos, the event never happened.” Hint: Might be Jorge Castro.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jorge Castro: What the LTS Enablement Stack means for sysadmins

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TLDR: 12.04.2 ISOs are NOT just rolled up updates, they’re 12.04 with newer kernels.

I’d like to point out some changes to things that might affect our server users. The last 12.04.2 point release is the first real release where the LTS Enablement Stack is in effect.

There are some things I’d like to highlight for those of you not reading the release notes, as this is different from how we rolled point releases in the past.

  • New installs from the 12.04.2 ISOs will get a newer kernel (3.5) than 12.04 (3.2).
  • Machines currently running 12.04 will NOT receive these kernel upgrades, only new installs from the new ISOs will get the enablement stacks.

Recommendations:

  • The 12.04 and 12.04.1 ISO’s are at http://http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ – you’ll likely want to keep a set for yourself if you want to roll out with the same exact kernel for your deployments – you’ll probably want to have all three ISO sets on hand depending on your hardware.
  • The original 12.04 stack will continue to be maintained for 5 years, if you don’t need the new kernel, you don’t need to use it.
  • In the past if new hardware rolled out and didn’t work with the LTS you were kind of stuck with either backporting a kernel, or (what I reluctantly did) deploy a non-LTS release until the next LTS came out, at which point you would rebase on the new LTS.)

What this means is that the life of the LTS is now much longer, while also giving you the option of sticking with a stable userspace with newer hardware support (if you need it). The wiki page has a bunch more details, please check it out.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jorge Castro: Juju core 1.9.8 released

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David Cheney passes along that Juju core 1.9.8 has now been released.

For those not familiar with Juju core, it is the rewrite branch of Juju in golang. The team is now close to feature parity with the Python version, we expect to have something real nice for you by 13.04. 🙂

My favorite feature here is a real small one, an idea passed along to the team by Rick Spencer. juju generate-config -w will now spit out a configuration file for you. We’ve documented a bunch of providers in there, so out of the box you’ll get AWS, OpenStack, HP Cloud, and the local provider in the config file all commented out, you’ll be able to just paste in your creds and go. This is much nicer than trading snippets with friends.

Here’s the changelog, make sure you check it out, there are still some limitations, like lack of constraints, so be aware. Expect a summarized report on the Go version soon, we’ve inherited some great new features, including better multiplatform support, you’ll find 1.9.8 is working for OSX now.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jorge Castro: elasticsearch in Ubuntu, ready for testing

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Github just announced a new code search, powered by elasticsearch. Just recently StackOverflow revamped its internal search engine. Their choice of search technology? Elasticsearch. So I thought, I wonder how well we support elasticsearch in Ubuntu?

Well, thanks to work of Luis Arias and Paul Czarkowski, there’s already a Juju charm for this, that can get you up and running with an elasticsearch cluster in just a few commands. It even snags the latest stable version from github for you. Nice.

There’s probably a bunch of other things that the charm needs, right off the bat there’s a bunch of integration points that elasticsearch provides, it would be wicked to connect these up to our django, rails, and node charms so web developers can just deploy search along with their app in one go. If you’re interested in this let me know!

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu