PyCon US 2011 recap

PyCon has officially finished yesterday. It has been a great week. I have met a lot of cool and smart people and also had a lot of fun.

At the conference I have met 3 libcloud contributors - Paul, Jed and Grig.

Paul, Jed and Grig only stayed there for the conference days, but I have also stayed there from 14th to 17th to lead the libcloud sprint.

Our sprinting team was pretty small - me, Paul (first day), Steven and Tavis, but we have still accomplished quite a lot.

Here is a short list of some of the things which have been accomplished during the sprints (some of them are still work in progress):

  • Added a new “pricing” module and moved all the existing pricing info to a separate JSON file (libcloud/data/pricing.json). Updating the prices for the providers which don’t expose them through the API should now be a lot easier.
  • Paul has started initial work to port libcloud to Python 3
  • Steven has worked on the Amazon S3 storage driver which should be finished in the upcoming week
  • libcloud now works fine with Python 2.7 and PyPy (there have been some minor issues which have prevented some tests to pass on Python 2.7)
  • Test coverage has been increased for about 10%
  • I have started working on the Windows Azure storage driver
  • Tavis has worked on refactoring some of the existing modules, fixing styling issues and fixing bugs in CloudFiles storage driver
  • Finalized and committed two community submitted drivers; Nimbus driver by David LaBissoniere and Bluebox driver by Christian Paredes

I have also talked with a few people which use the library and most of them would like us to expose more provider specific functionality - namely Amazon Elastic Block Storage and load balancers.

We have already debated a bit about this in the mailing list, but we haven’t actually started working on it yet, because it’s pretty hard to create a useful generic abstraction for resources like load balancers, IP addresses and so on.

You can expect more info and debates about this in the mailing list in the upcoming weeks.

I hope to see you again next year in Santa Clara (there have been some debates about renting a beach house for the sprints - you definitely don’t want to miss that!) and possibly this year at EuroPython in Italy.