Is OpenStack the New Linux? 185
Posted
by
timothy
from the interesting-tools-find-interesting-uses dept.
from the interesting-tools-find-interesting-uses dept.
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.'"
Noise without content (Score:4, Interesting)
It sounds very exciting until you look at the code. Then you realise that the quality in the project is entirely in the marketing, and there's nothing of worth code-wise at all.
Surprisingly hyped platform (Score:3, Interesting)
There must have been a lot of development going on in the OpenStack camp during the past year. Last time I checked many features that were already available in other open source cloud platform products were work-in-progress and setting up and configuring a functional private cloud was cumbersome at best. I wonder how they have managed to gain such publicity and backing over more mature competitors.
Re:Done. (Score:5, Interesting)
I always think of Betteridge's Law of Headlines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenStack is a Linux distribution organized for deploying a compute cloud. Linux is the new Linux?
No it's not. It's a virtualization management platform with appropriate interfaces for clients that you can deploy on pretty much any Linux server.
Re:Done. (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno...
We're already hearing about "local clouds" - essentially building a small-scale cloud for your own large company. So, say, Hewlett-Packard could, instead of renting cloud space, could build a small "cloud" just for themselves.
Once that becomes relatively common, someone will come up with the "personal cloud" - a small home server, that "does" "everything" "the cloud" "does". I actually expect IPv6 may help with this - if you can access "your" cloud from anywhere, what advantage does "the" cloud have?
And then, once that becomes common for nerds and the tech-savvy wealthy, someone will decide to do it in software instead of a dedicated hardware appliance. I expect they shall call it a "desktop cloud".
And then the loop begins AGAIN!
Re:Done. (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the same but have been doing some digging of late. I've only really looked at depth into AWS so far, and yes, it can be as simple as sticking a LAMP stack in the "cloud". BUT if you need to scale that up, there's some rather neat stuff for load balancing and auto-scaling, basically being able to build a service/system that could handle the slashdot effect without needing the long term hardware commitments. And its rather easy to do. Add into it the ability to distribute your content across multiple cache servers to speed up access and you have the ability to put together global infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of a data centre deployment.
Now as to the long-term costs, I actually view that as much as a matter of good management of that infrastructure - demand not as expected then cut back on resources used or if there's constant demand then reserve (pay up front for) that capacity and cut costs. While it might not be right for every project cloud based services have enough advantages and make sufficient economic sense that it is fool-hardy to ignore them any longer.
"the New Linux" is an analogy (you literal dorks) (Score:4, Interesting)
"the New Linux" is an analogy (you literal dorks). From the FAQ http://openstack.org/projects/openstack-faq/ [openstack.org]
What does it mean for the cloud ecosystem?
This is not yet code that comes with certification from operating system or hardware vendors. Instead it's aimed at providers, institutions, and enterprises with highly technical operations teams that have the capabilities and needs to turn physical hardware into large-scale cloud deployments.
Still, wide adoption of an open-source, open-standards cloud should be huge for everyone. It means customers won't have to fear lock-in and technology companies can participate in a growing market that spans cloud providers.
A great analogy comes from the early days of the Internet: the transition away from fractured, proprietary flavors of UNIX toward open-source Linux. An open cloud stands to provide the same benefits for large-scale cloud computing that the Linux standard provided inside the server.
Re:Done. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think "Cloud" is less about physical architecture and more about feature set. When I think "Cloud" I think dynamic, quickly reconfigurable, essentially "limitless". Where I work we're moving away from a traditional model where applications are installed on their own dedicated servers with dedicated DB and FS storage to a Cloud model where VMs can be dynamically allocated in seconds, cloned from images and ready to roll. Storage is via EC2 style no-sql object storage and doesn't need to be pre-provisioned. For a small shop this probably doesn't sound very exciting but when you're in an environment with tens of thousands of machines and are used to multi-week wait times for approval, purchasing and install of new hardware it's a pretty big shift.
So it's not the redundancy, or even use of VMs that's interesting, it's the pooling of resources - having compute & storage be essentially utilities you can take as little or as much of as you need. Places like Google have been doing this for a long time, but it's only recently becoming mainstream in other orgs.