We are pleased to announce the release of Libcloud 2.0.0.

This major release brings many new features, improvements, bug-fixes, and drivers.

Release highlights

• Apache Libcloud 2.0 series replaces the use of Python httplib with a hard dependency on the requests package. Users no longer have to specific Certificate Authority bundles when using Apache Libcloud
• 10% performance improvement through the use of HTTP sessions
• Support for buffered IO streams for storage drivers
• Support for Python 3.6, deprecation of Python 3.2
• 3 new drivers - OnApp Compute, OnApp DNS, 1&1 Compute
• Lots of improvements to our Azure ARM support
• Continuing udates to the Amazon drivers

A detailed description of the 2.0 HTTP API is documented here

Compute API Changes

• Outscale SAS doc improvements and logo update

OnApp Changes

• Add list images support for OnApp driver
• Add keypair management to OnApp driver

Amazon EC2 Changes

• Add r4 instance types for AWS
• Add support for AWS eu-west-2 and ca-central-1 regions
• Add P2 GPU instance types
• Add method to modify snapshot attribute for EC2
• Add ENA support for EC2 compute images
• Add support for forcing detachment of EBS volumes to EC2 driver
• Add support for ModifyVolume and DescribeVolumesModifications
• Added Import Snapshot and Describe Import Snapshot to EC2 compute driver
• Add missing regions in AWS storage and compute drivers
• Add SR-IOV net support to images in EC2 compute driver
• Fix - update t2.small image size from 11 CPU to 1
• Added Billing Product for image in EC2 compute driver

Linode changes

• Add start, stop instance methods and fix incorrect state TERMINATED to STOPPED

Azure ARM changes

• Fix typeerror on ex_list_nics
• Add support for Azure Cloud Environments as well as Locations
• Fix string representation of the VhdImage type and fix listing of Public IP addresses
• Add network security groups to azure ARM
• Add the ability to list resource groups
• Fix Azure ARM driver condition for ex_list_publishers where location is specified

Google Cloud changes

• Allow delete instances from managed group
• Allow preemptible instances to be created
• Remove validation checks for guestOsFeatures

Alibaba Aliyun changes

• Add aliyun ecs instance join leave security group
• Fix Aliyun ECS, Load balancer and storage adapters when using unicode UTF-8 characters in the names of resources

DigitalOcean changes

• Add price_monthly extra param to digitalocean sizes

VMWare vSphere changes

• Fix issue with authentication methods crashing

Storage

• Reintroduce S3 multipart upload support with signature v4

DNS

• Add OnApp driver

Minor changes

Common

• Added an integration test API and a test suite for validating functionality without mocking any libcloud subsystems
• Change Cloudscale to cloudscale.ch.

Bug Fixes

Compute

2.0.0

• Fix OpenStack drivers not correctly setting URLs when used with identity API, would default to 127.0.0.1 and service catalog URLs were not adhered to.

• Fix Aliyun ECS, Load balancer and storage adapters when using unicode UTF-8 characters in the names of resources in 2.0.0rc2 < it would fail as a MalformedResponseError, Python 2.7 element tree was raising a unicode error

• Refactor the test classes to use the full libcloud.http and libcloud.common.base modules, with Connection, Response all used with requests_mock. This increases our test coverages and catches bugs in drivers’ custom parse_body and auth modules

• Rename libcloud.httplib_ssl to libcloud.http now that we don’t use httplib

2.0.0rc2

• Fix Public IP not assigned when creating NIC on Azure ARM
• Fix a bug in profitbricks driver where listing snapshots would request a malformed URL
• Fix LIBCLOUD-806 bug where vsphere driver cannot be instantiated
• [google compute] Improve performance of list nodes by caching volume information.

Full change log can be found at here.

Special thank you

I would like to wish a special thank you to all of our community contributors for their ongoing support to the project.

