30 Mar 2017
If you are working with OpenStack and you do not want a full fledged installation of OpenStack for testing, you can check out DevStack. It is a set of scripts which will setup a test OpenStack environment in a few minutes with one simple script on a single node.
In my case, I used a 12G Virtual Machine with 6 CPU cores, 200G disk and Ubuntu 16.04 as the Linux OS.
- The first step is to add a user with sudo priveleges. I created a user called
stack here, added it to the sudoers list and switched to that user shell.
$ sudo useradd -s /bin/bash -d /opt/stack -m stack
$ sudo tee <<<"stack ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" /etc/sudoers
$ sudo su - stack
- Next download devstack from the git repository.
$ git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack-dev/devstack
$ cd devstack
- You now need to add configuration for OpenStack admin password, database password, etc. In the root of the
devstack directory create a local.conf file and add the following.
[[local|localrc]]
ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin
DATABASE_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
RABBIT_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
SERVICE_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
- Now you are all set to start the installation. Just run
You will see a bunch of packages downloading and getting installed. Wait for the process to exit successfully - and yes, you are done with your OpenStack test installation.
You can open the OpenStack Horizon Dashboard at http://devstack_box_url/.
08 Nov 2016
Very recently I have been working on a platform to orchestrate VM creation and lifecycle management across a cluster of nodes with capacity, metadata, storage and network management. I was exploring stuff like KVM + QEMU and XEN when I read about libvirt and found it perfectly suiting my needs.
To start off with, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor, a software which enables us to run Virtual Machines on top of a host machine. XEN is another such hypervisor.
libvirt, on the other hand is an abstraction layer on top of the various hypervisor platforms with a nice API available to manage virtualization. We can choose to use any of the hypervisor backends that libvirt supports to create and manage virtual machines. The list of hypervisors supported by libvirt are listed below:
Source: Wikipedia
libvirt has an API in C for development. It also has bindings in other languages like python, perl, ocaml, ruby, java, Go, PHP and C#.
Let’s start off with installing libvirt first. Since the workstations I use are ArchLinux and OSX, I will stick to these two platforms only (the installation instructions for other platforms are easily available).
On ArchLinux, you can install libvirt with a KVM backend by installing the following packages
sudo pacman -S libvirt qemu ebtables dnsmasq bridge-utils openbsd-netcat
By default, KVM is the default driver enabled.
On OSX, you can install libvirt by running
To ensure that the libvirt daemon is running, run the following command
sudo systemctl status libvirtd
Once the libvirt daemon is running you can use the command line client virsh which comes included in the libvirt package to connect to the daemon.
Once inside the virsh client, you can run a bunch of commands to consume the API.
- Getting the hypervisor hostname
virsh # hostname
playstation
- Getting the node information
virsh # nodeinfo
CPU model: x86_64
CPU(s): 4
CPU frequency: 1800 MHz
CPU socket(s): 1
Core(s) per socket: 2
Thread(s) per core: 2
NUMA cell(s): 1
Memory size: 8066144 KiB
virsh # version
Compiled against library: libvirt 2.3.0
Using library: libvirt 2.3.0
Using API: QEMU 2.3.0
Running hypervisor: QEMU 2.7.0
You can use the help command to get a list of all available commands.
In the next post in the libvirt series, I’ll start off with programmatically consuming the libvirt APIs.
05 Nov 2016
Over the past month, I have been exploring various PaaS providers in the market to study how they package and present their PaaS offerings to the users differently, when someone at work pointed out Jujucharms by Canonical (the same company behind Ubuntu). And taking a first look at it - I immediately liked it, just because of the clear and simple way in which they have presented application and service modelling.
Quoting for their website, “Juju is an application and service modelling tool that enables you to quickly model, configure, deploy and manage applications in the cloud with only a few commands. Use it to deploy hundreds of preconfigured services, OpenStack, or your own code to any public or private cloud.”
You can explore the modelling tool yourself here. As an example, I have a WordPress model setup with the Wordpress nodes scaled to 3, one apache node acting as a reverse proxy to the wordpress nodes, a mysql master database connected to the wordpress nodes and a slave mysql instance.
The best thing about this is when you deploy, Juju will take care of all the configuration required at the various nodes. (In the above example, the reverse proxy will be configured to point to the wordpress nodes, the slave database will be configured to replicate from the master database, etc.)
Once done with the modelling, you can deploy the models you generated for your applications and services to any of the public cloud platforms supported by Juju.
05 Nov 2016
I have been off the blogging / social grid for quite a long time now (the last blog came way back in mid 2014), so I feel it’s about time that I resume this blog. I have initiated this with trashing away Tumblr - my old blog (meh! I know.) and moving the old posts to Jekyll running on Github Pages.
I have been keeping quite busy with work over the past year and a half - from working quite extensively on new cloud platforms spanning over the IaaS, PaaS and Serverless space, to exploring and learning newer design and architectural methodologies, plus tinkering with technologies and frameworks which went into building these distributed and highly scalable systems. Which brings me back here - because I am quite keen to share the stuff which I have learnt during this period building these platforms.
So that said - you can expect a lot more entries from now on :)
07 Jul 2014
Hello planet! Over the past few weeks I have been working on Krita Animation to make it more usable by adding essential animation features and fixing various loose ends. So here is an update on what has been done so far(Also this happens to be my first update on my Google Summer of Code, 2014 project).
Fixed loading of animation layers: Initially the animation layers did not load correctly. Only the first animation layer used to be loaded properly. And there were bugs with the layer box in the timeline GUI too. This has been fixed now. Here is a video demonstrating multiple animation layers and frame switching.
Auto frame breaking: This feature is specifically helpful for animators who don’t like to click the buttons or use the keyboard for adding frames, but directly start drawing on a new frame after selecting the frame. There is an option to disable this feature as it might sometimes get in the way of the workflow. Also there is an option to either insert a blank frame or key frame on frame break. Here is a video demonstrating auto frame breaking.
Frame Navigation actions: Actions for jumping to next and previous keyframes, next and previous frames have also been added with Keyboard shortcuts. This is specifically very helpful for animators who use keyboard to switch frames without clicking the buttons or using the timeline.
Changing the timeline width: Added an option to change the timeline width according to the number of frames required in a particular animation.
Animation import: Currently the animation frames and layers get imported in Krita Animation. But the timeline GUI doesn’t get updated accordingly.
The Road Ahead
These are the things I have been intending to add or fix in the next few days:
- The Onion skin Docker, which is a critical feature and is currently work in progress. There should be something substantial on this soon.
- Add code to make the timeline GUI refresh/update on its own during import, frame and layer deletion, etc.
- Frame and layer deletion, layer locking, moving frames and layers.
- Animation export to PNG sequences.
- Animation player and scrubbing, caching of probable frames(with some logic like locality of reference).
- …And lots of bug fixes :)
Also there have been some queries about how to test this stuff. So the only way to test it right now is by building from the source code after checking out the animation development branch, which is ‘animator-plugin-somsubhra’.
That is all I have for now. Thanks for reading!
Oh, and by the way Krita started its first donation campaign on Kickstarter to raise money for the 2.9 release and make it more awesome. Here is a direct link to the Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source-digital-painting-accelerate-deve
