Open Stack

Hello all,

After a meeting in Brno a few weeks back I met up with a fellow
RedHat colleague Steven Hardy, who is working on a project called
Heat (an OpenStack incubator project).  After watching his
presentation on OpenStack and then later his talk about Heat at the
EMEA OpenStack day we got chatting, and the subject of Image
Building in OpenStack came up.

The project I currently work on, "Aeolus" has a suite of tools for
managing federated clouds.  One of the tools we've created is called
Imagefactory and is designed specifically to allow automated
building, converting and uploading of images to a number of Cloud
providers.  We decided it would be worthwhile to get together and
try to integrate the two projects, since Imagefactory had recently
gained a provider plugin for OpenStack.

The result of this experiment is a proof of concept that we pulled
together in a few days.  We put together a video that demo's the
thing in action.  You can view it here (it's only around 6mins).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdBM4HA3QUk

We'd be interested to see what other users think of this.  We aim to
create a horizon plugin that should be easily included in existing
OpenStack installations.  We'd love to get feedback from you guys.

Is this something you would find useful?
Can you envisage this fitting into your current processes?

Hopefully this can provide a starting point to discuss image-building
requirements for OpenStack, which will provide valuable input to the
Imagefactory team, who are interested in adding further, more scalable
support for OpenStack to Imagefactory

Regards

Martyn