Does anyone know what one would do to participate in a cloud community?

Question

I've been looking at the plaintive entreaties for participation on cloud.com and eucalyptus.com

I have read much of their documentation and looked at cloud.com's videos, the introductory video on cloud.com in particular is a fine example of someone saying nothing for four minutes while reassuring you that what he's talking about is "cool".

I've played a bit of Call of Cthulhu in my time and am wary of getting involved with cults trying to invoke elder gods through bizarre rituals. When communities are so cagey, vague and inconclusive about what it is they do I have to wonder...

What the hell would one do in contributing to these communities? What benefit does contributing confer apart from being able to play buzzword bingo on your resume?

For context sake. I am asking this because an outsource developer we are using is getting involved with amazon ec2 stuff and we've been having a look at those services. So that I can understand how all this whizz-bang IaaS stuff works I'd like to poke about in one but I'm not paying to do so out of my own pocket and, frankly, no one in our office fully understands how this all works and the venture is unlikely to attract budget until someone with the company credit card "gets" it. Usually I have found experience is the best teacher but I don't know what I am supposed to be experiencing or how best to experience it.

I guess this boils down to: is there any kind of cloud service similar to ec2 I could "have a go" with for free? And if not is there anyone who can explain it without using a thesaurus of current business flavours du jour sprinkled liberally with the word "cool"?

Answer 1

It's with some intrepidation that I try to answer your question (first time answerer, be kind :) ).

Your line of questioning isn't silly - it is just what I'm trying to figure out myself, what are the compelling reasons to implement cloud computing? I'm the technical writer for OpenStack, and I want to write some starter tutorials for some virtual "try it out" images we're creating.

The title question, "what to do to participate in a cloud community" really depends on the community. We're so early-on that community participation is pretty technical - get a Launchpad account, try out the code, talk to us on IRC and mailing lists. Other communities would have different participation patterns.

In summary, I think you could try OpenStack's developer preview out, get a feel for our community, and play with the cloud fabric controller (spin virtual machines up and down and so on) using VirtualBox.

So, if you want to try out OpenStack's Compute (aka Nova on Launchpad), download Virtual Box, and then get the image by downloading from here. Unzip the image, then start Virtual Box. There's a readme in the zip file that has step-by-step instructions (not super air-tight, but I'm testing them). What I'm trying to learn myself is "what's a good starter tutorial for *aaS?"

Answer 2

I think you'd find 10 Steps to Initiating an OpenStack Cloud Service an interesting read. It's all about how to get a major service (i.e. code contribution) accepted into OpenStack.

Answer 3

I don't know if there are any free Cloud providers - but EC2 isn't going to hurt you. I work with it daily in the office, billed to a corporate card, and I use it for personal projects billed to my own card.

Signup to EC2 is free, and if you already have an Amazon account as a purchaser then it's just a couple of clicks. Spinning-up a Micro or Small instance for a few hours to play with it will set you back a few pence. Leave it running and you'll venture into pounds territory - but we're talking £10 or £20 for a months' usage. Fire a Medium or Large (or larger) up, and you'll accrue charges at a higher rate, obviously. Terminate any instances and zap any storage you might have created, and the billing drops to zero.

EC2 pricing is here.

Answer 4

There are various options. However in my opinion, the most useful and easy options would be to go along with OpenStack. Read about it. Visit devstack.org, and OpenStack official website and install it on your system. Observe it and figure out how it works. Once you are comfortable with its working and code structure, go to launchpad and pick problems you think you can solve it then learn git( if you don't know already) then propose your solution. Get in touch with IRC channel associated with the project you wish to work upon. And with time you will start enjoying it.