The first talk I had a part in was Func, which I co-presented with Adrian Likins. Func, as mentioned before in Red Hat Magazine, is an API for controlling lots of nodes for arbitrary systems management tasks. It is ideally suited for replacing legacy SSH infrastructure as well as building new network applications that require secure network communications infrastructure.

We gave an overview for folks that hadn’t heard of Func before, and showed off several examples of things you can do with the Python API. Interest in Func is growing, and lots of folks are using it in ways we hadn’t originally intended (which is, of course, the idea).

One such application that surprised us was Open Symbolic, which aims to be a user-friendly systems management application written on Func. Additionally, some of our own IT folks have written a very lightweight “cloud” type management application using Func, which you should hear more about shortly. At the conclusion of that talk there were some very good questions about how things work, and also some interest in future expansions (with hopefully some patches coming down the pipe).

My second talk was about Cobbler, our next-generation installation server. I was very pleased to see Cobbler’s talk was standing-room only, showing that there is a lot of need for good tools to help streamline Linux installations and low-level datacenter setup tasks. Again, there were a tremendously good set of questions asked, and the community is already getting a lot larger with people trying out Cobbler after hearing about it at Summit. I’m happy to see that.

The current idea behind Cobbler is to build a common installation service that various applications can use to deploy Linux (more on this below)rather than having to keep creating these components. I’ll also be extending it to deal with image-based deployments in addition to traditional kickstart deployments.

As always, we’ll continue to gather a large community of sysadmins to work together and build common tooling we can all share. The basic premise is that by working together, we can build tools that are more powerful than the tools we could build alone. By following an open development model with shared tools, the need to reinvent the same wheels to do the same tasks goes away.

We’re also building a large set of community documentation based on deployment best practices and tricks, and I hope to roll this into a nice openly licensed manual and deployment guide later this year. Open community, open code, open docs — neat!

And while all of this is nice, the most exciting part of Summit was the announcement about Spacewalk. Spacewalk is the project name for the open-sourcing of Red Hat Satellite Server. This is not a “community edition”, it’s everything. The upstream for all code in the project is going to the website, and we’re already seeing a lot of interest from existing Satellite customers and prospective users. We had a lot of great discussion at FudCON about places the project might go, and there have already been several non-Red Hat patches made against the codebase.

We also announced that Satellite will be using Cobbler to provide advanced deployment support next year, so we can already see the advantages of getting these tools to work together. Planned work includes adding open source database alternatives and improving our support for Fedora and derivative distributions.

In the future, Func may have a place in Spacewalk as well. We can also look at incorporating other proven open source management applications, tools, and libraries. Everyone is encouraged to join the Spacewalk mailing lists or IRC channels (#spacewalk on irc.freenode.net) if they are interested in learning more or have ideas/questions.

These three applications, in general, constitute a new way of thinking. Namely, how can we apply the Fedora Development model towards enterprise management applications and sysadmin-level tools and processes?

Rather than buy tooling from a vendor or inventing internal frameworks that disappear when one changes jobs or departments, what can we share and openly build together and re-use? While we use the Fedora model to produce a community-driven distribution, we’re now also using it to produce better ways to manage Enterprise Linux. This development model applies just as equally to Enterprise Linux as it does Fedora. It just works.

As Paul Frields (the Fedora Project Leader) indicated at FudCON, the future of Fedora (and in turn, Fedora Hosted Projects and Extras Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)) is about lowering barriers to entry and encouraging collaboration–we are already doing well on technical grounds. How do we encourage more collaboration around management software? For starters, we work at making it easier to install. And we must make sure the communities remain active and integral, and continue to grow.

A lot of management software is hard to find and install because it’s not yet part of the distribution. I would encourage all ISVs out there that write open source software to look at getting their content into EPEL, where it can be easily found via search and is yum-installable. I’d also like them to take a look at how we are building strong communities around our projects using Fedora Hosted Infrastructure–and to take those examples to their own projects and communities.

