Canonical Voices

Cloud management dominates the theme for Landscape 1.4 with new features that allow you to manage your private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as easily as you manage your instances on Amazon EC2. Also released are new features that help system administrators be more efficient including time based package updates and role based access. These new features will be available this week on both the Hosted and Dedicated Server Editions of Landscape.

Cloud Computing: UEC Support

Building upon our support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, users can now start, stop and manage their private Ubuntu instances on their UEC from within Landscape. Users simply enter their credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage an instance. We’ve designed Landscape to work directly with both Amazon and Eucalyptus console pages so you can manage your instances without having to use any other tools. Landscape securely stores your security credentials making is easy to spin up new instances on UEC or EC2 at anytime. Once the instances are initiated, they all display on the same page allowing you manage all your physical, virtuali and Cloud instances in one place.

New Timed Package Updates

Users can now schedule package updates, system reboots and shutdowns in the future with minute increments. This gives System Administrators the flexibility to schedule activities for systems to occur during planned maintenance windows or low use periods to minimise the impact on the network. Now that we have developed the time / scheduling function, look for us to add this to other areas of Landscape where it it makes sense, like scheduling scripts in the future.

Administrator Roles

As Landscape is deployed in larger enterprises the need to delegate and limit access to systems has become a key need. Now, in addition to having a master admin who can manage all systems within a Landscape account, you can delegate access to systems to other administrators. This builds on our tags function (which allows you to tag computers performing the same function and update them with a single command) to allocate full access to systems by admin. Typically this means sys admins in different areas can be given full access to their local systems, but not to those in another area or country. Like tags, assigning systems to other administrators is completely flexible so you can use what ever criteria you need.

The Landscape 1.4 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.10 server edition. Details are at www.canonical.com/landscape

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager

This is a really short announcement, since it’s almost 4am here in Brazil and I should actually be sleeping, instead of building installers for Plone (ha!). But hey, this is exciting enough to keep some people awake all night.

Today, Canonical announces the availability of Landscape Dedicated Server!

So what is it?

One of the many things the Landscape team at Canonical has been working on since early this year is a version of Landscape that can be run on a local network, as opposed to the hosted, Software-as-a-Service version of Landscape that is available to the general public at the moment.

Many people have left us feedback saying that this would be desirable for them, and would actually make Landscape an option in environments where data cannot leave the local network boundaries due to strict policies. So if you’re one of this people or you have evaluated Landscape in the past but decided it was not for you due to this specific reason, this is the time to give Landscape a second look!

So thanks to everyone that has submitted ideas and requests for new features. We’re listening! Even more feedback-driven features are being added monthly, free of charge for existing customers, and the user interface is being polished and fine-tuned for managing large installations. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Today we are announcing the Landscape Dedicated Server Edition — a stand alone version of Landscape that users can install on-site giving them complete control of their Ubuntu environment. This is one of our most requested features so we modified the Hosted version of landscape, keeping all the management, auditing and monitoring features, packaging it as a software appliance you install on your systems. Now Landscape can operate locally so all your information transfers over your local network and all system configuration, policies and profiles are stored on your infrastructure.

New features available with the Dedicated Server and Hosted edition in the October release include:

• Manage your Cloud and physical systems in one console – including server, desktop and Amazon EC2 Cloud instances.

• Scheduled package updates – Now you can schedule package updates and machine restarts for maintenance windows or when network usage is low minimizing the impact to your users.

• Administrator Delegation – Group your systems to meet your needs then assign permissions to different administrators enforcing work rules and enhancing security.

To be the first to know about availability of the Landscape Server, get informed about upcoming Webinars and download the brochure.

Of course we will continue to offer the Hosted version of Landscape along side the Dedicated Server giving users a choice in how they want to manage their Ubuntu systems. All the new features mentioned above are planned to be available in October when we release the next major update of Landscape and Ubuntu Karmic Koala. The Landscape Dedicated Server is available for order now, but installation will not be available until late September / early October.

Click for detailed information on Landscape, Support and our Training products and services.

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager

Over the past few months, friends and family have been very curious about how my new job is going, and it’s been hard to stop for a moment and go into detail about it. I’ve been simply nodding and saying “It’s fine”.

This is an attempt at summarizing all the activity that happened in the last five months, though it’s far from being a short summary. If I had to pick a two words to describe my first five months at Canonical, it would be “Pure Awesomeness“. For a more detailed view, grab a cup of joe or your favorite other beverage and keep on reading.

Today is a special day. Exactly five months ago, on January 5th, I joined Canonical to work on the Landscape project.

It has been quite a ride so far, with two sprints with the Landscape team, AllHands and UDS in Barcelona just a week ago, and lots of excitement about the future. Saying that I’m completely stunned by the work everyone at Canonical has been putting together and how much the teams have grown in the last few months doesn’t do enough justice to it.

