Update from the Calico Team – July 21

Has it really been only 13 days since we launched?    It’s been a hectic time, with the team fielding lots of interest from potential partners and users for Calico.  From a development perspective, we’ve still found time to chisel away on a couple of key development items.

Chef-based install

We’re currently working on a cookbook of Chef recipes to automate the install of Calico and help people to get started.  For those of you who are not aware, Chef is a centralised configuration and deployment management system.  Chef ‘recipes’ are instructions that are used to deploy and configure machines, ensuring that they end up in a known state. It’s intended to make installing machines with specific configurations repeatable, for example it allows folks to install code across large numbers of servers in their data center.

Support for RedHat Enterprise Linux

We’ve been extending the supported operating systems to include RHEL6.5.  The key Project Calico code is entirely portable to any Linux-like OS (it’s written in Python, and it only makes use of a couple of standard Linux kernel commands).   However, we understand source code installs can be painful so we’re putting together a set of RPMs to cover the install of Calico –  including patched versions of the Nova and Neutron RPMs.  A Chef-based install on RHEL6.5 will follow up shortly.

For those of you champing at the bit for the next release, we’re running sprints every 2 weeks or so (but that will extend over the holiday period in August).   In keeping with the Project Calico theme, the sprint names are based around cat breeds.   So, expect Sprint German Rex (somewhat apt given the recent World Cup Final) to be touching down very soon.   Stay tuned.

We’ve also been defining our roadmap and getting input from several of our partners and prospective users of Project Calico on what they’d like to see.

And finally…. we’ve been growing the size of the team working on Project Calico, so readers will see some contributions from the new members over the next few weeks.