How to start managing your offering?? by understanding your product/offering

How do you go about understanding where you stand??
ANALYSIS!!!


If you are wondering on to manage your product/offering.
Here are the questions you need to ask (hope this serves as a template for you) :-
1) What all do you offer to customers in that product/offering?  lets call it offering XYZ ?
2) How easy it is for customer who has some idea that he/she is interested in XYZ ?
3) How easy it is for customer to find everything related to XYZ ?
4) What are others ( competitors) offering in the field of XYZ ?
5) What are the gaps in XYZ offering as compared to competitors?
6) Are those gaps worth chasing?
7) What is the scope of improving current offering XYZ?
8) What else do customer demand or ask for when they order XYZ?
9) What are the pain points for customers of XYZ?
10) What is the data related to customer orders ( time , location, price points, industry, motivation  e.t.c ) regarding XYZ orders
11) Return on investment on the changes you want top bring
12) Cost to company of the not doing bringing those changes or of bringing those changes (resources, time, finances, marketing, reputation, e.t.c.)
13) growth rate
14) market predictions
15) domain knowledge and data around that domain
16) adaptability of the customer
17) what could replace your offering ? any threat of becoming obsolete?
18) customers drivers(motivation) and restraints when their think about XYZ
19) are there any compliance issues regarding XYZ that you solve (can solve)
20) and probably the most important one .. User experience!!
21) Benchmark your offerings 

Push your package to pip

Finally after a long time .. a PR on my git project  https://github.com/Neetuj/python-wns
reminded me that i still need to push it to pip.

Given the hits I get on my notification entry (most popular so far) push-notifications-on-apns-gcm-WNS 
I felt bad for not putting in the effort before to push python-wns to pip
Anyways I finally did it today and now you all can avail the power of pip for python-wns by

pip install python-wns

Now if you are the one who are not interested in my pyton-wns package but want to push your own package here are the steps I followed  (order can be important so follow it :)

• Register on https://testpypi.python.org/pypi
• Register on https://pypi.python.org/pypi
• Confirm all verification emails for the new accounts 
• create a .pypirc file "vim ~/.pypirc" which looks like this 
• [distutils]
  index-servers =
    pypi
    test
  
  [pypi]
  repository=https://pypi.python.org/pypi
  username=name
  password=pwd
  
  [test]
  repository=https://testpypi.python.org/pypi
  username=name
  password=pwd
• package your library like this  

• python-wns/
    setup.py
    setup.cfg
    LICENSE.txt
    README.md
    wns/
      __init__.py

      wnslib.py 

   
•  The setup.py needs to be in a certain format you can checkout mine here setup.py
• Then test 
•  python setup.py register -r test
•  proceed if you get Server response (200): OK
• python setup.py sdist upload -r test
• proceed if you get Server response (200): OK
• python setup.py register sdist upload
• and you are done!!  test "pip install python-wns"
  

Install docker on MAC

I had docker on my ubuntu and I do not remember going through much for installing docker on ubuntu .

But for MAC i had to follow these instructions ( in case anybody is looking for these)

    brew install docker
    brew install boot2docker
    boot2docker up
    boot2docker init
    boot2docker up
    export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.59.103:2375
    export DOCKER_CERT_PATH=/Users/yours/.boot2docker/certs/boot2docker-vm
    export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
    boot2docker ip

Debugging openstack ....logs , services e.t.c

Something is broken ...
lets say heat is not starting up ..
what do we do ?

calm down!
check logs ( /var/log/heat-api.log,  /var/log/heat-api-cfn.log, /var/log/heat-engine.log)

Do you see any errors there ?? ( most of the times this should be sufficient)

but what if there is not error in the logs.. since the service is not even starting ?
try restarting the service(systemctl comes to rescue)

systemctl list-units |grep heat

systemctl status openstack-heat-api.service

systemctl status openstack-heat-api-cfn.service

systemctl status openstack-heat-engine.service

Just getting a failed status but no details ?try debugging

journalctl -u openstack-heat-api-cfn.service

here are few links which will help

https://access.redhat.com/articles/systemd-cheat-sheet

https://cdn.rawgit.com/ruzickap/linux.xvx.cz/gh-pages/files/systemd_cheatsheet/systemd_cheatsheet.pdf

Beginners guide to cloud and openstack

Disclaimer :-- all the content is sourced from various pages on openstack .. I am just putting together that information in a crash course :)

 

What is Cloud?

Let's quickly review just what exactly we mean by cloud technologies?
 Cloud technologies are built on existing technologies such as virtualization and clustering to virtualize hardware, software, storage, and networking resources into flexible units that are quickly allocated to meet demand. So rather than the old static model of dedicated hardware servers for various tasks, and static network and storage configurations, all of those formerly specialized devices are assimilated into a common resource pool. It's a more efficient use of hardware, and very fast to scale up or down according to demand. You can even configure self-service for users so they can grab whatever they need when they need it.
Types of cloud ?

• Private
• Public
• Hybrid
• 
  
 

 

All computing resources are shareable in a cloud, and there are three basic service models:

• SaaS, software as a service
• PaaS, platform as a service
• IaaS, infrastructure as a service

What is Openstack? 
Open Source Cloud Computing platform (short answer).
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack (long answer)

What are  Openstack components? 

core projects (short answer):

• Identity (Keystone)
• Dashboard (Horizon)
• Orchestration (Heat)
• Metering (Celiometer)
• Object stroage (Swift)
• Image service (Glance)
• Networking (Quantum now Neutron)
• Compute (Nova)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack (not so long answer)
https://www.openstack.org/software/ (long answer)

How do these Openstack Components talk to each other?

1. Messaging Queues: AMQP is the messaging technology chosen by the OpenStack cloud.The OpenStack components such as Nova , Cinder , Quantum communicates internally via AMQP(Advanced Message Queue Protocol) and through eachother using REST-call. The AMQP broker, RabbitMQ , sits between any two internal Openstack components and allows them to communicate in a loosely coupled fashion i.e its components has, or makes use of, little or no knowledge of the definitions of other separate components. More precisely, Nova components (nova-api, nova-scheduler , nova-compute) use Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) to communicate to one another.
   In OpenStack the Nova ,Cinder and Quantum implements RPC (both request+response, and one-way, respectively nicknamed ‘rpc.call’ and ‘rpc.cast’) over AMQP by providing an adapter class which take cares of marshaling and unmarshaling of messages into function calls. Each Nova components (for example api ,compute, Scheduler, etc.) , Cinder components ( for example volume, Scheduler) , Quantum Components( for example quantum-server , agents ,plugins )  create two queues at the initialization time, one which accepts messages with routing keys ‘NODE-TYPE.NODE-ID’ (for example compute.hostname) and another, which accepts messages with routing keys as generic ‘NODE-TYPE’ (for example compute) .
2.  

Beginner's links to find out about openstack

https://opensource.com/business/14/2/openstack-beginners-guide

https://eloiguillaud.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/cloud-computing-solutions-comparative-study-openstack-13/

https://www.linux.com/learn/docs/720624-introduction-to-openstack-from-zero-to-domination

https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/866101-how-to-test-drive-openstack

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Main_Page

playing with openstack HEAT : beginners introduction

• Install heat
• Heat templates reside here

1.  https://github.com/openstack/heat-templates
2. which can be seen on the vm its in /vagrant/heat_templates
3. there are test templates in root dir as well ex:- /root/heat_test_template.yml

• on the controller vm this is how to use heat to spin up nodes
  
  1. heat stack-create -f heat_templates/test.yml test
  2. once its created you should be able to see it using CLI like this :-
     [root@controller-01 vagrant(keystone_admin)]$ heat stack-list
     
      +--------------------------------------+------------+---------------+----------------------+
     | id                                   | stack_name | stack_status  | creation_time        |
     +--------------------------------------+------------+---------------+----------------------+
     | xxxx-xxxxx | test       | CREATE_FAILED | 2015-11-16T20:59:49Z |
     +--------------------------------------+------------+---------------+----------------------+
  3. on horizon you can see it here 
  
  

          7.  If you click the "stack name" link you can get into more details of your stack.
          8. There are Actions like "resume stack, suspect stack , delete stack" e.t.c that you can perform
         9.  You can get different details on the stack on horizonw including the template itself and you can change the template
     

• General Heat Resources :-

http://docs.openstack.org/developer/heat/template_guide/

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Heat

https://github.com/openstack/heat