brainstorming for the UDS-N session list

[Stephan Hermann]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 09:21:59PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 28, 2010 03:28:49 pm Allison Randal wrote:
> > UDS-N is just around the corner. We're starting to build up the list of
> > sessions to schedule, and want to collect community thoughts on where to
> > focus in 11.04. As usual, there's far more to talk about than we can fit
> > in one week, and far more possibilities to work on than we can fit in
> > one 6 month cycle. Your input is enormously valuable, to highlight areas
> > and issues that will have the biggest impact across the whole community,
> > and sort by priority.
> > 
> > To help conversation flow (and help the track leads focus on their
> > topics) I'll kick off a separate email thread for each planned track,
> > explaining what it's about, so you can hang your comments on that
> > thread. The UDS team has taken a different approach to the schedule this
> > year, and instead of tracks organized by teams (Desktop, Server, etc)
> > they'll be organized by themes (http://uds.ubuntu.com/tracks/).
> > Hopefully, this will inspire a lot of healthy cross-pollination of ideas
> > and people.
> > 
> > Thanks for the advance participation in UDS!
> > Allison
> 
> I would like to see some work on the traditional server boot experience.  It 
> regressed significantly in Lucid and has gotten some improvement in Maverick, 
> but I don't think it's had a good looking over by server admins.  For server 
> admins a logo is not what it beautiful.  Information about what's going on 
> with their system is what tends to delight them.  Myself, if I'm booting a 
> server where I can see the boot it's for trouble shooting and so I like it to 
> be a bit chatty.  What is "good" is in many respects the opposite of what 
> makes a good desktop boot.

Oh yes...We really don't need a pretty splashy bootup screen which hides all needed
important informations, and I don't even care if the server is coming up 5 or 15 seconds,
while the hardware init of the server itself takes 3 mins or more (depending on what hardware).

> I'm not sure what track this goes in.

Private Plumbers Track: "How to get rid of Plymouth on Servers and make Upstart
usable with unbelievable network interface setups?" (Attendees required: S.J.R.)

Or

Public Cloud Server Track: "How to make real Admins happy?"

But to not sound too cynical, there are more topics which needs to be addressed
for Ubuntu Server (not only Cloud installs) in general:

1. More pressure to HW vendors like HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco
   (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10265/index.html) to produce more
   up2date drivers and agents for Ubuntu/Debian Kernel Releases (especially LTS releases)
   with native package support.
2. More certification of new HW Models of the different HW vendors
   (http://webapps.ubuntu.com/certification/ shows still only small number of
   models, e.g. I'm totally missing the Blade Servers of HP, which runs really
   good with Ubuntu Server)
3. Enter Server Business for Real
4. Automatic Bare Metal Server Deployment Strategies for Datacenters (also good
   for UEC without SaaS Technologies like Landscape, old schoold d-i
   preseeding or even kickstarting)
5. Support of Development of Software Infrastructures to provide a similar feeling like HP
   Blade Matrix in Combination with Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and
   Cheap Storage Systems (e.g. glusterfs systems) for Small and Medium
   Enterprises (and even Large Enterprises)
6. Make Cluster Administration much easier (Pacemaker Configurations delivered
   via Remote Services or make Pacemaker and Puppet more friendly to each
   other)
7. Enter Server Messaging Services for Datacenter or in other words:
   How to maintain a large scaled world wide datacenter infrastructure via "The Marionette
   Collective" (http://marionette-collective.org/) or other thechniques using
   ActiveMQ, JMS, or Stomp in combination with config file management services
   like Puppet, Chef or CFEngine.
8. Enter Enterprise Driven Datacenter/Server Services Monitoring, especially using real Monitoring Systems
   like OpenNMS to not even monitor your services, or measure your performance,
   but also monitor business processes, website workflows etc.

I think the fun part here is to gather a community of people who are actually
in this business to help Ubuntu and as well Canonical to reach those goals.
But there are people around (even now) who are reading and listening :)

More?

Regards,

\sh