Holiday Coding the SageMath Cloud

I love the Holiday break.  I get to work on https://cloud.sagemath.com (SMC) all day again!   Right now I'm working on a multi-data center extension of http://www.gluster.org for storing a large pool of sparse compressed deduplicated ZFS image files that are efficiently replicated between data centers.  Soon SMC projects will all be hosted in this, which will mean that they can very quickly be moved between computers, are available even if all but one data center goes down, and will have ZFS snapshots instead of the current snapshot system.  ZFS snapshots are much better for this application, since you can force them to happen at a point in time, with tags, and also delete them if you want.  A little later I'll even make it so you can do a full download (to your computer) of an SMC project (and all snapshots!) by just downloading the ZFS image file and mounting it yourself. 

I'm also continuing to work on adding a Google Compute Engine data center; this is the web server parts hosted there right now https://108.59.84.126/,    but the real interesting part will be making compute nodes available, since the GCE compute nodes are very fast.   I'll be making 30GB RAM 8-core instances available, so one can start a project there and just get access to that -- for free for to SMC users, despite the official price being $0.829/hour.    I hope this happens soon.