Nico and Co. Exutoire, zone libre de Nicolas Barcet

Following up on the action I accepted during last week's server meeting, I searched the web a bit for PHP libraries for EC2 (or AWS in general).

As far as I can tell, a few exist, but only a few of those seem to be maintained regularly:

• PHP-AWS
• The Zend framework which has a AWS extension since version 1.8 and 1.9.6 is available in lucid universe 
• CloudFusion - ex Tarzan (thanks to Darren Govoni for pointing it to me)

As I might be missing some, if you have been using those or other PHP libraries to control EC2, could you please speak up and let us know what library you used and how you liked it?

Last month, the German magazine T3N published an article that I wrote in English and which my colleague Torsten translated to German. Here is the original text I wrote before translation.

Working with a cloud infrastructure is not yet a common practice in the development community, and it is even less so for a local, on premises, private cloud infrastructure.  Using a cloud infrastructure service requires to understand a few new paradigms.  Having this infrastructure ready to service your developer's needs is not yet understood, but has much goodness to offer.  This article tries to give a few pointers on how to use it and what to expect from it.

The Ubuntu Server Team wants to know how you use Ubuntu Server in day-to-day operations to help the team prioritize the support and development of future Ubuntu Server Editions.  This is the second edition of this initiative which was first introduced in 2008. It has now been extended to include more cloud related questions.

Thanks a lot to everyone that came to Skills Matter tonight for my presentation. I have really appreciated the quality of your questions and hope that my answers were satisfying.

Some people may say that I am a statistics junky... Well that's certainly true! But what do you want, being a product manager for a product that does not require ANY form of user registration, you have a tendancy to cling to any piece of data you may find that shows that you are not working in vain. Indeed, and to the opposite of most, if not all, of our competitors, we have absolutely no way to determine what is our install base.  We don't control our mirors, we don't have any ping back home mechanisms, and we are not considering adding any.  So, here I am, collecting as much information I can from outside sources...

Well, october was not too bad in that sense:

Dear Blog,

I am really sorry, I've been unfaithful. I have been seing another blog lately. Please don't be mad...

I have accepted to write a monthly blog on WorksWithU.  A couple entries already made:

It's been already almost a year since we started the Ubuntu Server Community Survey...  It's now time to prepare for a new edition of it to update our data on Ubuntu Server Edition usage.

If you have a few minutes to review the questions that we asked in the last survey and tell us what you think we should change or add, now is the time to do it. 

Bugs reports is always the best way to send this, but if you prefer leaving a comment here, feel free to do so as well.

Last Saturday Matthias Klose announced on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list the official certification from Sun of the OpenJDK 6 on Ubuntu 9.04. This seems to me a very important step for anyone developping and deploying Java on Ubuntu, and as there seem quite a bit of this happening on our server platform, I thought it was worth giving this announce a bit more visibility.

The Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) for Java is a very throrough test suite made to insure that each of the components shipped on a given OS respect the Java specifications.  Validation of the test suite by Sun is what provides the certification. Achieving this provide a great level of assurance to anyone willing to deploy its application in a new environment and allows validation that the Java specs are not derived by vendors to lock-in their customers, which has been tried in the past.

In my last blog, I tried to explain what is Canonical's strategy regarding cloud computing.  A few people (they'll recognize themselves) got back to me asking why they would use a private cloud.  They found the idea really "cool", but could not see how they could use it.

As with all new technologies, there is always a very big chance that there will be a disconnect between what the people putting some tool together think they are addressing and what the "real" people end up doing with it. Chances are  that what I describe below is not what people will really end up using it for, but I have none the less decided to start a series of blog posts where I'll try to describe quickly some of the possible scenarios that I think makes a private cloud useful. I'll start today with the concept of self service IT.

The past few weeks have been pretty active in terms of people talking about Ubuntu Server Edition and more particularly about the Entreprise Cloud.  Here is a loose list of what I have noted: