openATTIC (Posts about development)

The openATTIC project enters maintenance mode

Lenz Grimmer — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 14:20:01 GMT

If you have been following this blog closely, you may have already noticed that the frequency of new openATTIC releases and development activity in general has been slowing down over the course of the last 1.5 years.

We've been doing several bug fix releases of openATTIC 3.7 (and will continue to do so), but have not released a new major version with new features for quite some time. We also have not added support for Ceph "Mimic" or "Nautilus" (the current supported version of Ceph in openATTIC is "Luminous").

Instead, we have spent most of our energy in enhancing and improving the upstream Ceph Dashboard to become a full replacement for openATTIC. And we're happy to announce that we've reached feature parity (and much more) with openATTIC with the current Ceph Nautilus release!

Ceph Dashboard has been developed nearly from scratch, and we have been able to address a number of shortcomings that we identified in the openATTIC architecture over the course of its life cycle. There's great value in being able to start over again and to rethink some previous design decisions; we're very grateful to the Ceph community for giving us this opportunity.

Moving our focus upstream also allowed us to gather a much larger developer community around our efforts, which helped tremendously in adding new features and improving the existing functionality in a very short period of time. I am very proud of what we have achieved over the course of the past 20 months and we are very thankful for all the contributions and feedback that we've received so far!

Working with the upstream Ceph project directly also has the additional benefit of being part of the software distribution "out of the box" - there's no need to install any additional software! This way, we're able to reach a much wider audience of users.

If you have been using openATTIC before, many parts of the Dashboard will likely look familiar to you. We hope that switching to this new web-based management tool will be seen as an improvement and step forward from a user perspective.

If you are missing anything in the Dashboard that openATTIC used to provide, please get in touch with us and let us know! We're very keen on getting feedback as well as contributions.

Ceph Manager Dashboard Screenshots as of 2019-01-17

Lenz Grimmer — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 16:32:21 GMT

A lot has happened since I last wrote about the Ceph Manager Dashboard on this blog. This project has grown significantly in several ways since then: lots of new features were added in preparation for the upcoming Ceph "Nautilus" release, and the team working on this project has also grown quite noticeably.

I'll be talking about this journey in more detail at the upcoming DevConf.CZ and FOSDEM conferences and upcoming blog posts, but I'd like to share some screenshots as teasers for the time being - enjoy!

Note that these are made from a current development snapshot, the final version will likely look slightly different in some places. These screenshots also don't show the embedded Grafana dashboards and have been taken on a single node development system, so they aren't that impressive.

(See the gallery for higher resolution images)

Talking about Ceph Manager Dashboard at DevConf.CZ and FOSDEM 2019

Lenz Grimmer — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 13:37:38 GMT

Happy New Year to all of you! It's been a while that I posted on this blog; our team has been through an exciting year and it's time to talk about our achievements so far!

We've made a lot of progress in adding new features and missing functionality to the Ceph Manager Dashboard. The upcoming Ceph 14.0 "Nautilus" release is going to be a major milestone for us.

If you're curious to learn more about our work, I'm happy to share that I'll be talking about the dashboard at two upcoming Open Source conferences in Europe:

On Saturday, 26th of January, I will speak about Ceph Management and Monitoring with the Dashboard at the DevConf.CZ 2019 in Brno, Czech Republic.
On Sunday, 3rd of February, I will give an introduction to Managing and Monitoring Ceph with the Ceph Manager Dashboard in the Software Defined Storage Developer Room at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium.

Ceph and Ceph Manager Dashboard presentations at openSUSE Conference 2018

Lenz Grimmer — Mon, 28 May 2018 12:56:17 GMT

Last weekend, the openSUSE Conference 2018 took place in Prague (Czech Republic). Our team was present to talk about Ceph and our involvement in developing the Ceph manager dashboard, which will be available as part of the upcoming Ceph "Mimic" release.

The presentations were held by Laura Paduano and Kai Wagner from our team - thank you for your engagement! The openSUSE conference team did an excellent job in streaming and recording each session, and the resulting videos can already be viewed from their YouTube channel.

Ceph - The Distributed Storage Solution

Ceph Overview Slides

Ceph Manager Dashboard

Ceph Manager Dashboard Slides

Ceph Dashboard v2 update

Lenz Grimmer — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 10:30:22 GMT

It's been a little over a month now since we reached Milestone 1 (feature parity with Dashboard v1), which was merged into the Ceph master branch on 2018-03-06.

After the initial merge, we had to resolve a few build and packaging related issues, to streamline the ongoing development, testing and packaging of the new dashboard as part of the main Ceph project.

With these teething problems out of the way, the team has started working on several topics in parallel. A lot of these are "groundwork/foundation" kind of tasks, e.g. adding UI components and backend functionality that pave the way to enable the additional user-visible management features.