Regardless of who we work for, open communication and collaboration are how we get ahead–and Fedora (and EPEL) are providing an outstanding breeding ground for open source software now–even in what was previously thought of as an “Enterprise” type cathedral environment. I should also mention that the Fedora community is full of packaging experts and smart folks who can help you. Join #fedora-devel on irc.freenode.net and say hi.

If you’re not interested in development, but adminster systems and want to know how you can help out, take a look at Mike McGrath’s new CSI venture.

Good ideas come from where we least expect them. The Fedora development model and infrastructure are really powerful ways to create software, documentation, and tools that solve problems for people who need to manage their Linux infrastructure. Whether you are interested in Cobbler, Func, or Spacewalk–or even if you’re interested in Linux systems management in general–let’s get together, find better ways to collaborate, and invest in the operating systems that we all love.

So, that’s my summary of the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon. Boston’s a beautiful city and I will give it a pass for not having sweet tea at all available restaurants. I look forward to Summit and FUDCon next year–we’re growing fast in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux land, and there’s still many more places to go.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kernel Performance Optimization [PDF] - John Shakshober and Larry Woodman

Why Computers Are Getting Slower (And What We Can Do About It) [PDF] - Rik Van Riel

The Virtualization Toolbox. Open Source Solutions for Managing Virtual Environments [PDF 1] [PDF 2] - Dan Berrange and Richard Jones

Func - the Fedora Universal Network Connector [PDF] - Michael DeHann and Adrian Likins

Dynamic Grid Computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 [PDF] - Bryan Che

Missed the show? Catch up with our videos or check out the full list of available slide decks. We’ll be adding more of our (and your) favorites as they come in.

Other voices:

• Barton George (from Sun): Sun and Red Hat talk
• Halamka becomes an open source believer (from Dana Blankenhorn for ZDNet Healthcare)

Cobbler: Provisioning for Bare Metal and Virtualization
[ODP] slides by Michael DeHaan from his talk given Thursday June 19, 10:15 a.m.

And we still have a few more news items and blog entries about the Summit:

• Barton George (from Sun): Podcast interview with Jim Whitehurst
• Xen proponents question merits of Red Hat KVM hypervisor (Bridget Botelho for SearchServerVirtualization.com)
• IT leaders urged to contribute code to open-source projects (from Esther Schindler at Computerworld)

We know you’re all clamoring for more than links–the most popular question has been about the session and keynote videos and slide decks. The first few keynote videos are up at the Summit web site. We’ll be adding more as soon as some legal and liscensing issues are dealt with.

The slide decks are also on their way. The first few should be available this week, with more to follow.

And it won’t all be recap–also coming up are several articles that follow up on Summit and FUDCon topics, from the same folks that presented them in Boston.

In the news:

• Red Hat goes for virtualization (from Paul Mah at TechRepublic)
• Red Hat Launches oVirt Embedded KVM Hypervisor Project (from Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Linux Beacon)
• Red Hat opens Network…now how about a community? (from Matt Asay for CNet
• Red Hat expands open source virtualization applications (from Datamonitor via COMTEX at TradingMarkets.com)
• Red Hat beefs up identity and security management (from Bridget Botelho at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com)
• Red Hat to embrace virtualisation (from Egan Orion for CRN Australia)

Other voices:

• Jon ‘maddog’ Hall: Red Hat Summit Summary
• Mike McGrath (Fedora): Announcements from FUDCon
• Barton George (Sun): Back From Boston and the Red Hat Summit and FUDCON and Red Hat Summit/FUDcon: Pics and Podcasts

From FUDCon Boston, June 20, 2008:

The Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) is in full swing on its second day. We have another full day of exceptional hacking taking place on the third floor of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Just as the Red Hat Summit is drawing to a close downstairs–winding up with a half-day of sessions and panels–we’re just now kicking into high gear. This has been an exceptional way to introduce open source customers to the larger ecosystem behind the products they love, and the community that powers Fedora, the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Last night at the close of FUDCon Day 1, we had two huge events–the first came courtesy of Fedora’s Infrastructure team. Over the last couple of years, the team has built a world-class infrastructure for hosting and communication throughout the entire Fedora community. Last night, Infrastructure team leader Mike McGrath announced a one-two punch of free software goodness for Fedora. First, our Fedora Account System is now an OpenID provider. This means that the identity you create in the Fedora Project can be used across thousands of web sites. The other big announcement was the new Fedora telephony system, “Fedora Talk,” based on the juggernaut free software VoIP project Asterisk.

