The biggest news yet: 0.7.0 and support

This is a big one, we have quite a few things to announce today. First of all we’ll be releasing Project-FiFo 0.7.0! This is the so far biggest and best release in our history. It has a bunch of new features, improvements and perhaps most importantly an entirely re-worked UI. Second we are happy to announce that we will be offering commercial support for both public and private clouds run with FiFo! Lets look a bit in the details.

0.7.0

There is a lot so we’ll just visit the most important new features. For a full list visit the release notes they include about 200 tickets with improvements, bug-fixes and polishes. Changes range from the highly visible, not so obvious ones to make OPs life easier to changes invisible to most that improve handling of some corner cases. If you want to update your installation please follow the upgrade guide.

A new UI

With 0.7.0 we introduce cerberus, a new UI for FiFo. From all we’ve learned in the past we’ve build this from the ground up to be more user friendly, easier on the eye and all around more pleasant to use. It features a clean style based on material design. Improves on iconography, consistence of workflows and the general user experience. If you want to take a look we’ve also written the corresponding documentation.

OAuth2

With this release we’ve standardized the authentication schema. We fully support OAuth2 with this release, including all flows defined in the RFC and an extension to allow for yubikeys to be used. Cerberus has a section where all grants can be tracked and API tokens (with specific scopes and without timeout) can be created.

Accounting

After lots of thinking, consideration, and research we’ve settled on a way to do accounting we’re happy with. Happy enough to publish it as a feature. So now Snarl, our AAA solution finally earned it’s last A. Accounting data is modeled roughly after CDR records, a description of the format can be found in the documentation.

Documentation

Because we know how important good documentation is we’ve given ours a complete overhaul. Both the end user documentation and the API documentation for developers are entirely redone. It is now living at readme.io which we highly recommend for anyone looking to improve their own docs.

OmniOS

This is to be considered experimental! Together with help from Dan McDonald we put some support for OmniOS into 0.7.0! This makes it the second operating system to be managed by FiFo. So far we support the basic operations such as VM creation, deletion, power cycles and so on. We don’t consider it production ready just yet but are curious how people are going to use it to see where to focus our efforts.

DalmatinerDB and Tachyon

With Tachyon and DalmatinerDB we introduce a solution to monitor a whole cloud. Keep performance metrics for VM’s and Hypervisors with the option to monitor not only in real time but also historically to as far as you wish to go back. The system is especially designed to deal with the high volume of metrics a cloud can produce and copes well under pressure and in the face of failure.

Support

Project-FiFo is open source, it is a community project, born as such and staying that way. We do our best to help everyone who has questions or problems. Either via IRC, our mailing list, or the bug tracker. However sometimes that is not good enough. When running a mission critical system you might need the assurance of a direct line to support when things don’t go quite right.

We’re happy to announce that we are now offering commercial support to address this need, both for cloud providers and private clouds. The effort to make this happen has been quietly ongoing for a while now and our first customers are already very happy with the results.

If support is something that interests you feel free to get in touch, drop us a mail or come by the IRC channel to chat. 

Installation Video

Mark has been so nice and  make an installation video to aid along with of the documentation: