abiCloud 1.0.0 RC3 has been released

We’ve launched a new version of our product: abiCloud. The version is a new release candidate for 1.0.0. You can download it for Linux or Windows from sourceforge.

Fixed bugs

• [ABICLOUD-340] – Reset button never receives the ‘power on’ event.
• [ABICLOUD-352] – Unexpected error bundling images: Cannot recover from error.
• [ABICLOUD-356] – Power on events not received
• [ABICLOUD-367] – Tracer: problem with column virtualmachine

Improvements

• [ABICLOUD-346] – Add a ‘recalculate’ buton per datacenter to calculate the existing performance
• [ABICLOUD-363] – Change USER section name like GROUPS

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If you need support, you can get it from several sources:

• Documentation
• Forums
• IRC: (irc.freenode.net, #abicloud)

Tags: abiCloud, Abiquo, release, release candidate

A short overview of the Cloud Computing Workshop in Madrid

Last thursday we had the Cloud Computing Workshop in Madrid in the facilities of the CAN (Caja de Ahorros de Navarra), one of our investors.

Our guest start was Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Service Evangelist for Europe, that showed us how works the different services of the Cloud Computing platform from Amazon. He performed live demos of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Most of the audiences knew about these services, so they jumped right to the technical questions, and honestly I think Simone showed a deep knowledge of the platform answering even the most bizarre questions. The workshop took almost two hours, and it can give us an idea of the interest of the content and issues of the event. There were a lot of different questions, from type of virtual images supported, input/output throughput, bandwith available in S3, SLAs issues, taxes (VAT refund in Europe) and account management.

Following Amazon, Daniel García García (fillito) from minube.com, a social network of travelers, explained how they apply the dinamyc features of Amazon EC2 and S3 to handle the load peaks in their pltaform. Really intesting stuff.

An then it was my turn. With some technical issues I explained the features of AbiCloud our software to create Public and Private Clouds. I tried to communicate Abiquo’s mission and vision about Cloud Computing, and how we want to help enterprises and ISPs to jump in the Cloud’s revolution bandwagon.  I tried to perform a little demo and I had a litlle of every single problem that could happen: Google Maps did not work, I had an issue with my 3G connection… Well, you know, a demo.

Finally, Jose Manuel Estrada from Sun Microsystems gave us the vision of  Sun Microsystems. There is no doubt, Sun has reinvented itself to face the Cloud Computing challenge and it’s launching very interesting initiatives. One of the most surprising was the new Public Cloud Services to offer in their own Datacenters to compete with Google and Amazon. As a major difference, they will release under an open source license the management APIs. A brave and interesting bet. Sun will launch this summer storage services similar to S3, full datacenter virtualization (a bit like AbiCloud) and later on they will offer ESB and MOM services.

When we wrapped up we had the feeling of lack of time, something common when the topics covered were really interesting. So some of the attendes and the speakers decided to keep on talking about Cloud Computing with some beers and tapas. The best way to terminate the event.

Tags: Abiquo, Amazon, minube, sun

Cloud Computing Workshop in Madrid featuring Amazon Web Services [ES]

El Cloud Computing Workshop de Madrid es un evento gratuito pensado para todos aquellos desarrolladores, arquitectos, jefes de proyecto y directores de tecnología que quieran saber más sobre las posibilidades de este nuevo paradigma de la mano de uno de los actores principales del mercado como Amazon Web Services, y de una de las empresas que apuestan por el código abierto para crear Nubes Privadas.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) es una colección de servicios remotos de computación ofrecidos por internet por Amazon.com, Este conjunto de servicios tiene la característica de pagarse por su uso (pay-per-use o pay-as-you-go). AWS se ha convertido en el proveedor de servicios de Cloud Computing más importante del mundo, con unos 400.000 clientes estimados a finales de 2008. Simone Brunozzi es Amazon Web Services Evangelist para Europa. Es un magnífico comunicador cuya labor es la de dar a conocer los servicios de Cloud Computing que Amazon Web Services ofrece a sus clientes en todo el mundo.

Abiquo es una startup de Barcelona con presencia en Madrid y Palo Alto (California) que desarrolla una plataforma open source para la creación y gestión de Nubes Privadas e Híbridas (Private and Hybrid Cloud Computing). El producto abiCloud puede descargarse de la web, permitiendo a sus usuarios montar un entorno Cloud en sus proprios sistemas. Diego Parrilla es Director de Desarrollo de Negocio y de Estrategia Tecnológica de Producto de Abiquo. Además es editor de Nubeblog.com, blog en Español sobre Cloud Computing.

Actualización: Día del evento, 2 de Abril.

Agenda:

9.45 – 10.00 Llegada y Registro

10.00 – 10.15 Presentación qué es Cloud Computing. Abiquo (Castellano)

10.15 – 11.30 Amazon Web Services Workshop. AWS (Inglés)

11.30 – 12.00 Ruegos y Preguntas (Inglés y Castellano)

12.00 – 12.15 Descanso

12.15 – 13.00 Presentación Abicloud. Abiquo (Castellano)

13.00 – 13.15 Ruegos y Preguntas (Castellano)

13.15 Fin del Evento.

NOTA: La agenda no se ha cerrado, es posible que cambie con nuevos ponentes.

El evento tendrá lugar en la Cancha CAN en Juan Bravo nº3. Caja Navarra ha tenido la gentileza de cedernos espacio para realizar el evento.

El registro es gratuito, pero no hay muchas plazas (50). Si quieres registrarte, hazlo en la web de información del evento se encuentra en eventbrite.com aquí:

http://amazonabiquomad.eventbrite.com/

o dale a este botón

¡Os espero!

Tags: Abiquo, Amazon, events

abiCloud

We are looking forward to showing to the world a community version of our cloud platform to allow users to manage their public or private datacenter in an easy way adding cloud computing functionalities.

Tags: abiCloud, Abiquo, cloud computing

Abiquo’s middleware soon available in Windows

We aim to have a platform-independent product so it became necessary to develop a portable version for Windows. Currently, Abiquo’s middleware runs over Cygwin (which is not the best solution :))

One of our principles is avoiding developing and maintaining any environment or project that already exists. We won’t spend our time reinventing the wheel! (in the open source world, we mean). Therefore, we downloaded; studied and evaluated the two nowadays most used portable projects: Apache Portable Runtime Project and Netscape Portable Runtime. Both offer complete, interesting and useful portable options for Linux developers.

However, we finally decided to implement our own portable runtime :). And we did that to maintain our best middleware skill: the small 300k binary file. Even if the two portable options are excellent developments; they would duplicate the extension of the binary file.

Abiquo’s middleware has its critical modules in HashMap, Threads and Sockets. In order to adapt the Threads we needed the pthreads-win32 project as dependence. Winsockets has its own implementation and we only had to adapt the source code for the SocketServer class. So, finally, we made and abstract layer for a Windows Hashmap.

You’ll be able to download and try this Windows version in the new version of the Abiquo platform (coming soon…)

Tags: Abiquo, Apache, Middleware, netscape, windows

New community tool: IRC Chat

Now, you can talk with us on #abiquo channel on irc.freenode.net server.

See you there to solve your doubts :)

Tags: Abiquo, chat, community, irc

Futurlink in a box

Abiquo has began a project with Futurlink, the leader in marketing management for mobile devices.

Abiquo helps the costumer with the integration of its products with virtual machine technologies.

The main idea and benefits is that Futurlink will be able to use and develop new features of its marketing management products in heterogeneos environments and markets where nowadays it’s difficult to appear.

Tags: Abiquo, futurlink, VirtualBox, virtualization

AbiCloud: the cloud computing of Abiquo

If a Cloud is not a Grid where does abiquo fit? Abiquo is taken from the Ubiquity definition, and regarding cloud computing the keys are abstraction and availability, so yes we do fit!

We strongly believe an standard is necessary, in this way we agree with the cloud evangelists. That’s where abiCloud is going to try to fill the gap.

First of all, we are focussing in the Cloud Resource Description definition and the Virtual Application Life cycle. OVF and WS-management is our strong bid:

As regarding the administrator interface we chose the GoGrid strategy, make it pretty first and then make it accessible. However, the chosen RIA technology is FLEX.

But that’s just the firsts steps of a big project. The community plays an important role,  so if you are interested send an e-mail to clouding@abiquo.com, ideas, feed-back, suggestions are more than welcomed.

Tags: Abiquo, cloud computing, flex

Our platform is available for download :-)

Just a few lines to announce you that today we have released a beta version of our platform :-)

You can download it from our site: www.abiquo.com

It’s an open source platform for building & managing distributed applications easily. For me, the most distinctive feature is that you can use small devices (routers, smartphones, sensors…) as nodes, due to the small footprint of our middleware.

Now we are finishing different products over it:

• RIA management portal
• abiCloud: [Yes, another competitor in the market] An application to spread services in a cloud, or build them into your company
• abiNtense: A set of tools for boosting the execution of distributed apps (through AI agents) while guaranteeing the security and QoS
• abiData: An implementation of map-reduce for managing terabytes of data in different machines

As a reference, trovit is using our platform for improving their SEO (distributed crawlers, intensive data processing, avoiding html cache…). Another one could be a demo prototype that we made for www.fon.com which is a good approach to the “internet of things”.

Ideas, feed-back, suggestions, even critics, are more than welcome :-)

Tags: Abiquo, platform

A day in the Mountain

Abiquo Team enjoyed this last weekend in the mountain.

The aim of the activity was further enhance and improve the team building :)

We were sleeping in hammocks in the middle of the forest in a place located between Catalonia and South France.

On Saturday morning, it was time to release some adrenaline through some jumping and climbing.

Maybe, it’s better to see some examples:

Tags: Abiquo, team building