[workspace-user] Announcing the "great changes" release (2.0)

[Kate Keahey <keahey@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The most visible change in this new release is the change of name from 
"workspace service" to "nimubus". For the last year (since 1.3 release) 
our development strategy focused on providing a set of tools rather than 
just one service. This tended to confuse users who (unsurprisingly) 
expected the "workspace service" to be just one service. In addition, 
the popularity of our nimbus cloud caused most users to assume (quite 
reasonably) that our software was called nimbus. We tired of explaining, 
correcting, posting notes... and after some soul searching decided that 
the user is always right ;-) .

We will still use the name "workspace service" to describe the the 
"flagship" service of nimbus orchestrating the deployment of VMs on 
remote resources as well as the release versioning. Likewise, the 
context broker, workspace control, the workspace pilot, etc. all retain 
their names. We will simply use nimbus as an umbrella term for the 
ecosystem that grew around the workspace service over the past few years.

Oh, and to dispel all doubt: nimbus was named after a high-performance 
broom from Harry Potter ;-) .

Now that the naming issues are out of the way, I would like to announce 
the 2.0 release of nimbus!

The main new technical feature provided in this release is the VM 
resource manager API (extensibility plugin) allowing programmers to 
extend nimbus to provide interfaces to other resource managers such as 
e.g. the OpenNebula, or the VMware ESX server. You can find the 
documentation for the API at:
http://workspace.gridvm.org/vm/TP2.0/doc/api/rm/overview-summary.html

In addition, the release contains an implementation of a new front-end 
for the workspace service based on EC2 WSDLs. This front-end will allow 
us to provide compatibility with an increasing number of EC2 clients. We 
have no plans to discontinue support for the WSRF-based WSDLs: both 
front-ends have similar semantics and represent a relatively thin veneer 
on top of the workspace service as represented by the extensibility plugin.

No changes were made to the WSRF workspace interfaces: this release does 
not necessitate an upgrade.

You can download the new release from:
http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html
and the full changelog can be found at:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP2.0/index.html#changelog

--

Kate Keahey,
Mathematics & CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago