Rackspace Releases Cloud Stack As Open Source

zerocool^ writes "Techcrunch is reporting that Rackspace is open-sourcing their cloud computing technologies, under the name OpenStack. Rackspace has chosen to release under the Apache 2.0 license. The initial release encompasses the cloud object storage and cloud virtual server management suites. Along with this release, NASA is contributing technology from its Nebula Cloud Platform. Early partners include Intel, Dell, and Citrix."

Comments

Good licence, has anti-swpat clause

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Among the permissive licences, Apache 2.0 has the best patent retaliation clause:

• http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_clauses_in_software_licences#Apache_License

If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause

[zwei2stein]

It is basically same thing that most big companies do to each other: Before you sue us because of patent issues, remember that we hold quite a bit of patents too. Patents that you use. MAD doctrine minus nukes, plus patents.

Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause

[ciaran_o_riordan]

> Everyone has a right to file a complaint [...] without any consequences.

That's true for violations of criminal law (the State v. X, e.g. murder), but not for civil offences (X v. Y, e.g. copyright dispute).

Your suggestion would invalidate every promise not to sue. The software industry uses loads of promises not to sue. All the lawyers that help free software say that a promise not to sue is good. What makes you think you're right and they're wrong? (Sorry to use an "appeal to authority" reply, but your claim has about as much support among experts as the flat Earth theory does.)

All up in the Cloud.

[Forge]

Ahh... Nothing brightens my day like more free stuff. Especially Cloud Stuff I may actually use :)

Lot's of little boxes with AMD and Intel chips. No more big Iron. That is the dream. We aren't there yet as we still have an app or two that needs a $1,100,000 Sun box to run but this is where our data center is headed, A great pile of little servers and no concern if any one or two of them keels over.

Posted from the chilly Data Center of a Phone Company/ISP.

Re:All up in the Cloud.

[bsDaemon]

All clouds are free... you just have to go outside to see them.

Re:All up in the Cloud.

[quanticle]

Lots of little boxes with AMD and Intel chips. No more big iron. That is the dream.

As I understand it, Rackspace Cloud simply allows one to automatically provision virtual machines for applications in a simple and automatic manner. It is still up to the application to maintain synchronization between multiple instances and plan for failovers in case one of the servers goes down. So, unless the application has been specifically written for a "cloud" environment, the cloud is no more reliable than a single server. Deploying to the cloud won't make your application magically more scalable or fault tolerant.

Many "big iron" applications assume hardware that's very reliable. As such, they'd require significant changes to allow them to run in a cloud environment, where there are no such guarantees. For this reason alone, many corporations will stick with their mainframes.

Re:All up in the Cloud.

[Forge]

May I ask: what's your opinion on the TCO of "lots of little boxes" vs Big Iron, especially in terms of energy consumption and maintenance?

This depends on your specific situation and the specific application and hardware in question. Where we have replaced big iron with lots of little boxes, the total Electricity consumption was about the same. But that was mostly because of age. Newer machines do more per watt consumed.

The savings come from increased reliability and reduced hardware cost. I.e. The Million Dollar Sun box mentioned in my initial post would be replaced by about a dozen $5,000 Dell Servers. This won't happen anytime soon however as the software is not written for the cloud and porting it is none trivial.

video

[porjo]

There's a video up on youtube from BusinessWeek which gives a nice overview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g71ULBQv208

Re:video

[FuckingNickName]

Right, I see a diagram with three big areas surrounded by both circles and rectangles and with more little rectangles inside:
STORAGE - CLOUD FILES
INTERFACE - PUBLIC APIS
COMPUTE - CLOUD SERVERS
and two smaller areas surrounded only by one rectangle:
CONTROL PANEL
AUTHENTICATION & ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

And I hear quotes like:

"OpenStack enabled us to better serve our customers. In an open-standards based cloud world, cloud interoperability and cloud portability is increased [...] Our cloud today is the second largest cloud in the marketplace and by launching OpenStack we further increase our commitment to the cloud."

...I was shocked that this little speech didn't end with, "Praise be to the cloud."

Am I the only one that wants to stab my head with a fork whenever someone starts talking about "cloud" technology? Look, we've had compute and storage clusters for decades... tell us in precise technical terms what you're offering that's new and why it'd be suitable for general projects.

Re:video

[Nerdfest]

I don't know you well enough to determine whether or not it's annoying enough to stab you in the head with a fork, but it is getting a little annoying.

Re:video

[value_added]

Am I the only one that wants to stab my head with a fork whenever someone starts talking about "cloud" technology? Look, we've had compute and storage clusters for decades... tell us in precise technical terms what you're offering that's new and why it'd be suitable for general projects.

I think that's a disease that inflicts all companies catering to "enterprise" users.

Most people have at least a passing familiarity with Microsoft's nomenclature, where everything is constructed with an overlong string of polysyllabic names, sometimes (but not always) prefixed with "Microsoft". Service names are just one example. On *nix, you have daemons with one-word names that you stop|start|restart. Useage is as clear as its configuration and implementation. Ask a Windows admin about a given service, and he'll probably know its name, but how it works, how it's implemented and how it's configured will result in a blank stare.

