OpenStack: the Open Source Cloud That Vendors Love and Users Are Ignoring 99
Brandon Butler writes: "OpenStack has no shortage of corporate backers. Rackspace, Red Hat, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and many others have hopped on board. But many wonder, after four years, shouldn't there be more end users by this point? 'OpenStack backers say this progression is completely normal. Repeating an analogy many have made, Paul Cormier, president of products and technology for Red Hat, says OpenStack’s development is just like the process of building up Linux. This time the transition to a cloud-based architecture is an even bigger technological transformation than replacing proprietary operating systems with Linux. "It’s where Linux was in the beginning," he says about OpenStack's current status. "Linux was around for a while before it really got adopted in the enterprise. OpenStack is going through the same process right now."'"
You're talking about the cloud here (Score:2, Insightful)
The only people with the business case to use cloud infrastructure are the corporate backers themselves. SMB have no reason to chase clouds and mid-level B2B computing crap gets outsourced anyway.
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The only people with the business case to use cloud infrastructure are the corporate backers themselves. SMB have no reason to chase clouds and mid-level B2B computing crap gets outsourced anyway.
Yeah, because your typical SMB out there really want to use time and resources on managing their own IT systems, administrating their own servers and perform regular updates and security patching. It's not like they really want to focus on something else.. I know it is popular to make fun of the cloud hype on Slashdot, but IT as a managed services has real value especially for SMB (not at least compared to a very typical SMB scenario of the IT role being filled part time by the guy in the firm that knows mo
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That's sort of like saying that everyone should be riding the bus because it's too resource-intensive to maintain a scooter or to have it serviced.
If all the software that those SMBs need to run worked in a cloud environment with no issues, then it would make sense.
Most of those small businesses, especially not-for-profits, can't spend as much on reliable bandwidth and network infrastructure as they'd need to in order to leverage a cloud solution and not face maddening slowdowns in ordinary workflows.
If you
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As a IT manager of a 1000 user mid tier business, The only thing we could do in the cloud was Email and office docs.
Neither os which tied into our document management solution that was a business requirement, so using cloud apps was not appropriate for them, nor for the other 200 or so productivity apps we use.
putting the Servers in the cloud as virts is possible. but 2 times the cost of physicals, and I still have to manage them there anyway:-).
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You still have to admin your servers, even if they're in the cloud. Just not deal with hardware issues.
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You still have to admin your servers, even if they're in the cloud. Just not deal with hardware issues.
No, you rent the complete solution as a service -- Office365, Salesforce, etc. I work in a 100 person 1.5 IT guy company that have moved almost all our IT (rest soon to go) to rented services like these, and the business is quite happy about this vs. the hassle of running our own IT.
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For some businesses, yes. If they can rely on turn key solutions.
Many businesses can't.
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We should take of our IT glasses.
Of course IT shops need direct access to their IT. But most shops are anything from ice cream parlors to carpenters. The prototypical SMB. They don't need their IT as we do. They need it like we need electricity or running water. Pretty much standard, but reliable.
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How's that any different from outsourcing your hardware and software support without using the cloud? Its not.
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I know it is popular to make fun of the cloud hype on Slashdot, but IT as a managed services has real value
Managed IT services are perfectly fine. Calling it "the cloud" is buying into a buzzword that exists for no reason but to generate hype over a business model that has been around for decades.
More virtualisation than cloud (Score:5, Informative)
OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services. As with many "open" technologies, the realities aren't quite as simple as the article here suggests, though.
It's certainly true that proprietary high-end networking gear and virtualisation software can be expensive. In that respect, alternatives like OpenStack are potentially disruptive.
On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.
Also, just because big name brands are keen to be associated with the shiny new buzzword, don't mistake that for sincere support. OpenStack poses a direct threat to the established business model of some of those networking giants, and just like everyone else, the executives at those businesses are wondering where the industry is going next and how to look like you're playing nicely while really still trying to optimise your own financial position.
Re:More virtualisation than cloud (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.
+100
SMB here - We virtualised all our 6 servers and multiple test pc's onto a couple of grunty boxes. We looked at the cloud, but our net is to slow and unreliable (thanks Malcom Turnball for screwing the NBN).
Looked at OpenStack - a freaking nightmare to put together. Huge chain of dependencies and general flakyness. vSphere was too expensive if you wanted clustering, vmotion, replication etc. We eventually settled on proxmox - debian based using KVM, trivially easy to install and get running. Nice admin interface and basic backup facilities.
8 months on no real regrets, so sometimes regret not going with HyperV 2012.
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I give it another play around sometime soon, but it would have to other a lot more to persuade me to migrate now :) And our scaling needs are not large - might go up to 4(!) nodes next year.
