Is OpenStack the New Linux? 185
snydeq writes "As the self-proclaimed 'cloud OS for the datacenter,' OpenStack is fast becoming one of the more intriguing movements in open source — complete with lofty ambitions, community in-fighting, and commercial appeal. But questions remain whether this project can reach its potential of becoming the new Linux. 'The allure of OpenStack is clear: Like Linux, OpenStack aims to provide a kernel around which all kinds of software vendors can build businesses. But with OpenStack, we're talking multiple projects to provide agile cloud management of compute, storage, and networking resources across the data center — plus authentication, self-service, resource monitoring, and a slew of other projects. It's hugely ambitious, perhaps the most far-reaching open source project ever, although still at a very early stage. ... Clearly, the sky-high aspirations of OpenStack both fuel its outrageous momentum and incur the risk of overreach and collapse, as it incites all manner of competition. The promise is big, but the success of OpenStack is by no means assured.'"
Re:what problem does OpenStack address? (Score:5, Informative)
Its not intended to be a replacement for an OS. If you read the article its basic a set of software to allow you to roll you own cloud solution. Basically Amazon EC2 in a box. You'd still need to install OSs on the virtual machines.
No no its no the new Linux, the Title is misleading.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenStack isn't a distro. It's a collection of utilities for virtualizing and managing compute and storage resources to build clouds. Putting Apache, PHP, and MySQL onto a linux box doesn't make the LAMP stack "Linux" any more than putting OpenStack services (Nova, swift, etc) onto a Linux distro makes OpenStack Linux.
Re:Oh please. (Score:4, Informative)
There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.
Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.
The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.
If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
OpenStack is a virtualization and object storage infrastructure and management system. It is not an operating system or a Linux distribution. It's an application. Rackspace is a major sponsor of the project, and eats their own dog food. Nova is the VM side, and supports (to varying degrees) pretty much every hypervisor. Swift is the object store that Rackspace Cloud Files is based on.
This should not be compared to kernels, Linux or anything of the sort. "...a major threat to VMware, Citrix and Parallels datacenter management products" would be a lot better.