GanetiCon 2013

This year Ganeti, the cluster virtualization manager that Google released in August 2007, celebrated its sixth birthday. Over the years, there have been many improvements and changes to Ganeti as the user community continues to grow.

During the first week of September, Google, GRNET and Skroutz organized GanetiCon 2013, the first Ganeti user and developer conference, in Athens, Greece. Over the course of the three-day conference, 50 people met to discuss Ganeti and the future: how they use it, and what they'd like to see come out of it, with workshops on features and discussions between community members.

Among the topics we identified as key for Ganeti were:

- Better fleet management for environments with multiple clusters
- Improvement of OS installation and image management
- Better disk support
- Security improvements and reduction in the use of the root account
- Increased support for different types of "partial shutdown" situations

The community also presented software based around Ganeti. Over the years, two web managers were developed, Ganeti Web Manager and ganetimgr, as well as a full openstack compatible cloud based on Ganeti, Synnefo. Organizations gave presentations on their usage of Ganeti including the Debian Project, the Oregon State Open Source Lab (OSUOSL), Google, GRNET and Skroutz.

We are very excited about the feedback and community appreciation we received for organizing the event and we look forward to working on the most important issues, and to organize a new event in 2014!

By Guido Trotter, Ganeti