Blog

We are happy to announce Libcloud v3.8.0.

This release includes new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

Highlights include:

• Performance improvements in the storage drivers
• Removal of 18 drivers for providers that are no longer active (they went out of business, have been acquired, or similar).

A list of all the changes can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html#changes-in-apache-libcloud-3.8.0.

Development-Related Changes (developers only)

In addition to the end-user visible changes, we have made various changes to our development process and practices to better follow and align with modern Python development and packaging best practices.

• Tooling (pylint, mypy, bandit, isort, black, etc.) config options have been migrated into pyproject.yaml file.
• Package setup and build-related metadata have been migrated from setup.py and setup.cfg to pyproject.toml.
• The unsafe “setup.py test” wrapper command has been removed in favor of invoking pytest directly.
• The “build” PyPi package is now used for creating release artifacts (sdist, wheel) in an isolated virtual environment.

Download

The release can be downloaded from https://libcloud.apache.org/downloads.html or installed using pip:

pip install "apache-libcloud==3.8.0"

Upgrading

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

pip install --upgrade "apache-libcloud==3.8.0"

Upgrade notes

A page that describes backward incompatible or semi-incompatible changes and how to preserve the old behavior when this is possible can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade_notes.html

Documentation

Regular and API documentation is available at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/v3.8.0/

Bugs/Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://github.com/apache/libcloud/issues.

Don’t forget to attach an example and/or test that reproduces your problem.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who contributed and made this release possible! The full list of people who contributed to this release can be found in the CHANGES file.

Special thanks to Anthony Monthe - @ZuluPro for contributing driver removal / clean up change.

We are happy to announce Libcloud v3.7.0.

This release includes new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Highlights include:

• Improvements in the CloudSigma compute driver
• Support for af-south-1 region in the Amazon S3 storage driver
• Bug fix for OAuth2 desktop client authentication in the Google Cloud Platform compute driver
• Support for Python 3.6 has been dropped

A list of all the changes can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html#changes-in-apache-libcloud-3.7.0.

Note on Python 3.6 support

Python 3.6 support has been dropped in Libcloud v3.7.0.

Python 3.6 has been EOL and non-supported for more than a year now (https://endoflife.date/python) and a lot of libraries (including some we depend on) have already dropped support for it.

Last release which still supports Python 3.6 is Libcloud v3.6.1.

Note on code style change (developers only)

To make formatting and styling in our code base more consistent, we have re-formatted all the code with black (https://github.com/psf/black) and pyupgrade Python 3.5+ (https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade) and we will automatically enforce black code style (https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and pyupgrade checks for all the new code going forward.

This should make it easier to contribute and read the code since all the code will be using the same style.

Download

The release can can be downloaded from https://libcloud.apache.org/downloads.html or installed using pip:

pip install "apache-libcloud==3.7.0"

Upgrading

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

pip install --upgrade "apache-libcloud==3.7.0"

Upgrade notes

A page which describes backward incompatible or semi-incompatible changes and how to preserve the old behavior when this is possible can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade_notes.html

Documentation

Regular and API documentation is available at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/v3.7.0/

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://github.com/apache/libcloud/issues.

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 CHANGES file.

We are happy to announce Libcloud v3.6.1.

This release includes new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Highlights include:

• Improvements in the EC2 price scraping script and updated pricing
• Improvements in the Azure ARM compute driver
• Improvements in the GCE compute driver
• Various bug fixes in the EC2 compute, OpenStack compute, Azure storage and other drivers

A list of all the changes can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html#changes-in-apache-libcloud-3.6.1.

Note on Python 3.5 support

Python 3.5 support has been dropped in Libcloud v3.5.0.

Python 3.5 has been EOL and non-supported for more than a year now (https://endoflife.date/python) and a lot of libraries (including some we depend on) have already dropped support for it.

Last release which still supports Python 3.5 is Libcloud v3.4.1.

Note on code style change (developers only)

To make formatting and styling in our code base more consistent, we have re-formatted all the code with black (https://github.com/psf/black) and pyupgrade Python 3.5+ (https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade) and we will automatically enforce black code style (https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and pyupgrade checks for all the new code going forward.

This should make it easier to contribute and read the code since all the code will be using the same style.

Download

The release can can be downloaded from https://libcloud.apache.org/downloads.html or installed using pip:

pip install "apache-libcloud==3.6.1"

Upgrading

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

pip install --upgrade "apache-libcloud==3.6.1"

Upgrade notes

A page which describes backward incompatible or semi-incompatible changes and how to preserve the old behavior when this is possible can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade_notes.html

Documentation

Regular and API documentation is available at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/v3.6.1/

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://github.com/apache/libcloud/issues.

