Can OpenStack Avoid Fragmentation In China? 42
itwbennett writes "More people visit the OpenStack Web site from Beijing than any other city in the world and developers in China account for the second largest number of code commits. But beyond a high level of interest, there's another reason that the OpenStack Foundation might do well to host its next summit in Hong Kong: Avoiding fragmentation. China has a history of going its own way in technology. 'I watched it develop its own 3G technology, much to the dismay of global network and phone makers who were shut out of the market. More recently, Chinese companies have gleefully gone on their own with Android,' writes ITworld's Nancy Gohring. It seems like a long shot, but maybe by holding the next summit in Hong Kong, OpenStack can draw contributors into the fold."
Re:what is OpenStack? (Score:5, Informative)
Like Eucalyptus and Cloudstack, Openstack is a framework for managing a virtualization environment. It's basically an IaaS, written mostly in python to glue together:
Image provisioning, by way of a service called glance.
VM provisioning, by a virtualization technology of your choice. You can do kvm/xen/vmware/hyperv and I wanna say openvz as well, although kvm is the most supported with xen being the hypervisor employed in Rackspace's deployment of openstack. This service is called Nova. They took it from Nasa
Networking provisioning, by the way of linux bridges (and vlan management if you chose) using a service called nova-network, or by the way openvswitch/linuxbridges offering ip over ip or 8021q using a service called quantum. Clients can be assigned a shared network, their own network with their own vlan (using nova network), or Clients can be assigned a shared network and/their own networks linked between vm hosts using gre tunnelling or vlan management.
ISCSI is provisioned by a framework called cinder.
You can also configure an s3 like service called Swift.
Openstacks greatest feature and flaw is that it is extremely configurable, extremely extensible and that features are added very quickly. As a site admin, you are expected to upgrade every six months. The upgrade guide offers a facsimile of reality, which is its own pain point. Many features are not documented very well, some features are deprecated between releases and the upgrade guide sometimes fails to mention it.
I'm taking care of two installations of openstack. I've just upgraded one from the previous release to the current one, and another which was two releases back. It was painful. If you have an admin team that likes to fly by the seat of their pants, openstack is not for you. It requires a great deal of institutional restraint.
But when it works, it is a unix sysadmin's wet dream. The command line tools work properly in this release, and you can script everything you need to do for day to day maintenance in bash. If you want to use ec2's api to interact with your vms, it's a supported configuration. If you want to use openstack's better thought out apis to do so, all the better. If you know python, you can really make this thing sing. You can script snapshotting vms and have the snap shots go to glance. You can move vms from one host to another, so long as you have a common shared storage area for storing the vm images. You can write your own scheduler for deploying vms, you can make filters to make pick how resources are allocated very very easily. There's also a vm management web interface called Horizon. I think it exposes just the right amount of functionality to the user, especially those that don't care about the openstack underbelly.
When it works right, openstack is a dream to play with. When it doesn't, you have your work cut out for you.