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."'"
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.
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.
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: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.
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.