Adding a new tag for cloud computing

[Thomas Goirand]

On 01/18/2012 10:02 PM, Enrico Zini wrote:
> Cool. Shame you didn't pick up the suggestion to turn it into a web
> page, it means I'll have to do it myself :P

I am really unsure what to put in such web page. Also, were you vouching
for a wiki entry in fact (sorry, it's not clear)?

> Can you please check the
> script results, and confirm that the expressions I have quickly put
> together actually make sense?

They really do make sense, and I don't think we need more tags than the
one we have already (appart from admin::cloud-computing and
suite::openstack). Thanks for pointing this out.

Now, should I show here the result of it?

> I've added suite::openstack:
> 
>    Tag: suite::openstack
>    Description: OpenStack
>     Open source software for building private and public clouds.
>     http://openstack.org/ 

Cool, thanks!
I'll add this tag to all nova binaries right away! :)

> For admin::cloud-computing, what would be the difference between
> admin::cloud-computing and admin::virtualization?

admin::virtualization would be, I'm guessing, for the different
hypervisor, like Qemu, Virtualbox, Xen, kvm, LXC, OpenVZ and friends,
plus maybe things that would admin them, like dtc-xen (which I wrote),
xen-tools, etc. These are to administer a single computer, not a pool of
servers.

admin::cloud-computing would be for cloud, meaning that it might use the
tools above (Openstack uses KVM or XenAPI for example), but also for
cloud storage. The main difference is that they work with not only one
computer, and they are abstraction layer, on top of the virtualization
layer.

Neither XenAPI or OpenStack, or even Eucalyptus, for example, are
actually implementing a virtualization layer. They are pure tools to
administer such virtualization layers, but also storage (like Swift,
Sheepdog, or many others).

> I am not an expert of this field; in fact I waited a bit before
> replying, just in case someone else from the list who knows more than me
> would give feedback, but it looks like I'll have to do.

Frankly, there's not so many people who are. I don't even consider
myself an expert (yet), and I have many things to learn as well. On the
administration side of cloud computing, it's overly complicated, and I
don't think it's going to go on a path to be more easy to understand
(even some concepts are hard to grasp).

Luckily, when you are just using the cloud, as a client, it's a way more
easy. The only thing you got to know is simple commands like "nova list"
(lists your VMs), "nova boot" (start a VM), etc. And it's a bit the same
kind of things with Xen API: xe vm-list, xe vm-clone, xe vm-start, etc.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)