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 CHANGES file.

We are happy to announce Libcloud v3.6.0.

This release includes new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Highlights include:

• Improvements in the Kuberneter container driver
• Improvements in the OpenStack compute driver (support for micro versions, etc.)
• Compatibility / support for paramiko >= 2.9.0 including backward compatibility layer for backward incompatible changes in paramiko related to old OpenSSH versions. More information on that available in the Upgrade Notes - https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade_notes.html#libcloud-3-6-0
• Support for authenticating using Azure AD credentials in the Azure Blobs storage driver

A list of all the changes can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html#changes-in-apache-libcloud-3.6.0.

Note on Python 3.5 support

Python 3.5 support has been dropped in Libcloud v3.5.0.

Python 3.5 has been EOL and non-supported for more than a year now (https://endoflife.date/python) and a lot of libraries (including some we depend on) have already dropped support for it.

Last release which still supports Python 3.5 is Libcloud v3.4.1.

Note on code style change (developers only)

To make formating and styling in our code base more consistent, we have re-formatted all the code with black (https://github.com/psf/black) and we will automatically enforce black code style (https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) for all the new code going forward.

This should make it easier to contribute and read the code since all the code will be using the same style.

Download

The release can can be downloaded from https://libcloud.apache.org/downloads.html or installed using pip:

pip install "apache-libcloud==3.6.0"

Upgrading

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

pip install --upgrade "apache-libcloud==3.6.0"

Upgrade notes

A page which describes backward incompatible or semi-incompatible changes and how to preserve the old behavior when this is possible can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade_notes.html

Documentation

Regular and API documentation is available at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/v3.6.0/

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://github.com/apache/libcloud/issues.

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 CHANGES file.

Today we are happy to announce various website updates. Here is a short summary of those updates.

• Move from svn to git for storing the website source code and the generated static content (https://github.com/apache/libcloud-site)
• New Docker image to make it easier to build and contribute to the website
• Upgrades to the various software and libraries used to build and serve the website (Jekyll, Ruby, Ruby Gems, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.).
• Dark mode / theme for the website
• Removal of Google tracking code (Google Analytics, Google Fonts)
• Removal of various Ruby gems which are not needed to build the website
• Other minor styling improvements

More on that below.

Background, Context

It has been over 8 years since the new static Jekyll powered website has been launched.

8 years is a long time and since then a lot has changed. Especially in the web world, but the website stayed more or less the same.

Since the website is purely static and doesn’t contain any dynamic server side components this means that not updating the software which is used to build the website has no negative security implications for the end users (that’s a nice thing about all the static website generators). This is vastly different if you run a server side CMS such as Wordpress or similar where you need to make sure it’s always up to date with the latest security patches.

Main problem with using old software (Ruby, Jekyll) was that it was very hard to reproduce local development environment which made it almost impossible for others to contribute - even I had issues with reproducing the environment in the past year.

We used Ruby 1.9 and Jekyll 1.5 which were both almost 8 years old and officially deprecated and non-supported for many years already.

At first, I only wanted to create a Docker image with this old software which would make it easier for other people to contribute and build the website locally.

It turned out that even that is very hard now because of the various old versions of the software and libraries that software depends on. After many hours, I did get it to work, but I decide to try to go a step further and see if I can actually update Ruby and Jekyll.

And surely, it turned out that’s not an easy task either. Over the years, Jekyll had many releases with breaking changes and to make things worse, we also utilize some custom Jekyll plugins which needed to be updated (I was actually already somewhat aware I’m opening a can of worms because I already tried to do that a couple of times in the past, but each time I decided to abandon those efforts since it required too much work / time).

In the end, after addressing all of those various issues and breaking changes, I got everything to work.

To make contributing even easier and faster, we also provide a pre-built Docker image with the development environment which should save some time and CPU cycles since the image doesn’t need to be built locally (sadly the image is on the larger side because a lot of tooling is needed to build the website - I do hope to reduce that a bit in a future when I get a chance by using a multi stage build).

Since I was already working on the website I also decided to make a bunch of other changes, my favorite one being dark mode / theme. I personally already use Dark Reader extension for Firefox which automatically provides dark mode for most websites on the fly, but I know now everyone is using something like that and a native dark mode / theme is usually better.

The source code and everything else for the new website is available at https://github.com/apache/libcloud-site.

Conclusion

We hope you will enjoy those new changes and most importantly, we hope those changes will decrease the barrier to entry and make contributing to the website easier and faster.

P.S. If you find any bugs or issues with those changes (especially the dark theme), please feel free to report them or, if possible, contribute the fix directly - that would be much appreciated.