Nicolas Barcet Free zone of nijaba

The third Open World Forum – which will happen in Paris on 30 September and 1 October 2010 – will bring together open technology decision-makers from around the world, under the banner of Open Innovation and Free / Open Source. Some 1,500 participants from 40 countries are expected to attend, to cross-fertilize initiatives and map out the digital future (the 2010 version of the site was put online yesterday, if you are interested in the other tracks).

This year the committee asked me to join them in helping David Sapiro put together the Open Cloud track, and I am very happy to announce that this is now complete.  We may have a couple additional late comers that will be added, but I think we now have what looks likes an excellent speaker list that will allow us to go quite far in our panels and think-tank. 

According to the statistics page on the Cloud Market, which claims to be "the most complete catalog of Amazon EC2 images", images using Ubuntu as the base platform have the largest share in their catalog.

My colleague Thierry Carrez just posted a blog this weekend discussing the new autoregistration features of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that are coming up in Ubuntu 10.04LTS Server Edition.

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.

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.

Jeudi dernier j'ai eu l'occasion de faire une brève présentation pendant l'Open World Forum sur le théme des technologies à l'origine du SaaS.

Ubuntu is positioning itself as a true cloud OS, and seems so far to be the only Linux distribution to have done so, but too often we are being asked why and where we are going.  I am not going to try to redefine what cloud means in this post, as this has been done countless times . If I just remind you that cloud can be divided in three layers: the infrastructure (IaaS), the development platform (PaaS) and the application (SaaS), I think that it should be enough to make sure we are thinking about the same thing.

So far, Ubuntu has produced three major components out of its cloud strategy: two at the infrastructure layer and one at the software layer:

• Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon EC2 (IaaS)
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud powered by Eucalyptus (IaaS)
• UbuntuOne (SaaS)
  

Even though UbuntuOne is obviously a cloud product, and an important initiative for Canonical to deliver added functionality to its large user base, it should clearly be distinguished from the other two components, as one distinguishes the shovels from the buildings it allows to make.  I'll only talk here about "shovels" (infrastructure components), and try to summarize where we are aiming with that. The Ubuntu mission is clearly to select the best components from open source, assemble and refine them, to provide the best possible user experience in order to leverage it against the biggest monopoly the software industry has ever known.  In other word to provide a use-able alternative to the operating system/productivity suite that currently dominates the world.  Our cloud strategy clearly inscribe itself within this mission, let me try to explain you why and how.

Le salon Solutions Linux Open Source 2009 s'achève, et ces 3 jours on été d'une intensité inégalée pour moi.

The Ubuntu team just announced on a couple mailing lists the availability of an official beta for Ubuntu Server images on Amazon Web Services. More info regarding this beta can be found on the Ubuntu web site and registration is open to anyone.

It has been an interesting process to put these images together and I must address big thanks to everyone that participated in this efort, including msm, soren, zul, esh, surfous, sg and certainly a few others that I have forgotten.  It's been a great community effort, thanks!  Well, I guess it is done now, so we just have to wait to see what EC2 users think of this image. I am sure there are things that we can improve (there always is) and am anxiously waiting to see what will be the comments about Ubuntu's first step into the cloud.