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If you're using OpenStack for general virtualisation I'd say you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The OpenStack feature set shines when you actually need things like on-demand scaling, completely API driven infrastructure, instantiation of servers with lifetimes of minutes to hours, etc. To be used in the way it's designed for it pretty much requires applications written to function that way.
If you're just virtualizing traditional workloads you're better off with using RHEV or VmWare or some
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OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services.
I'm not sure that's true. From what I've read (but admittedly I haven't tried to implement OpenStack), it doesn't seem to offer any great virtualization capabilities compared with other hypervisors. It seems that the benefit of OpenStack comes from it being an easy way to deploy virtualization, storage, and compute nodes as a platform for development.
If I want to set up a single server with a hypervisor, would I set up OpenStack? If I had 5 servers that I wanted to set up as hypervisors, would OpenStack
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Some of what you say is certainly fair, but I don't think the useful/not useful cases for OpenStack are quite as black and white as you seem to be implying.
For a single physical box that's going to pretend to be a handful of not-often-changing virtual boxes, sure, something like OpenStack is way overspecified (and overcomplicated).
However, scaling up a bit, you moved into the territory where you have a few powerful machines and multiple large-scale storage devices, and you probably want them to run lots of
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Well if you're saying that virtualization is useful for IT departments, then yes, I'd certainly agree. If you said distributed/redundant virtualization would be useful for IT departments, I'd agree there too. For example, I would love to be able to do the following quickly, easily, and with FOSS: Set up multiple provide datacenters in different locations, each with a couple of computers that can serve as hosts and some form of mass storage, and link them all together as some kind of cluster for virtualiza
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Of course vendors love it (Score:2, Insightful)
Cloud computing companies fuck their customers with excessive charges orders of magnitude higher than normal data-center co-location costs.
The reason why people are ignoring it is because they recognize the ass fucking. Simple really.
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The scaleability they offer is a big advantage over just having a server at a co-lo. It's not worth the money for any project I've worked on, but if you have a web-business that has the potential to become very popular, putting it in a couple of different vendor's clouds can make a lot of sense so that you can very quickly scale up to handle the traffic.
A cloudy day is a bad day (Score:2)
The data insecurity and NSA pre-packaging they offer is a big advantage but not for you
FTFY
Re:Of course vendors love it (Score:5, Informative)
This has nothing to do with cloud computing service providers. OpenStack is more about companies using the software for private clouds in which case they would be running it in their own data center.
In this case, customers are still not picking it up even though they could have cloud computing without the service providers dicking them over.
I think the software will have to prove itself over time in addition to companies figuring out how it fits into their data centers. Red Hat throwing it's support weight behind it will definitely help.
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What is the use case? (Score:3)
Re:What is the use case? (Score:5, Informative)
If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter. If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS.
And you get the usual proprietary issues from both. The promise of OpenStack is that you develop in house, then push it out to whatever commodity provider(s) meet your needs at the time, x number of times in y number of locations.
It's not entirely unlike how you can assume that most any popular PHP package will run on whatever hosting provider you choose, but at the machine level instead of the app level. All the usual caveats about standards apply.
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The promise of OpenStack is that you develop in house, then push it out to whatever commodity provider(s) meet your needs at the time, x number of times in y number of locations.
So if I'm running KVM on CentOS, OpenStack would be an easier path to migrate my existing VMs to other cloud providers? Not sure I need it, but that could be interesting in some situations.
Re:What is the use case? (Score:4, Informative)
yes, this is what OpenStack does/is supposed to do. You can migrate your virtual machines, and the storage and networking infrastructure from your local datacenter, to a remote datacenter, to AWS, or Rackspace or any other openstack compliant hosting provider. In the grand sceme of this things it's really quite impressive and awesome. In reality it's still a mess, but getting better all of the time.
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And you get the usual proprietary issues from both.
I'm not entirely sure what you're angling at VMware with that, but for AWS it makes more sense.
The promise of OpenStack is that you develop in house, then push it out to whatever commodity provider(s) meet your needs at the time [...snip...] [compatible] at the machine level instead of the app level.
I was under the impression that OpenStack is a management and deployment framework - it will work on top of whatever supported hypervisors are in use (KVM, Xen, VMware, etc). One would assume you won't be exposed to the majority of OpenStack's APIs and direct management systems if you're using a third-party cloud provider.
Unless you're planning your own cloud system or are looking at a deployment on the scale wher
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The thing is that it's not OpenStack *or* VMWare, it's OpenStack *and* any hypervisor you like, including VMWare if you want. It's (as far as I understand, mind) an "Application Layer" above the hypervisors.
