There has been a flurry of press around Cisco’s release of OpFlex. If you want the nitty gritty details, please read the IETF draft available here. What exactly is OpFlex? The IETF draft sums it up nicely: It’s clear that Cisco intends to make OpFlex an open standard together with it’s partners in the vendor, provider and Open Source communities. We’re working hard to make that a reality. On the Open Source front, I’m leading a team of people who are working hard on the code around this new OpFlex Policy Agent.

With the Icehouse release of Neutron impending, we’ve unfortunately uncovered a bug which is affecting ODL integration with Neutron. This bug was introduced by this commit, and the reality is better CI for the ODL plugin would have caught this. I’m going to work to enable this better CI in the near future. The workaround for this is to add the following in your nova.conf: I’m working on fixing this right now.

My good friend Dave Meyer just wrote a great blog post at SDN Central available here. A key point which Dave makes is this: Dave is spot on with his analysis here. We need to stop thinking about artifacts as being only things such as installable software, firmware images, or even pieces of hardware. In the Open Source world, the community is an artifact. Vibrant mailing lists filled with discussion are artifacts.

As OpenStack marches towards it’s Icehouse release this spring, some work I’ve been doing has finally merged upstream. This week, both the OpenDaylight ML2 MechanismDriver and devstack support for OpenDaylight merged upstream. This was a huge effort which spans the efforts of many people. This was the first step in solidifying the integration of OpenDaylight with OpenStack Neutron, and we have many additional things we can do. To get a first taste of running the two together, please see the video of the OpenDaylight Summit presentation myself, Madhu Venugopal, and Brent Salisbury did in early February.

I am very lucky to be a part of six great presentation submissions for the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. The OpenStack Foundation uses voting to help decide which of these talks, panels, and tutorials will be scheduled. I would appreciate your vote for my submissions! I’ll highlight them below. Using OpenStack Within An OpenStack Environment: This is a talk which will be similar to the tutorial Madhu, Brent, Ryan and I did at the OpenDaylight Summit, except it will be less tutorial focused and more presentation based.

For the last few months, TimeMachine has been failing for me between my Macs and a QNAP TS-659 NAS I have. The NAS is running firmware 4.0.3, and I would consistently get the error “Cannot connect” when trying to connect. I was able to work around this with the following command run manually: Running that in a terminal window allowed me to then use the GUI to select that disk for backups and things started rolling again.

If you’re a fan of networking, you are no doubt very excited by all of the recent excitement in the industry as of late. And there is no larger area of innovation in networking at the moment than Open Source networking. Two of the projects at the forefront of Open Source networking innovation are OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight. OpenStack Neutron is driving an API around networking for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds, and has been very successful at driving mindshare in this area.

Last week I was in New Orleans for LinuxCon. This was my first LinuxCon event, and it was pretty awesome. The event was co-located with a smattering of other Open Technology events as well: CloudOpen Linux Plumbers Conference Xen Project User Summit OpenDaylight Mini Summit Gluster Workshop 2013 ENEA North America Hacker Event UEFI Plugfest Linux Wireless Summit Linux Security Summit As you can see, that’s a lot of events to pack into a single week.

Voting for the OpenStack Summit is now open! To vote for OpenStack Presentations for the Summit in Hong Kong, use the link provided here. The presentations being voted on now are for the conference portion of the event. There are a lot of great presentations out there. I’d like to highlight the ones I am lucky enough to be a part of here. OpenStack Neutron Modular Layer 2 Plugin Deep Dive: This is a presentation myself and Robert Kukura from Red Hat are putting together.

So, it’s now official: I am a member of the OpenStack Neutron core team. I was voted onto the team last week and made official at the weekly Neutron meeting this past Monday. I will initially focus on the Open Source plugins (Open vSwitch, LinuxBridge) and the Modular Layer 2 (ML2) plugin. I wanted to thank Mark McClain for nominating me! The OpenStack Neutron core team is a great group of developers to work with, I’m very excited to continue contributing to OpenStack Neutron going forward!