At AllHands and UDS we got a short preview of the things that are coming out in the next cycle and beyond. An example of that is the newly formed Design and User Experience (DUX) team which will not only be focusing on Ubuntu itself, but on many other areas across Canonical and the whole Open Source community in general.

At UDS, the DUX team had a special ‘booth’ where any person from any project could walk to them and get advice about their personal or favorite application. One person which has favorably used such advice already was Seif Lofty, from Gnome Zeitgeist. I met Seif during breakfast at the first day of UDS and I cannot describe how excited he was about simply *being* at UDS. And he was certainly twice as happy when he left.

Another person I had the joy to meet was David Siegel, of Gnome Do fame. We teamed during AllHands on the infamous “Fun In The Woods” activity, which had some people walking like zombies on the day after.

Even more importantly, I was able to meet many many more other colleagues from different teams and wrap up some loose ends from tasks that I got started during the first couple months. I’m definitely impressed by the amount of plain brilliant people that are part of Canonical as of today.

In a sense, being at a Canonical event is very much like being at a Plone conference. Everyone seems to be very receptive about new ideas and very friendly and laid back. And as a bonus, I was able to exercise my (not so secret now) power of throwing some crazy ideas around and see how they influence people. And man, I’m already impressed by the outcomes, just a week after the fact.

To me, this has been the most rewarding thing so far, to be able make big contributions not in lines of code, but in ideas that can make a concrete difference in the hands of the right people. This is something that can only be possible at a company the size Canonical is at the moment, where it’s just big enough that you can grab a mind or two to push an agenda without affecting the rest of the team and still small enough that you can influence decisions.

As my colleague Jamu would best describe, “I’m PUMPED!”. :)

But that’s not all. Software-wise, I was able to make some big contributions too. The Landscape team just finished a 6 month development cycle that brought many cool features to life. I’m really happy with that, and specially with the speed that this team can get features from the black board into reality. It’s also a much different environment than what I was used to, with very well-defined and refined processes for ensuring the overall quality of anything that is produced. One process that I’m specially enjoying is the requirement for two positive reviews before landing a branch. I hope to talk more about that soon (that is, sooner than 5 months from now *wink*).

As for my role in the team, it is quite different than what I’m used to. I’ve been focusing a lot on the UI aspects of Landscape, on ways to make things more obvious and more streamlined. I’ve been also writing a ton of Javascript, and collaborating with other teams to define better policies for Javascript testing in general. And finally, we will now have a person from the DUX team dedicated to working with us, which will push work on the Landscape UI even further.

I also had the chance of interacting with the Launchpad team, which has a much more refined process due to the size of their team. Over at Launchpad, I started a branch back in mid-December, even before starting at Canonical, to allow Launchpad to use the Chameleon Template Engine.

That was another wild ride, and during the course of this project I was able to contribute tons of fixes upstream to Malthe Borch to make Chameleon even more compatible with plain old ZPT. In fact, it is so compatible at the moment that due to the magic of z3c.ptcompat Launchpad will be able to run *both* Chameleon and ZPT with the flip of an environment variable. Even more stunning, the changes required to code were minimal, basically changing imports to use z3c.ptcompat, and in templates we’ve had to fix some non-XHTML compliant ones and remove unused i18n tags. I am happy to announce that this branch will soon be merged (it was submitted to PQM, successfully accepted and is waiting to land the buildbot queue). The bad news is that not all tests pass at the moment with Chameleon enabled, but we will be dogfooding and fixing those tests as we go. It was too much pain already to maintain a nearly 6 month old branch outside the main tree. ;)

I am really interested in many of the things that the Launchpad team is doing, process-wise. The PQM seems like a very nice idea for a bigger team like theirs, though it would probably be useful to our smaller team in Landscape too, and to others in general. Hopefully I will get a chance to explore it more and talk about it during the upcoming FISL 10, in Porto Alegre.

Lastly, but not least important, I’m also working on getting nightly builds of the Bzr Installer for Windows rolling, and a more streamlined process for the official builds. Karl Fogel, of Producing OSS fame, and our Launchpad Ombudsman is making sure I keep my promises about that, which is yet another great incentive.

All in all, there’s of course a ton of things I forgot to talk about and which happened in the last 5 months, but this post is already getting too long so I will stop right here and save some of the meat for a future one. Stay tuned!

Announcing the release of Landscape 1.3 – the next version of Canonical’s management and monitoring software that lets you manage multiple Ubuntu systems as easily as one. In addition, Landscape enables you to monitor all your systems from a single Web interface reducing the complexity of managing multiple systems. The theme of 1.3 is Cloud and scalability.