That’s right, Fedora contributors will be able to use VoIP to set up voice meetings that facilitate better and more efficient collaboration. There will also be features to ensure that those conversations don’t damage the openness and transparency on which Fedora thrives. As Mike announced in this recent blog post, the hardware and bandwidth have been provided courtesy of our friends at ServerBeach, and the dial-in numbers by Arrival Telecom and DiDDiscount.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst arrived in the FUDCon space just in time for Mike’s big announcement. I saw a smile spread across his face as he saw the incredible work done by our Infrastructure team–just a recent example of the constant, continuous improvements in Fedora. If you’re interested in what Jim had to say, Fedora engineer Jeremy Katz posted an excellent summary of the speech and subsequent Q&A.

This morning things kicked into high gear again. Some of today’s highlights:

• Our QA and Triage teams continued some very intense work on Fedora’s testing processes, and discussing the current and future use of Rawhide and how it can be used most effectively to improve the distribution.
• A brainstorming session was held by Max Spevack and Mairin Duffy on the future of the Spins website, and how to generate a user-friendly experience for people who want to create and consume customized versions of Fedora (“spins”). Max and Mairin make a great team for keeping the talk on-track and focused on the user experience (or “story”) before lunch, and afterward narrowing in on guidelines and goals for the spin process itself.
• The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) group members here at FUDCon also formed a hackfest session. The EPEL special interest group is all about helping enterprise Linux users use more of the thousands of software packages available in Fedora.
• The Community Architecture group had a long strategy meeting to talk about its funding for the rest of 2008–making sure it’s spent in a way that maximizes the benefits to Fedora and our community building goals. One of the most interesting things about our CA team–and frankly, one of the reasons many others want to emulate the way they build Fedora’s community–is that they conduct all this work openly and transparently. Anyone is free to see how we allocate our funds, set our priorities, and produce results from our community work.
• Thanks to our friends at Digium, the company behind Asterisk, many of our Infrastructure team, some folks who operate in remote areas of the globe, and a handful of other Fedora team leaders and engineers were able to receive SIP handsets. We’ll use those with the new Fedora Talk to test and implement new communications solutions for all our contributors.
• Around all this activity, there were a constant stream of visitors from the Red Hat Summit–people interested in the ways in which our community brings innovative new ideas and software to the world of free and open source software. Educators, engineers, system administrators, editors, students, journalists, C-level executives, and enthusiasts all were well represented.

It’s been an exhausting but incredibly fulfilling couple of days thus far–and the BarCamp day on Saturday is sure to be just as solid. Just another few days in the whirlwind of community-powered goodness that we call the Fedora Project.

• Red Hat in Boston, Part 2.1: Fixing Patent Failure Without A Bulldozer (Serdar Yegulalp for Information Week)
• Red Hat, Amazon Team Up in the Cloud (Dan Berthiaume for eWeek)
• A new virtualizer for Red Hat (Gordon Haff for CNet News.com)
• Red Hat debuts new hypervisor, open-sources Linux management platform (Jon Brodkin for Network World)
• Red Hat chief: We are hard to do business with (Andrew Donoghue for ZDNet.co.uk
• Red Hat to embrace virtualisation (Egan Orion for The Inquirer)
• Red Hat Summit: Single sign-on via IPA server (from heise online)

Other voices:

• Paul Frields (Fedora Project Leader): Saturday Morning Fever (FUDCon info)
• Jeremy Katz (Red Hat engineer): Jim Whitehurst at FUDcon (including a summary of his Q&A)
• Jesse Keating (Red Hat): FUDcon

This morning instead of a keynote, experts from throughout Red Hat gathered for a Q&A panel:
- Craig Muzilla
- Iain Gray
- Paul Cormier
- Katrinka McCallum
- Brian Stevens
- Scott Crenshaw

We’ll be posting video soon of this session along with the other keynotes. Until then, here’s a quick summary of what the experts had to say on a few of the questions:

On Red Hat’s patent policy
Paul: We won’t protect patents for our own good. We do it for the upstream, and we do it for the proliferation of open source.

