Jenkins forces reinstall of server images on Rackspace

This is much more DevOps than Dev, but it is important as well ! One difficulty we have doing remote development with a team spread over at least a million cities (I haven't actually counted) is that the local development LAN for Bob is frankly inaccessible for Alice and Charlie. Maintaining n-1 VPN links is just going to drive us all mad.

So the simple solution is to rent a couple of cloud servers and host the development builds on there. The cost is pretty minimal, and it seemed good - until I realised that Jenkins, our friendly Continuous Integration Butler, was unable to re-install a cloud server from an image. Or rather it *could* - but Jenkins did not know when the server was rebuilt, and the server itself, which could signal jenkins, would have no state, so could not signal jenkins with *why* it had been rebuilt. So, Pantry Bell (https://github.com/lifeisstillgood/pantrybell). We simply run a webserver, that when called (perhaps from one Jenkins job) will force a re-imaging of a Rackspace server. This has a simple callback in rc.local (wget http://jenkins.frozone.mikadosoftware.com/pantrybell//`hostname`) So - a server forces a rebuild, on successful rebuild, the server calls home, and then the "real" jenkins job can be triggered using the Jenkins API calls. Amazingly enough it works, has trivial security, no REST compliance but it works

OpenStack and Rackspace

OpenStack and Rackspace

I suspect that if you find this as exciting as I do, one or both of us need to go out looking for a life. However, OpenStack is nearly here, and Connexions is in the Early Access Program. WooHoo.

OpenStack is in the frankly hilariously named Essex release, and is a collaboration between NASA (yes!) and Rackspace (and now 150 other companies) all of whom bascially want some of Jeff Bezos’ AWS lunch.

Now, I am currently trying to get Jenkins to nicely play with my cloud servers (see Pantry Bell) and it will use the pythonic nova Real Soon Now.

But the real pull is that we will be using rackspace to integrate all the different components involved in the new system, early as possible. The system currently builds the repository and the (old) editor, and I am working on bringing in the new Aloha editor and the webview asap. The sooner we see everything working together the sooner we shall find those great moments of code serendipity.

We have an opportunity as a bunch of Open Source developers to use the first real F/OSS cloud based offering and even influence a little part of its development. I am excited to see where it will go, and excited to see if it can provide measurable benefits to Connexions, either in development simplicity or sysadmin time savings. Interesting Times are ahead.

The Usual Suspects

Starting Blogging !

This is the first of hopefully a regular series of blogs from the developers behind Connexions.

Connexions

Connexions provides free (beer and speech) educational resources to students and teachers around the world. It has developed over ten years a eco-system of authoring tools, repository and means to serve the textbooks, exercises, snippets of knowledge to 2 million people a month.

And they are building a major update of that code.

And its all Open Source - and being developed right in front of your eyes. (Mail us if you want to join in.)

And thats what we are doing here ...

The people¶

(If your gravatar is not here, please let me know the right email address to use)

Jessica Burnett		Paul Brian		Ed Woodward
Philip Schatz		Michael Mulich		Marvin Reimer
Ross Reedstrom

Google Summer of Code Students

Debajyoti Datta		Saket Choudray		Alasdair Corbett
Yanchai Ye

The code:

https://github.com/Connexions

The plan

I am hoping we can link to the specs, and have the developers involved in each component post about their updates or changes on a regular basis.

We shall see, as the old man said.