You can have OpenStack running with VMWare, XenServer, KVM, or possibly other hypervisors, if you like. Here for example is how you could setup OpenStack to use VMWare vCenter [openstack.org]. But at the moment I also have absolutely no Idea what I could user it for. My "classic" virtual machines do everything I need th
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Meh, it's also just another level of complexity.
http://docs.openstack.org/trun... [openstack.org]
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If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter.
If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS.
I see no reason to deploy OpenStack at a small to medium sized business. Am I just looking to get myself fired for insisting on a solution that is not VMware?
Openstack is not a VM manager. It's a cloud management system. If you want your cloud units to run in VMWare containers, OpenStack supports that. It also supports Xen, VirtualBox, several other VM hosts and Containers.
The advantage of a cloud is that you can toss stuff around without having to dedicate specific machines to them. This allows easier recovery from hardware failures as well as the ability to add nodes and capacity on-demand without having to sit down with paper and pencil and allocate physical
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If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter. If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS. I see no reason to deploy OpenStack at a small to medium sized business. Am I just looking to get myself fired for insisting on a solution that is not VMware?
And I would agree with you. OpenStak has the PROMISE of being a good thing for your average user, but it is FAR from being a turn-key solution. Getting OpenStack to actually do what you want it to is not something most smaller operators have time to figure out but requires someone who knows a lot about the specific VM product you want to use and the tools needed to make adjustments to your created machines.
But that really isn't a problem with OpenStack points to the purpose of OpenStack. This tool is de
I almost had to groan at marketing lingo today. (Score:1)
Thank you cloud to butt.
Linux Was Free (Score:1)
In the beginning, Linux was free. I remember using it in college and learning about it and getting excited. If these big corporate players want traction against AWS and the like, they should be giving out free hosting to college students so they can tinker with it too.
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Linux IS still free... HOWEVER..
Hardware costs money, IP addresses cost money, buildings cost money, billing customers costs money, bandwidth costs money, employees cost money and electrical power costs money. Personally, I think having somebody do all this for me for the little some charge is a great deal.
So, if you don't want to make payments to somebody for your hosting, you are free to buy the hardware, an IP address and bandwidth and pay the power company and do it yourself. Good Luck.
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In the beginning, Linux was free. I remember using it in college and learning about it and getting excited. If these big corporate players want traction against AWS and the like, they should be giving out free hosting to college students so they can tinker with it too.
And so they are. Look at Red Hat's Openshift.
it boggles the mind... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that right now, in the midst of the NSA security nightmare and all the angst and FUD it's causing, that people are wondering why individuals are not deciding to throw their often-sensitive data into the cloud.
how could anyone think their data will be or stay safe, given the various threats that we hear about on almost a daily basis?
timing is everything (besides location of course...and sex appeal...and everything else) in life, and right now is not the time for cloud computing.
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...that right now, in the midst of the NSA security nightmare and all the angst and FUD it's causing, that people are wondering why individuals are not deciding to throw their often-sensitive data into the cloud.
how could anyone think their data will be or stay safe, given the various threats that we hear about on almost a daily basis?
timing is everything (besides location of course...and sex appeal...and everything else) in life, and right now is not the time for cloud computing.
And you think, based on the revelations you've read, that your often-sensitive data is safer in a closet in your office? It's still accessible over the internet, and your CEO still logs in from any old airport wi-fi or coffee shop using his malware-riddled DELL.
I don't worry about Amazon, China, or the NSA sifting through my databases at night, because given the state of the State I don't think we can do much to stop them. I DO worry about power failures, water pipe bursts, exploding UPS batteries, dust, an
Ignoring all the other problems with "clouds"... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hell, lets even ignore all that. What would I, as an end user, use OpenStack for? I'm sincerely asking: what is the use case for an end user directly using OpenStack?
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Hell, lets even ignore all that. What would I, as an end user, use OpenStack for? I'm sincerely asking: what is the use case for an end user directly using OpenStack?
That, I think is the answer to TFA's question. You shouldn't. That's for the DevOps people to worry about.
As an end user, you shouldn't have to care what the data center underpinnings are. And for personal systems, the standardized images of cloud systems aren't much use. Although if you're running a call center or some other group where lots of people are running essentially identical systems, they're a better candidate for commodity virtual hosting.
The problem is DevStack (Score:1)
The problem with OpenStack is that the only part of it that is actually open and free is DevStack, which is fine for tinkering but isn't suitable for actual deployment. Of course, for an actual deployment solution, you have to pay these vendors $$$$ at which point you might as well just pay Amazon $$$$ and get better service.