In the meanwhile, we have submitted over 80 additional pull requests, of which more than 60 have been merged already.

In this post, I'd like to summarize some of the highlights and notable improvements we're currently working on or that have been added to the code base already. This is by no means a complete list - it's more a subjective selection of changes that caught my attention.

It's also noteworthy that we've already received a number of pull requests from Ceph community members outside of the original openATTIC team that started this project - we're very grateful for the support and look forward to future contributions!

The initial Ceph Dashboard v2 pull request has been merged!

Lenz Grimmer — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 09:02:16 GMT

It actually happened exactly one week ago while I was on vacation: it's our great pleasure and honor to announce that we have reached our first milestone - the initial Ceph Dashboard v2 pull request has now been merged into the upstream Ceph master git branch, so it will become part of the upcoming Ceph "Mimic" release!

The Ceph Dashboard v2 pull request is ready for review!

Lenz Grimmer — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:55:36 GMT

About a month ago, we shared the news that we started working on a replacement for the Ceph dashboard, to set the stage for creating a full-fledged, built-in web-base management tool for Ceph.

We're happy to announce that we have now finalized the preparations for the initial pull request, which marks our first milestone in this venture: reaching feature parity with the existing dashboard.

Screen shot of the Ceph health dashboard

In fact, compared to the dashboard shipped with Ceph Luminous, we already included a number of additional features that were added after the Luminous release and added a simple authentication mechanism.

Ceph Manager Dashboard v2

Lenz Grimmer — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 14:13:45 GMT

The original Ceph Manager Dashboard that was introduced in Ceph "Luminous" started out as a simple, read-only view into various run-time information and performance data of a Ceph cluster, without authentication or any administrative functionality.

However, as it turns out, there is a growing demand for adding more web-based management capabilities, to make it easier for administrators that prefer a WebUI to manage Ceph over the command line. Sage Weil also touched upon this topic in the Ceph Developer monthly call in December and created an etherpad with some ideas for improvement.

A preliminary screen shot of the Ceph health dashboard

After learning about this, we approached Sage and John Spray from the Ceph project and offered our help to implement the missing functionality. Based on our experiences in developing the Ceph support in openATTIC, we think we have a lot to offer in the form of code and experience in creating a Ceph administration and monitoring UI.

Meet the openATTIC team at SUSECON 2017 in Prague (CZ)

Lenz Grimmer — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 18:33:09 GMT

Conference season is heating up again - next week Kai Wagner (co-founder of the openATTIC project) and myself will be at SUSECON in Prague, to talk about how to manage a Ceph cluster with SUSE's Salt-based DeepSea project and openATTIC 3.x.

SUSECON marks an important milestone in our project's history - it was at last year's SUSECON in Washington, DC at which the acquisition of the openATTIC project and team by SUSE was announced.

A lot has changed in the meanwhile - among other things, the team has grown significantly (Ricardo Marques and Tiago Melo from Portugal and Volker Theile from Germany joined us), we switched from Mercurial to git and changed the project's focus in version 3.x into becoming a scalable, feature-rich Ceph management tool.

We look forward to show off what we have worked on and achieved in the meanwhile. If you haven't done so already - make sure to register for SUSECON right away! See you next week!

Speaking about openATTIC 3.x at the Ceph Days in Ede (NL) on 2017-09-20

Lenz Grimmer — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 07:45:00 GMT

After having been heads down with the development of openATTIC 3.x in the past few months, it's time to get back to the surface and start talking about our latest achievements!

In addition to speaking about openATTIC 3.x at SUSECON in Prague later this month, I'll be traveling to the Netherlands next week, to attend the Ceph Day Netherlands.

Quoting the Ceph Days web site:

Hosted by the Ceph community (and our friends) in select cities around the world, Ceph Days are full-day events dedicated to fostering our vibrant community. In addition to Ceph experts, community members, and vendors, you’ll hear from production users of Ceph who’ll share what they’ve learned from their deployments.

I last spoke about the Ceph features in openATTIC 2.x at the Ceph Day in Munich almost exactly a year ago, and a lot has happened with our project in the meanwhile. I look forward to giving an update!

The title of my talk will be "Ceph Management and Monitoring with openATTIC 3.x", covering the following topics:

With version 3.x, the openATTIC project has significantly changed its direction of development and underwent a few major changes. In this session, Lenz will give an overview about the current state of development and the Ceph management functionality provided in version 3 of openATTIC. He will highlight the differences to version 2.x and give an overview about how the new components are being utilized in order to help managing and monitoring Ceph clusters.

The registration for Ceph Day NL is still open, so make sure to register now!