libcloud Monthly Update (January 2011) - libcloud 0.4.2, Storage API, Pycon
Recently I have joined the libcloud team as a committer and I have decide to write a short status update post each month (actually, Redis weekly has inspired me to post something like this - our posts won’t be so low-level but more of a general view of what’s going on with the project).
The post will summarize what was accomplished in the previous month, what is currently going on and what you can expect in the upcoming months.
I am going to start with an update for the January 2011.
What has been accomplished in January 2011
- libcloud is back to Twitter, new account name is @libcloud
- libcloud 0.4.2 has finally been released, some notable features are:
- new drivers for CloudSigma, Brightbox and Rackspace UK
- availability zone support for the EC2 driver - now you can select an availability zone when booting an EC2 node
- improvements to deployment capabilities
- libcloud.security module for SSL certificate verification - actually it’s pretty sad that we needed to implement this ourselves, but since Python 2.5 / Python 2.6 does not provide this functionality, this was our only option (actually, we could use a library like M2Crypto, but we don’t want to introduce another external dependency). For more information about setting it up, read this wiki entry and this blog post.
- Minimum supported version has changed from Python 2.4 to Python 2.5
What is currently going on
- cluster instance support has been added to the EC2 driver - that is not really a killer feature, but it’s still a nice to have :-)
- debate about the “driver maintainer status” on the mailing list
- hacking has started on the Storage API (libcloud storage API proposal & ideas thread, wiki entry) - this is a pretty major feature so you are encouraged to join our mailing list and participate with your ideas, feedback and suggestions
Library will eventually be split into two modules; “compute” (current drivers and deployment capabilities will be moved there) and “storage” (in development) - don’t worry, we are working hard to not break the existing functionality so you will still be able to use your old code with a new version without any major changes.
This feature is planned to be included in the next release of libcloud (0.5.0).
What is going on in the upcoming months
- Me (Tomaz), Paul and Jerry will be at Pycon in March so if you will be there as well, feel free to contact us, we’d love to talk!
That is it, see you next month (in the mean time, don’t forget to join us at our mailing lists - [email protected] or IRC channel #libcloud @ freenode).