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Deploy your own "cloud" with Debian "Wheezy"



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The Debian Project                                http://www.debian.org/
Deploy your own "cloud" with Debian "Wheezy" 		press@debian.org
April 25th, 2012                http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120425
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Deploy your own "cloud" with Debian "Wheezy" 

The Debian Project produces an entirely Free operating system that
empowers its users to be in control of the software running their
computers. These days, more and more computing is being moved away from
user computers to the so-called "cloud" – a vague term often used to
refer to Software as a Service (SaaS) [1] offerings. We are concerned
that, without the needed care, this trend might put in jeopardy most of
the freedoms that users enjoy when running (on their computers) 
software that is Free according to the Debian Free Software 
Guidelines [2].

  1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service
  2: http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

We encourage Debian users to prefer cloud offerings where the SaaS
infrastructure is entirely made of Free Software and can be run under
their control. We encourage Debian users to deploy their own clouds, as
the ultimate way to retain all the freedoms that Debian stands for.


To help our users with these tasks, we are proud to announce the
availability of several new technologies that would ease the deployment
of Debian-based clouds. Starting with the forthcoming release of Debian
7.0 "Wheezy", users will find ready-to-use packages for OpenStack® and
Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). OpenStack®, the open source cloud OS, has
been created to drive industry standards and end cloud lock-in.
OpenStack® is a common, open platform for both public and private
clouds with the support of more than 2,600 global project participant
and over 150 industry leading companies. The open source cloud
operating system enables businesses to manage computers, storage, and
networking resources via a self-service portal and APIs on standard
hardware at massive scale. To find out more about OpenStack®, you can
visit the official website [3].

  3: http://www.openstack.org/

The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) is a Free Software project that is hosted
by xen.org [4] that delivers an enterprise-ready server virtualization
and cloud computing platform. XCP integrates with the following cloud
orchestration stacks: CloudStack, OpenNebula and OpenStack®. To find
out more about XCP, you can visit the website of the project.


  4: http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html


The work to finalize Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" is still ongoing, but
packages of the above technologies are already available as part of our
"testing" release [5]. We encourage interested users to test them. In
particular:

  * You can set up a minimal but fully functional OpenStack® cluster
    using two computers by following the HOWTO on the Debian wiki [6]

  * You can test XCP installation and deployment by installing
    the xcp-xapi [7] package and following the instructions in its 
    README.Debian file

  * You can test OpenStack® using XCP by installing nova-xcp-plugins
    [8] in your XCP server, and following the instructions in its 
    README.xcp_and_OpenStack file


  5: http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/
  6: http://wiki.debian.org/OpenStackHowto
  7: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/xcp-xapi
  8: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/nova-xcp-plugins

"Preserving user freedoms in the cloud is a tricky business and one of
the major challenges ahead for Free Software. By easing the deployment
of Debian-based private clouds we want to help our users in resisting
the lure of giving up their freedoms in exchange of some flexibility,"
said Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader. 
For Lars Kurth, Community Manager at Xen.org, "Debian and Xen have a 
long uninterrupted history: thus, I am really pleased that Debian is 
the first Linux distribution to contain XCP packages. Until now, it 
was only possible to use XCP in Linux appliances within a tightly
controlled environment. In Debian "Wheezy" we changed how users
interact with XCP, providing much more flexibility and enabling anybody
to use Debian as a XCP Dom0 kernel. This enables Debian users to build
cloud services based on the leading Free Software virtualization
platform that is powering some of the largest clouds in production
today." 
"Having OpenStack packages included in Debian confirms the great job
done by the OpenStack community to deliver high-quality free/libre
software. It's exciting to collaborate with the Debian developers to
enable building clouds based entirely on Free Software," added Stefano
Maffulli, OpenStack® Technical Community Manager. 

Please let us know if you encounter any problem, using the Debian 
bug tracking system [9].

  9: http://bugs.debian.org/


About Debian
------------

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the "universal operating system".

Contact Information
-------------------
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at
http://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.

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