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1. Large chunks of it are "just" API's with no implementation behind them. I recently had someone say we should use OpenStack because it had Cinder and we needed block storage. I had to point out that doesn't really help unless they want to pay for a Cinder backend, or develop their own.
2. It's horrifically complicated. I used to work for HP Cloud Services: HP's public cloud. I was there when Biri decided to use OpenStack. I saw the huge pain even they went thr
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Lot more than you think... (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenStack holds a summit every 6 months. This last one (just last week) had over 3500 people in attendence - developers from those sponsoring it, operators, and user; and they were talking about how phenominal the growth has been - the first from what I heard had like 500 people.
So while you may want to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Compute for a non-managed, public cloud; if you want to do something in-house, you have fewer choices. VMware certainly has their offering; but it also comes at a high price (yes, I've looked at it in the past). I'm not sure where the various hypervisor support is, but I do know they use KVM and have the ability to use others (Rackspace uses Xen, others use VMware or Windows HyperV if I am not mistaken; at the very least there's discussion on it).
Now, I wouldn't expect high growth for OpenStack. Why? It's a big budget item to run in-house, and most are probably not going to market they use it. If people are not devoting a lot of money up-front to run it, they may be testing and slowly rolling it out as resources allow. And yes, you can run it from the SMB level to the Enterprise level.
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace; I've got a few servers that I may try to install OpenStack on to play with myself as well.
One issue I've seen... (Score:2)
Is what the summary aludes to: 95% of the people I see who are 'in' Openstack are not users, but people assigned by vendor 'X' to make sure that vendor 'X' is not rendered irrelevant. A large chunk of the resource behind openstack verges on technical marketing rather than development.
I see this as more worrisome than the Linux case. Linux adoption was also developer heavy with few users, but developers with genuine passion were on it. Here we have an ecosystem of vendors that is fearful of 'the next linu
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It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing
No, it isn't. A bunch of incompetently integrated systems that require lots of effort to put into a state suitable for students and to keep in that state? Speaking as someone who has actually written a course on cloud computing, no thanks. The students can get free time on one of the big providers instead and learn everything they need, and those providers actually try really hard to make things work. (The free allocations tend to be fairly small, but they're enough for learning basic principles.)
I've also
Analogy Schmanalogy (Score:1)
Linux got adopted in the enterprise because it already had an existence elsewhere, bourne
out of frustration of failing proprietary software, lock in, closed cultures, fuck-over-ism, etc.
(MS are you listening?) The techies injected their own culture, knowledge and the need
for Linux into the corporations organically (no doubt this amounted to a revolution).
Cloud computing on the other hand is the answer to a non-exsitent problem. It's a coporate
hype. Adopters are those that've got their heads not in
docker, et all (Score:1)
It's not gaining traction because there's another huge movement going on at the same time, developing into a useful deployment product far faster then OpenStack.
It's also much more approachable for individuals and small teams.
Docker/LXC is moving fast and is quite amazing. It's no-frills VM's with consistent/predictable templates with absolutely minimal overhead.
Why run OpenStack to virtualize hardware into sections, and then run many heavyweight OS VM's on slices of hardware, when all you really wanted to
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Docker will be part of the solution. But more is needed, because Docker will keep being small. Not to many features, just do what it needs to do.
Do you want autoscaling for example, Docker alone isn't enough. You'll need some kind of orchestration.
OpenStack does have a project called Heat which does this.
I wonder how long it will take until Docker can be run in proper multi-tenant environment by mere mortals.
Dan Walsh from RedHat added SELinux to Docker, that could be a a way.
OpenStack is still not as easy
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I should probably mention, the Heat Orchestrator can run without the rest of OpenStack.
Eh (Score:2)
I thought UNIX/LINUX were a hardcore part of enterprise groups pretty much from the start.
Not necessarily ignoring... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what they mean by "end users". I've been keeping an eye on OpenStack, and it seems to be useful for developing cloud applications, but I might be missing the point a little. So are we calling developers of large-scale applications "end users"?
I don't think people are ignoring it, but as far as I know, OpenStack doesn't really service your standard network IT market yet, and it's not really something that will service "end users" as I think of them. It seems to be something to provide scalability for development, but if you're a developer working on a large application, it's often smarter to go with a vendor rather than trying to build your own infrastructure. That means that they go with AWS or Rackspace or something.
So my question is, who do you expect to be implementing OpenStack other than cloud providers (e.g. Rackspace) and a relatively small number of companies looking to build their own cloud infrastructure?
