Another year is behind us. Like most of the previous years, this year included a lot of exciting development. This post is going to present some statistics and highlights of the year.

Year in Numbers (recap)

  • 800+ commits
  • 191 opened PRs on Github (159 closed, 32 open at the time of this writing)
  • 86 opened JIRA issues
  • 75+ different contributors
  • 4 releases (3 major ones)

Statistics from Open Hub.

You can also dig into the numbers yourself on Github, Open Hub and Apache Project Information.

Releases

This year we had 4 releases (2.0.0, 2.1.0, 2.2.0, 2.2.1). Out of that, three major ones.

Libcloud 2.0.0 which was released in April represented a big milestone. We finally moved away from our home grown HTTP abstraction layer built on top of Python’s httplib library to the popular requests library.

Back in the day when the project started, requests library didn’t exist yet so we needed to build a lot of the functionality which is now provided by requests ourselves. Move to requests means that we now have a lot less code to maintain and we can focus our efforts on the actual drivers which is core to Libcloud and where the project provides value.

To give you an idea how much effort it took - the ground work for that change started back in 2016 (https://libcloud.apache.org/blog/2016/04/06/requests-support.html, https://github.com/apache/libcloud/pull/728), but it took a lot more testing and work to get it stable enough so we were finally able to include it as part of the stable 2.0.0 release (and before that, we also released a couple of release candidates so users could test and verify that their Libcloud related code still works as expected without any regressions).

Special thanks to Anthony Shaw for leading this effort and not giving up (the change itself involved touching a lot of code and updating test cases for most of the drivers which resulted in a lot of not so pleasant work and merge conflicts).

Community

The community continued to grow and we have received contributions from more than 75 different contributors. Keep in mind that this number only includes people who contributed a code change which has been merged into trunk. The actual number is quite a bit higher (code who didn’t get merged, people who reported a bug or didn’t include a code change, etc).

We have also added one new committer - Quentin Pradet.

Ecosystem

In addition to various proprietary and private code bases, Libcloud continues to be used as an important part by various open-source projects and libraries.

Most notable ones include SaltStack, StackStorm and Ansible.

Conclusion

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to the project in one form or another. No matter how small or involved, your contribution helped project grow and push through another successful year.

Again, thank you, happy and successful 2018 and see you soon.