Deploy your own cloud with Debian Wheezy

April 25th, 2012

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) 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.

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 participants 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.

The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) is a Free Software project that is hosted by xen.org 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.

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. 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

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

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

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.

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 https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.