• Tinu Cleatus for the OnApp driver
• Alex Misstear for the EC2 improvements
• Jie Ren for the Aliyun improvements
• Francisco Ros for the DigitalOcean improvements
• Peter Amstutz and Joseph Hall for the Azure ARM API updates
• All of our community for their ongoing support and contributions…

Download

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

pip install apache-libcloud==2.0.0

Upgrading

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

pip install --upgrade apache-libcloud==2.0.0

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/latest/

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LIBCLOUD. 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.

One of the big requests whilst we were replacing httplib with the requests package in 2.0 was why didn’t we use a HTTP library that supports asynchronous API calls.

The intention for 2.0 and replacing the HTTP backend classes was to improve the usability of the project, by making SSL certificates easier to manage, improving the maintainability of our source code by using an active 3rd party package and also improving performance and stability.

Apache Libcloud already has documentation on threaded libraries like gevent and callback-based libraries like Twisted, see using libcloud in multithreaded environments for examples.

PEP 492, implemented in Python 3.5 provides a new coroutine protocol using methods, __await__ for classes, a coroutine method wrapper, or a method that returns a coroutine object. Also async iterators and context managers have been introduced.

We would like to take advantage of the new language features by offering APIs in Apache Libcloud without breaking backward compatibility and compatibility for users of <Python 3.5.

Use cases for this would be:

• Being able to fetch Node or StorageObjects from multiple geographies or drivers simultaneously.
• Being able to quickly upload or download storage objects by parallelizing operations on the StorageDriver.
• Being able to call a long-running API method (e.g. generate report), whilst running other code.

Design 1 - async context managers PR 1016

This design would allow drivers to operate in 2 modes, the first is for synchronous method calls, they return list or object data as per usual. The second mode, API methods like NodeDriver.list_nodes would return a coroutine object and could be awaited or gathered using an event loop.

import asyncio

from integration.driver.test import TestNodeDriver
from libcloud.async_util import AsyncSession

driver = TestNodeDriver('apache', 'libcloud')

async def run():
    # regular API call
    nodes = driver.list_nodes()

    async with AsyncSession(driver) as async_instance:
        nodes = await async_instance.list_nodes()

    assert len(nodes) == 2

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(run())
loop.close()

Design 2 - Additional methods in each driver for coroutines PR 1027

This is the second design concept for async support in Libcloud.

The concept here is to have Asynchronous Mixins, LibcloudConnection uses requests and LibcloudAsyncConnection uses aiohttp for async transport see

The LibcloudAsyncConnection is an implementation detail of AsyncConnection, which is the API for the drivers to consume see

The drivers then use this mixin for their custom connection classes, e.g.

class GoogleStorageConnection(ConnectionUserAndKey, AsyncConnection):
    ...

They then inherit from libcloud.storage.base.StorageAsyncDriver, which uses a new set of base methods, e.g. iterate_containers_async and can be implemented like this:

        async def iterate_containers_async(self):
            response = await self.connection.request_async('/')
            if response.status == httplib.OK:
                containers = self._to_containers(obj=response.object,
                                                 xpath='Buckets/Bucket')
                return containers
    
            raise LibcloudError('Unexpected status code: %s' % (response.status),
                                driver=self)

Now the consumer can more or less do this:

from libcloud.storage.providers import get_driver
from libcloud.storage.types import Provider

import asyncio

GoogleStorageDriver = get_driver(Provider.GOOGLE_STORAGE)
driver = GoogleStorageDriver(key=KEY, secret=SECRET)

def do_stuff_with_object(obj):
    print(obj)

async def run():
    tasks = []
    async for container in driver.iterate_containers_async():
        async for obj in driver.iterate_container_objects_async(container):
            tasks.append(asyncio.ensure_future(do_stuff_with_object(obj)))
    await asyncio.gather(*tasks)

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(run())
loop.close()

Design 3 - Initializer with “async” mode

This option is similar to 2, except that if a driver is instantiated with “async=True”, then all driver class methods would return coroutine objects. Internally, it would patch the Connection class with the AsyncConnection class.