The Iced Tea project recently passed Sun’s compliance test. How does Red Hat look to use open Java with no encumbrances?
Craig: We’ve been an active member in OpenJDK because it’s right for the industry. Sun has done the right thing by opening it. We are actively looking at using it within the JBoss product line and leveraging the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of the business to make them work together, making it more attractive for our customers.

What is the most interesting question or discussion you’ve had at the Summit?
Iain: At Iain’s Booth, many people were asking about new products, esp MRG. Some of the questions were from beta customers. Many had just come from sessions about new technology, and they were interested in finding out about using those things. And there were a lot of questions about virtualization.

Paul: The thing I’ve heard over and over: “We didn’t realize how many open source projects beyond the operating system were ready for prime time.” Also a lot of questions about where we’re going next and the products we’re bringing to market.

Katrinka: The most popular question I’ve heard: How do I find the Spacewalk site? (It’s spacewalk.redhat.com–the open source Satellite project we announced this week.)

What’s the demand for virtualization? What is Red Hat seeing in that area?
Scott: It’s one of the hottest topics in enterprises, and even mid-size organizations. There is a wave of production use around server consolidation, and a lot of interest in wider deployment. Companies are grappling with the ramifications of security, risk policy, management, balancing workloads. So we have rich conversations with customers who deploy virtualization, and almost every one has plans to make it a core part of their IT architecture.

Paul: One of the things I see frequently in the press that limits the picture–the biggest use case you see is server consolidation. And I think people aren’t really seeing that that’s just one of many. Others include high availability, virtual desktop, cloud computing. Virtualization is the foundation to enable that style of comptuing. Many uses are in their infancy; many haven’t been implemented yet. I think it’s going to be the mainstream. It’s the next generation of the operating system.

Scott: One of the impediments is economic. If you have to pay so much to virtualize a server, there’s only so much you can do with it. So our solution is to build it in–it’s available on every server. Think to when we used to buy TCP stacks separately. When they were integrated, new use cases, new paradigms came up. So I think we’re on the verge of transformation as virtualization is implemented ubiquitously without the barriers that were there a year or two ago.

The video will be posted to the Summit homepage.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 get another year of TLC. (Austin Modine for The Register)
• Red Hat Summit Panel: Who ‘won’ OOXML Battle? (Chris Kanaracus for CIO.com)
• Red Hat opens Satellite service code for Spacewalk (from Austin Modine for The Register–who the editor would like to give props to for the Bowie-referencing subtitle)
• Virtualization and Linux: Red Hat unveils new vision. (Steven J. Vaugn-Nichols for IDG News Service)
• Red Hat CTO elaborates on lofty ‘cloud’ vision (Pam Derringer for SearchEnterpriseLinux.com)
• SPYRUS® Demonstrates Pocketsize PKI System at Red Hat Summit 2008 (from Businesswire)
• Red Hat intros VMware hypervisor alternative based on KVM (Bridget Botelho for SearchServerVirtualization.com)
• Red Hat develops Linux-based hypervisor, virtualization security tool (Jon Brodkin for Network World)
• Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit (Virtualization.com)
• Jaspersoft and Red Hat Extend Relationship to Deliver Enhanced Reporting Capabilities for Enterprise Customers
• Red Hat Summit: embedded hypervisor and Web front-end for virtualisation environments (from heise online)

From our own press corp:

• Red Hat Delivers Realtime Capabilities & High Performance Messaging
• More on MRG from the Press blogs

Other voices:

• Tom Tromey (Red Hat): GCC Summit News
• Jeremy Katz (Red Hat engineer): Red Hat Summit Day 1

Leadership keynote: Jim Whitehurst

Jim Whitehurst focused on how Red Hat enables customers to gain value by entering the open source ecosystem. As examples, he talked about SELinuxAMQP. The Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) was developed internally at JP Morgan for fast messaging. Whitehurst described the visionary CIO of JP Morgan, who realized JP Morgan could improve the code and reduce their maintenance commitment over the long term.