Then, of course, there's the folks at VMware. Not only do they adopt the same enterprisey naming conventions that vendors like Microsoft use, but they go and change them to similarly nutty names, making no attempt to distinguish the new name from the old one. Their documentation, while reasonably complete, is bewildering to read. God help you if you are considering (or looking for) the "free" version of the "VMware vSphere Hypervisor".

What I can't figure out who is who these people think their audience is. Technical people want techncial answers. Instead, they get vague references to "technologies", a few hundred links to "knowledge base articles", and yet another frigging "control panel" to dumb down and obfuscate everything.

Re:video

[zerocool^]

And, with a cloud object storage system, the ability to upload things and not worry about file replication / redundancy. That's the idea for the end user - redundancy is taken care of. OpenStack lets people not worry about the system that worries about end user replication.

RPC Service Layer is very slim

[Michael Kristopeit]

i've built multiple instances of cloud architectures... generally it's not going to be much more complicated than it would be to describe how your datacenter(s) and database(s) and nodes are connected. generally the most optimization can be gained by adapting a specific application to the specific cloud architecture. there is probably a lot of vendor lock that comes free with this open source. i'm a fan of rolling your own in cases like this... it isn't very complicated, and you can add optimization cases specific to your application(s), and perhaps remove network calls or calculations that will never be referenced. it will take you just as long to hack away at the open source as it would to write it from scratch.

ok, but what is it?

[FuckingNickName]

Why is it that any article about something "cloud"y doesn't tell me what is actually being sold. Could someone give me a functional overview of what this software achieves, perhaps putting into the context of similar software? Thank you.

(I haven't interacted with Rackspace since some fairly poorly supported dedicated server hosting about 8 years ago!)

Re:ok, but what is it?

[quanticle]

As far as I can tell, the software they've released allows you to start, stop and configure large numbers of virtual machines in a fully automatic fashion. In other words, you can set up your own cluster more quickly than if you had to set up all the VMs manually.

Re:ok, but what is it?

[tomweeks]

Hey there... man, :)

In a nut shell, Cloud Files is the Rackspace equivalent to AmazonS3 online storage webservice or "file hosting service", except Cloud Files also includes CDN (content distribution services) via limelight. Cloud Servers is the Rackspace Xen offering, and Cloud Sites is the web and DB hosting services. All wrapped up with the Rackspace Cloud control panel and back end auth-API. Here's some sales-less info on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackspace_Cloud Scanning over it though I see that wikipedia article is a bit out of date. Our Cloud Servers offering DOES actually support Windows VMs now (in beta). Though I'm more a Linux guys myself.. ;)

Part of the coolness is that between the Cloud Servers and Cloud Files systems, we have a publicnet and servicenet interface. The latter allows direct "intra-cloud" transfers, while public (external) clients can hit the same content via CDN (limelight), allowing you to distribute your content and load via embedded URL around the world without hitting any one data center.

Tweeks

Literally

[Hognoxious]

Vaporware!

Linux Cloud Computing

[helix2301]

This is a great step for the open source community and this might help give a big push into cloud computing in the Linux world. I know I read the Linux Journal and they are always talking about cloud computing and Linux being a strong back end.

Re:Linux Cloud Computing

[lemur3]

I have been using the rackspace linux cloud computing platform for just under a year and i have to say that it is pretty darn cool.

if this software has every feature that i currently get when buying access (like web front end for dealing with instances.. and the API etc..) it will surely be welcome to some opensource folks.

Buzzword Express

[EriktheGreen]

(grabs fork)

No, just take a few deep breaths and it'll go away.

"Cloud computing" is the current buzzword express. Like "thin clients" or Ubiquitous Java or AJAX or any number of technological trends before it, it's a way for non technical executive types to "lead" by grasping hold of something they don't understand. It's a handle for managers to move large concepts around with. It doesn't matter that it's not a significant advance in technology, science, or cybernetics. Its purpose is to pick an arbitrary spot for the industry to orbit around for a while.

Most importantly, it's a way for technical types to manipulate executives, managers, and marketers. Want to sell an idea or concept to a manager? Ride the buzzword express. Even if it's a no-brainer idea that should be done to keep the company afloat, and the managers are smart enough to realize that, the easiest way to sell it is to use buzzwords. This lets the executives know you're listening to them, gives them a warm fuzzy feeling of being in control, and distracts the marketing people.

The Buzzword Express even labels for you those technical wanna-bes and young idealistic programmer types who have plenty of enthusiasm and not much real world experience. Just listen for the buzzwords...anyone taking them seriously can't be worth too much face time. It helps you weed out the riff-raff.

The only cost is that you sometimes are forced to listen to announcements about it. Just keep breathing...

Awesome!

[Improv]

I hope this is more of the "we hope to work with you" type of release than the "dropping kittens in a box at the side of the highway" type of release. Either way, good to have software to manage this kind of thing.