The downside of this is that all method calls to a driver would need to be awaited or used by an event loop.

from libcloud.storage.providers import get_driver
from libcloud.storage.types import Provider

import asyncio

GoogleStorageDriver = get_driver(Provider.GOOGLE_STORAGE)
driver = GoogleStorageDriver(key=KEY, secret=SECRET, async=True)

def do_stuff_with_object(obj):
    print(obj)

async def run():
    tasks = []
    async for container in driver.iterate_containers():
        async for obj in driver.iterate_container_objects(container):
            tasks.append(asyncio.ensure_future(do_stuff_with_object(obj)))
    await asyncio.gather(*tasks)

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(run())
loop.close()

Give us feedback

Got a better idea? Have an API or design, the question we’re asking is “if you wanted to use Libcloud for an async application, what would the code look like?” This helps us design the API and the implementation details can follow.

Feel free to comment on the mailing list or on the pull requests, or raise your own pull-request with an API design.

We are pleased to announce the release of Libcloud 2.0.0rc2.

This release brings many new features, improvements, bug-fixes, and drivers.

Release highlights

• Apache Libcloud 2.0 series replaces the use of Python httplib with a hard dependency on the requests package. Users’ no longer have to specific Certificate Authority bundles when using Apache Libcloud
• 10% performance improvement through the use of HTTP sessions
• Support for buffered IO streams for storage drivers
• Support for Python 3.6, deprecation of Python 3.2

A detailed description of the 2.0 changes is documented here

Note that 2.0.0rc1 was not released to PyPi as 4 breaking issues were discovered by users. The changelog for both 2.0.0rc2 and rc1 is below.

Release highlights for 2.0.0rc2

Compute

• Fix a bug in profitbricks driver where listing snapshots would request a malformed URL
• Fix LIBCLOUD-806 bug where vsphere driver cannot be instantiated
• [google compute] Improve performance of list nodes by caching volume information.

Common

• Fix LIBCLOUD_DEBUG trying to decompress already decompressed responses
• Added an integration test API and a test suite for validating functionality without mocking any libcloud subsystems
• Fix for Linode classes since 2.0x
• Fix CertificateConnection not correctly signing requests in 2.0rc1, impacted Azure classic driver, OpenStack and Docker driver
• Change Cloudscale to cloudscale.ch.
• Explicitly check if response is None in RawResponse class

Compute

• Outscale SAS doc improvements and logo update
• [GCE] Allow preemptible instances to be created
• Add support for forcing detachment of EBS volumes to EC2 driver
• Fix Public IP not assigned when creating NIC on Azure ARM
• [ONAPP] Add list images support for OnApp driver
• [EC2] Add r4 instance types for AWS
• [EC2] support for AWS eu-west-2 and ca-central-1 regions
• [EC2] Add P2 GPU instance types
• [EC2] Add method to modify snapshot attribute for EC2
• [Linode] Add start, stop instance methods and fix incorrect state TERMINATED to STOPPED
• [EC2] Add ENA support for EC2 compute images
• [Azure ARM] fix typeerror on ex_list_nics
• [GCE] allow delete instances from managed group

Storage

• Reintroduce S3 multipart upload support with signature v4

Changes Apache Libcloud 2.0.0rc1

Common

• Fix DEBUG mode, also add support for using io.StringIO as the file handle when calling libcloud.enable_debug
• Introduction of the requests package as the mechanism for making HTTP requests for all drivers
• Fix bug where custom port and secure flag would not get propagated to connection class
• Fix bug where custom port would not get propagated to connection
• Fix bug where instantiating a connection from URL and then requesting an action with a leading / would lead to a malformed URL

Compute

• Fix a bug in profitbricks driver where listing snapshots would request a malformed URL
• Fix LIBCLOUD-806 bug where vsphere driver cannot be instantiated
• [google compute] Improve performance of list nodes by caching volume information.

Full change log can be found at here.

Special thank you

I would like to wish a special thank you to all of our community contributors for their ongoing support to the project.

Download

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

pip install apache-libcloud==2.0.0rc2

Upgrading

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

pip install --upgrade apache-libcloud==2.0.0rc2

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/latest/

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LIBCLOUD. 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.