Whitehurst encouraged customers to look at the code they develop internally. “The waste in IT software development is extraordinary,” he said. By bringing that coding effort into the open and building a community around it, enterprises can look at millions in savings.

Visionary keynote: Dr. John Halamka

Continuing the discussion of the value of open culture, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School, talked about healthcare IT. In modern medical IT, he said, “Open and transparent is good, closed and proprietary is bad.” Dr. Halamka’s talk focused on the millions of Eastern Massachusets medical records handled by their Red Hat cluster, placing that in the context of national work on open medical IT standards.

Dr. Halamka works as part of the American Health Information Community (AHIC). One of his main projects with AHIC is improving medical record standards. He describes it as “500 groups working to harmonize standards.” The AHIC defines a number of use cases to drive their work. One of their projects, for example, might be making it possible to get your medical records in a totally portable way.

In Massachusetts, the IT group Dr. Halamka oversees has put this planning into action. Patient records are transmitted on an entirely open source architecture, with edge servers at all the medical providers and payers. As an example, Dr. Halamka pulled up his own record, then joyfully showed his mostly-IT audience the underlying XML source.

By using open standards running on an open source infrastructure, they move patient data wherever it needs to go without delay. In the process, they have saved over $20 million a year by not having licensing and fees for a slower clearinghouse to ship records.

As a call to the innovative open IT audience, Dr. Halamka listed the items that keep him awake at night: Electronic health records for doctors; storage as a utility; e-Prescribing; data sharing for clinical care among a community of caregivers; security; RFID and bar-coding; providing remote decision support; compliance requirements; internal and external websites that provide social tools for end-users; and disaster recovery.

Partner keynote: Jim Stallings

Jim Stallings from IBM presented the partner keynote, which served to bring home some of these open source lessons from the big infrastructure/large enterprise/data center perspective. What are global CEOs/CIOs worried about? Globalization, scale, complexity, security, and energy. In particuar, Stallings explained how energy has been the surprise concern that is going to change how data centers operate in the future.

In this transformation of the data center, one area of cost savings includes dealing with heat. As a global concern, power and cooling are going to drive data center changes, with Linux at the center because of flexibility, speed, and a history of caring about these matters.

Stallings describes an average achievable energy savings of 40%, with an average payback of less than two years. For every dollar of energy savings, there is an average additional six to eight dollars in operational savings.

In the news:

• Red Hat chief calls for open source missionary work. (Austin Modine for Channel Register)
• Red Hat meanders into hypervisor market. (Austin Modine for Channel Register)
• Red Hat in Boston, parts 0, 1.0, and 1.1. (Serdar Yegulalp, for InformationWeek)
• Red Hat Network to be open sourced. (from PC World)
• Red Hat unveils new virtualization initiatives. (from Network World)
• Red Hat Summit 2008 opens in Boston (from heise online)
• Red Hat offers JBoss on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. (Pam Derringer, for SearchEnterpriseLinux.com)

From our own press corps:

• Red Hat Exchange Adds Three New Partners
• JBoss Enters the Cloud
• Red Hat Advances Open Virtualization to Drive for Market Leadership

Other voices:

• Jeremy Katz (Red Hat engineer): Day 0 wrap-up and a note about campground sessions
• Max Spevack (former Fedora Project Leader): Starts a helpful discussion on how to best get from boston airport to fudcon/sheraton for $5
• Paul Frields (current Fedora Project Leader): More on FUDcon Thursday
• Barton George (from Sun): In Boston for Red Hat