As an IT guy (not a developer), the whole thing is still pretty unclear. What would I use OpenStack for? If I wanted to test it out, what would I need to get started? How would I set it up? What, then could I do with it? Most of the appeal of "the cloud" at this point is the potential to divest myself of responsibility for its maintenance. The only people that I can imagine making use of OpenStack are large companies with large public, business critical web applications, and even then only those who, for whatever reason, don't want to use AWS or Rackspace or some other vendor, and have the resources to build and maintain a bunch of cloud infrastructure. Yes, there are businesses that fit that description, but it's not a large percentage of businesses.
And I'm not sure I'd call them "end users".
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Sure, but you're still talking about development. Like I said, I'm not a developer, just an IT guy. What am I going to use it for?
Most companies don't run on web development. Even when they have a considerable network, the network is providing authentication/directory services (e.g. Active Directory), DNS, DHCP, file services, and maybe a few relatively small server-side apps (e.g. Quickbooks). How does OpenStack help me with any of that? Can I deploy or manage those services better or easier than set
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Slashdot if you read one post in this thread, please let it be this parent.
Cloud is an API... less useful for traditional IT (Score:3)
To really make use of the cloud, don't put traditional apps on it. It is not designed to run things like MS Exchange.
If you work in a software development shop, especially a web app, then cloud is awesome. Think of cloud as an API. That is where the real power is!
We have a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The entire deployment is described in software using Amazon's API. We abstract our infrastructure as code so we can replace it with Openstack if we need to. Amazon's API far ahead of anything else out there, so right now we don't really need to switch. This system is extremely powerful. We can bring up entire testing environments the the execution of a script. In system configuration is driven with Chef, but even some of those scripts use the Amazon API to help discover information about the environment.
VMWare provides some of the features, but nothing like Amazon offers. VMWare is also designed for a traditional IT cycle where you can about running a VM for more than a year. Cloud thinking makes more using of disposable nodes. A machine may not last a month because it is replaced with an entirely new image.
So, IF you write software correctly, having an in-house cloud API is extremely useful. Having a cloud API that a standard is also very useful. Start small with a public provider (Rackspace), then bring in-house as the business grows (RedHat Openstack). When the business needs somethings more elastic, that same API can be used with third party providers to supply the computing when it is demanded (Rackspace).
Cloud API's are new. Give it time.
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Try proxmox (http://proxmox.com/)
debian based system - trivial to install, uses KVM and Containers, nice web based admin system. Supports clusters and High Availability out of the box.
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I did, easier than openstack to put together, but still very fiddly and at the time I tried it, required a min of three nodes.
API bad (Score:1)
I used them for years,finally gave it up.
The API was not good enough, and for my use, cheaper VPS providers were cheaper.
It should be called VendorStack (Score:1)
Having played with OpenStack for a couple of weeks, the overriding impression I got from it is that it is made by vendors, for vendors.
You can download and do most stuff advertised, but it takes a LOT of learning and work, UNLESS you pay a vendor for their bolt-on to make the management of it easier. What a surprise, most of these vendors are the developers. It's therefore in their best interests to make it difficult to setup.
What tipped me away from it was that once you have it setup, it is also going to
Just masturbation (Score:2)
This whole cloud thing will blow over. As someone already noted, if you replace "cloud" with "other people's servers" it sounds a lot less appealing and a lot less manageable.
Do you want to outsource your outsourced infrastructure to a bunch of head-wobblers?
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Isn't the point of deploying OpenStack yourself that "cloud" != "other people's servers"?
Comment removed (Score:3)
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I agree somewhat. I was turned off by the silly naming of their daemons.
Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Horizon, Keystone, Glance, Ceilometer, Heat, Trove.
It's like they're trying to be old sysadmins and naming their boxes after their favorite pokemon until they run out of names and start using Star Trek episode names midway through. No context in the names so you can't figure out what anything does without a reference.
That said, I've looked at it several times because of the things it might do for me that
Try OpenNebula for end-users (Score:2)
My experience as an end-user in a research project:
I've tried to install OpenStack on a small group of 4 machines (a controller, a network manager and two compute node). It was a real mess to install. The documentation contains omissions and mistakes. You need to write your own shell scripts to get the work done (and redone). Understanding what went wrong from the cryptic python debug messages is like banging your head against a wall. The only way I finally was able to test things was to scale back to a "on
Only just become usuable (Score:2)
The thing about OpenStack is that it has been under really heavy development for the past two years. Two years ago the product was buggy as hell. But they've made a series of 6-monthly releases since then. Each one of which offered substantial improvements. Its now pretty good and stable. There is really a incredible support for it. I heard of numbers of around 2000 developers so each release really is substantially better than the previous.
Now that it is basically stable, it will likely get real traction w