LibCloud with Anthony Shaw

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list. 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 Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas. I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project The Open Data Science Conference in Boston is happening on May 21st and 22nd. If you use the code EP during registration you will save 20% off of the ticket price. If you decide to attend then let us know, we’ll see you there! 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