2012-April Tashi Incubator Status Report

Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.

The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud computing 
on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). The idea is to 
build a cluster management system that enables the Big Data that are stored in 
a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by 
remote users in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner.

Tashi originally encompassed just the tools to manage virtual machines 
using Xen and QEMU, but has been merged with Zoni, which manages the 
physical aspects of a cluster like power control, network settings and 
handing out physical machines.

In the period from January to April, the project had received permission
to publish a release. Shortly thereafter, a further release was
approved, incorporating several bug fixes detected during deployment
of the first release and from Jira reports.

In the process of making our first release, contact to two of our three
mentors was re-established. The third mentor has not been heard from
(also in other parts of Apache) for quite a while. We obtained sufficient
administrative access to Jira to manage our problem reports.

Development efforts this period have mainly been in adding resilience
to Tashi components, as well as returning more helpful messages in case
of errors. Some parts of the code base that were relevant only to Thrift
have been removed.

Upcoming software goals are to investigate what is needed to support IPv6,
considering replacement for RPyC and providing the ability to hand
out server slices (operating system level virtualization).

The project has a user community, but it is small. Growth mostly has
happened by word of mouth. To show potential users at large the
utility of this project, the author of this report will apply some of
the advice posted to general@apache.incubator.org, as well as create
web pages demonstrating the project's utility, provide sample VM images
and disseminate other information relating to the deployments close to him.
He will also urge others to make similar information publically available.

One of our users has requested the creation of a private branch for his
team to work on. Perhaps this will result in a valuable feature addition
to the project.

Items to be resolved before graduation:
	* Generate more publicity for the project.
	* Develop members of the user community to submit feature
	  extensions.