Cloud Computing: EC2 Support
Landscape 1.3 introduces support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud service. Users can now start, stop and manage their Ubuntu instances on Amazon EC2 from within Landscape.  Just enter your EC2 credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage one of our pre-configured versions of Ubuntu that include the Landscape Client.  We have both 32 and 64 bit server versions available in both the US and EU regions. Once you started, you can use Landscape to manage and monitor them as you would your physical systems. Landscape saves you time by allowing you to manage your physical, virtualized and Amazon EC2 instances from one page.

New Custom Graphs
Users can now create and store trends of key system parameters allowing them to view and act on issues before they impact system performance. This gives System Administrators the flexibility of writing a script to monitor any machine readable parameter that is important to them such as temperature, memory and disk usage.

Knowledge Base
We’ve taken the experience our support engineers have gained with Landscape and created a library of articles that are now available in our knowledge base. There are hundreds or articles that you can search through that will save you time by allowing to quickly find and learn about common procedures and fixes.

The Landscape 1.3 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.04 server edition (Jaunty Jackalope). Read more at the Landscape blog or get product details here

Ken Drachnik – Landscape

No, this is not a blog post about the kind of landscape you’re accustomed to, though it might trigger a few ‘I want to be a Landscape Architect’ thoughts from a person or two.

The news this time is that I’m going through a landscape change myself, and to me it’s still a bit scary just to think about it.

The last such change in my life happened roughly ten years ago when I left my job as PHP Programmer and Systems Administrator at a small ISP to start my own company with a few colleagues from university. At that time, leaving PHP behind to learn this new (to me) fancy things called Zope and Python felt really weird, not to mention the fact that I was about 20 and knew no-one of my age that had successfully started a web development company (I mean, I live in a very small town, this is not Silicon Valley).

So cutting to the chase, I would like to let everybody know I will be joining the Landscape team at Canonical starting January 5th. I will not be leaving Enfold Systems though. We keep working together part time at least until April, where we expect to make at least one big release of a fully eggified Enfold Server based on Plone 3.2 in that timeframe. After April, I will still be doing work for Enfold Systems, but the time available for that will much more constrained.

Joining the Landscape team is very exciting to me, not only because I will get to work with some really smart people, but also because I will be working from home and being supervised by one of the top minds in the Brazilian Python scene: Gustavo Niemeyer, responsible for pearls like `Mocker`, `Storm` and `Smart`. And on top of that, I will get to learn new ways of managing and collaborating within a distributed software development team, a subject that was theme for my graduation thesis.

Last, but not least important, there’s a long story of back and forth between me and Canonical that dates back as far as 2004. On that year, DebConf 4 was happening in Porto Alegre which is about one hour drive from where I live.

Hanging out on the #zope3-dev irc channel I’ve noticed that one guy, Steve Alexander, connected from an IP range in Brazil. That struck me as odd because I didn’t know Steve very well, but maybe well enough to guess that something hot was going on. So Steve told me he was here for DebConf, and I self-invited me to stop by and say `hi`.

Arriving at DebConf, I met Steve personally for the first time, and again had an odd sensation there: Steve and about 30-40 folks where separated from the rest of the DebConf crowd on their own room, hacking away. I also met Mark Shuttleworth there and saw him talk about his space flight. That was one of the most exciting things and very heart-warming to me since my dream as a kid was to be an astronaut.

Later on that same day I came to know they were creating a new distro: they were taking name suggestions and voting. It was not surprise at least to me when I first saw Ubuntu being mentioned in the news, though I don’t recall clearly if that was one of the suggestions being voted.

Having just finished a big project using Zope 3 and relational databases, Steve quickly asked for my input on the preliminary design of a Zope 3-based web application for managing translations, which I promptly gave. The code I was looking at right there was the beginning of Launchpad. Up until very recently, Launchpad was powered by a creation of mine named `sqlos`, which has now been replaced by `storm`.

Steve asked me if I was interested in joining the team, but I had to decline given that I had just signed up with Enfold Systems, which was only about a month old at that time. I did put them in touch with a good friend I met only a couple years before: Christian Reis (kiko). In retrospect, that might have been one of the best contributions I made to Canonical, and to Open Source in general.

So, all in all, very exciting news for me. Canonical has a special place in my heart since I basically saw when Ubuntu and Launchpad were born and have some really good friends working there. The situation is no different with Enfold Systems. I have been working with Alan Runyan since before Enfold was Enfold, and really since before Plone was Plone: when Plone 1.0 was announced I was with Alan Runyan, Paul Everitt and Alexander Limi in Paris, at SolutionsLinux 2003, participating on a Zope 3 sprint, mind you.

To summarize, I will be splitting my time between Enfold Systems and Canonical between January 5th and April 1st 2009. After that I will be working full time at Canonical but still expect to contribute significantly at Enfold Systems. One of the responsibilities I have right now and which I don’t want to drop is building the Plone installers for Windows. Hopefully I will keep doing that. Unless some Ubuntu dude sneaks in by night and erases my Windows partition, that is. :)