LibCloud with Anthony Shaw

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Summary

More and more of our applications are running in the cloud and there are increasingly more providers to choose from. The LibCloud project is a Python library to help us manage the complexity of our environments from a uniform and pleasant API. In this episode Anthony Shaw joins us to explain how LibCloud works, the community that builds and supports it, and the myriad ways in which it can be used. We also got a peek at some of the plans for the future of the project.

Brief Introduction

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• Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
• Today we are interviewing Anthony Shaw about the Apache LibCloud project

Interview with Anthony Shaw

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris
• What is LibCloud and how did it get started? – Tobias
• How much overhead does using libcloud impose versus native SDKs for performance sensitive APIs like block storage? – Chris
• What are some of the design patterns and abstractions in the library that allow for supporting such a large number of cloud providers with a mostly uniform API? – Tobias
• Given that there are such differing services provided by the different cloud platforms, do you face any difficulties in exposing those capabilities? – Tobias
• How does LibCloud compare to similar projects such as the Fog gem in Ruby? – Tobias
• What inspired the choice of Python as the language for creating the LibCloud project? Would you make the same choice again? – Tobias
• Which versions of Python are supported and what challenges has that created? – Tobias
• What is your opinion on the state of PyPI as a package maintainer? What statistics are most useful to you and what else do you wish you could track? – Tobias
• Could you walk our listeners through the under the cover process details of instantiating a computer instance in say, Azure using libcloud? – Chris
• Does LibCloud have any native support for parallelization, such as for the purpose of launching a large number of compute instances simultaneously? – Tobias
• What does it mean to be an Apache project and what benefits does it provide? – Tobias
• What are some of the most notable projects that leverage LibCloud for interacting with platform and infrastructure service providers? – Tobias
• Could you describe how libcloud could be extended to abstract away a new type of service that’s not yet supported – e.g. a database? – Chris
• Would you suggest that libcloud users extend libcloud to cover ‘native’ services they might use like AWS Lambda, or should they mix libcloud and ‘native’ SDKs in cases like this? – Chris
• Could you talk a little bit about the cloud oriented network services that libcloud supports? Is it possible to create AWS VPCs, subnets, etc using libcloud? – Chris
• Do you know if people use LibCloud for abstracting the APIs of a single cloud provider, even if they don’t have any intention of using a different platform? – Tobias
• Do you think that people are more likely to use LibCloud for bridging across muliple public cloud platforms, or is it more commonly used in a hybrid cloud type of environment? – Tobias
• What is on the roadmap for LibCloud that people should keep an eye out for? – Tobias

Keep In Touch

• Twitter
• GitHub
• GitHub

Picks

• Tobias
  • Blue Yeti Microphone
  • Diablo Swing Orchestra



• Chris
  • Rosewill RK Keycaps
  • Enki
  • Catch 22



• Anthony
  • Hidden Brain Podcast
  • PyKwalify
  • Doing Nothing

Links

• Dimension Data
• Austin Bingham and Robert Smallshire Pluralsight Python Training
• CloudKick
• PyPI Ranking website
• Apache JClouds
• SaltStack
• Scalr
• Apache Software Foundation
• Mist.io
• StackStorm

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA