Apache Whirr release 0.7.0 is now available. It includes changes covering over 50 issues, four of which were considered blockers. Whirr is a tool for quickly starting and managing clusters running on cloud services like Amazon EC2. This is the first Whirr release as a top level Apache project (previously releases were under the auspices of the Incubator). In addition to improving overall stability some of the highlights are described below:

Support for Apache Mahout as a deployable component is new in 0.7.0. Mahout is a scalable machine learning library implemented on top of Apache Hadoop.

• WHIRR-384 – Add Mahout as a service
• WHIRR-49 – Allow Whirr to use Chef for configuration management
• WHIRR-258 – Add Ganglia as a service
• WHIRR-385 – Implement support for using nodeless, masterless Puppet to provision and run scripts

Whirr 0.7.0 will be included in a scheduled update to CDH4.

Getting Involved

The Apache Whirr project is working on a number of new features. The How To Contribute page is a great place to start if you’re interested in getting involved as a developer.

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the release (reporting issues, fixing bugs, reviewing changes, writing documentation, etc), and big thank you to our tireless release manager Andrei Savu.