Blog

The Project Management Committee (PMC) for Apache Libcloud has asked Alex Gaynor to become a committer and we are pleased to announce that they have accepted.

We are glad to have him as a committer. Everyone, please help us welcome him to the team :)

Libcloud 0.14 which has been released recently includes many new features and improvements. Among those new features is also a better support for working with multiple regions in the Rackspace drivers.

Brian Curtin, one of the Libcloud commiters wrote a great post about Libcloud 0.14 and the Rackspace drivers on the Rackspace developer blog - Libcloud 0.14 Released.

We encourage everyone who wants to learn more about Libcloud and Rackspace drivers to check it out.

Libcloud 0.14 which has been released recently includes many new features and improvements. One of those new features is also a driver for the Exoscale public cloud.

Exoscale is a public cloud service provider based in Switzerland. Their cloud is powered by an open-source cloud computing platform Apache CloudStack. As such, the new Exoscale driver heavily relies on the existing CloudStack driver.

If you want to learn more about how to get started with the new Exoscale driver, you should read Libcloud 0.14 and Exoscale blog post which has been written by one of our developers and posted on the Exoscale blog.

Today we are pleased to announce a new, improved and more user friendly version of our website.

Background and History

Original website was developed and published back in 2009 when the project was first announced.

A lot has changed since 2009 and during that time the web has been evolving at a rapid pace. Now we have terms such as responsive web design, great front-end frameworks for building responsive websites such as Bootstrap and Zurb and many other new things which didn't exist or weren't widely used back when we first launched.

During this time we focused most of our efforts on improving the code and making the library better. This meant the website didn't receive a lot of needed love and attention so design-wise, it was mostly stuck in the 2009 era.

Over the years it has become apparent that presentation and documentation is also equally or even more important then the code itself, so we have decided to fix some of the "mistakes" we have made in the past.

A couple of months back we launched a new documentation and today, we are happy to present you a new and much improved website which was built with modern tools and principles in mind.

Improvements and New Features

Responsive design makes a site pleasure to use on a variety of devices and screen sizes. Image by placeit.net.

New website includes many improvements and new features. Some of the more important ones are listed bellow.

More modern and user-friendly design

New website now features a more modern and user-friendly design. This includes bigger fonts, better typography and so on.

On top of that, the new design is fully responsive which means you can now better enjoy the content on smaller devices such as mobile phones and tablets.

Improved and re-designed landing page

We know that landing pages are very important so we have decided to totally re-design and re-organise ours.

New landing page now displays all the important information (project features, code examples, showcases some companies and projects using Libcloud) and also features a more clear call to action.

Blog section

New website now features a fully-fledged blog.

We will use the blog to post important project news, keep you up to date with what is currently going on and post case studies and stories from projects and companies which are using Libcloud.

If you are using an RSS reader to stay up to date, we also offer an ATOM feed.

Updated Credits Page

Credits page now features an up to date list of people who have contributed code and documentation.

As noted on that page, the list is automatically generated from the CHANGES file so it might not be 100% accurate.

Search Engine Optimizations

We have made some changes which will make our website a bit more friendly to the web crawlers and search engines. We hope this will make it easier for you to more quickly find the content you are looking for.

The changes we have made include improvements to the underlying HTML markup, addition of the OpenGraph tags and an addition of a sitemap.

Under the Hood

Old website was powered by Apache CMS. It mostly worked good enough for simple use cases, but a small user base means it lacks a large ecosystem around it which is pretty standard for many other popular content management systems.

Because of that, we have decided to switch to Jekyll, a Ruby based static website and blog engine.

On top of that, the new website is fully responsive and built using Bootstrap 3 front-end framework.

Similar to the old website, source code is still stored in an SVN repository so all the benefits we get from version control are preserved.

Source code of the new website can be found in the SVN repository.

Conclusion

We hope you will like and enjoy the new website.

We also hope the new website now better reflects the underlying evolution of the library and the direction we are heading.

If you have any suggestions on how we can make the website even better, don't hesitate and share it with us. You can send your feedback to the mailing list, or you can checkout the website repository and make the changes yourself.

We are pleased to announce a long awaited Libcloud 0.14.0 release.

This is a first release in the 0.14 series which means it brings many (and I mean many!) new features, changes and improvements.

Release highlights

• To make working with providers which support multiple regions easier and more user-friendly, some of the drivers have moved away from the "one class per region" to a single class plus "region" argument model. Those drivers include: EC2, Rackspace, ElasticHosts, Joyent, CloudFiles.
• Addition of a programmatic way of updating the pricing file and ability to use a custom pricing file. For more information, please see https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/compute/pricing.html#using-a-custom-pricing-file
• Addition of block storage management methods to the following drivers: OpenNebula, OpenStack, EC2
• Unification of the extension arguments for handling security groups in the EC2 and OpenStack driver
• New standard compute API for SSH key-pair management
• Many new features and improvements in the CloudStack driver
• New compute and load balancer driver for Google Compute Engine (GCE)
• Ability to export Libcloud's DNS zone to BIND zone format
• and much more!

Full change log can be found here and here (keep in mind that this release also includes all the changes from 0.14.0-beta3).

Note about backward compatibility

Some of the changes noted above are backward incompatible. For more information on what has changed and how to update your code to work with a new release, please visit the Upgrade Notes page.

Download

Libcloud 0.14.0 can be downloaded from https://libcloud.apache.org/downloads.html

or installed using pip:

pip install apache-libcloud==0.14.0

Upgrading

If you have installed Libcloud using pip you can also use it to upgrade it:

pip install --upgrade apache-libcloud==0.14.0

Documentation

Regular and API documentation is available at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LIBCLOUD. Don't forget to attach an example and / or test which reproduces your problem.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who contributed and made this release possible!

Full list of people who contributed to this release can be found in the Changelog.