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Ubuntu Switches To OpenStack For Cloud
angry tapir writes "Canonical has switched its cloud software stack to the open-source OpenStack. The current version of its Ubuntu Server, version 11.04, uses the Eucalyptus platform. Ubuntu Server 11.10 will include the OpenStack stack as the core of the company's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) package. The server release will also include a set of tools to help users move their cloud deployments from Eucalyptus to OpenStack."
Am I to infer that crack rock is unstable? In what way?
You are using of course LTS for your servers, right? Because otherwise it would be stupid... So, is 3 years support not enough for you?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
what's Microsoft's server support?
LTS is 5 years for servers.
to be fair i have tested many software and found them all to have issues, somewhere for someone.
if you have stable enough hardware any infested or otherwise software will still run.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Is OpenCloud from the goatse guy?
Typically about ten years (Server 2000 support ended last year, and 2003 is still supported.)
LTS is actually 5 years.
I think MS's is longer, but not by orders of magnitude. NT4 was EOL around 2004, so 8 years. Server 2003 ended regular support last year (so 7 years), extended support will be available until 2015 (so 12 years). I'm not sure what to compare to what.
All that said, the LTS does not mean that they actually include more stable versions of software, so I would also be wary of using LTS on production servers, as 10.04 LTS was as stable in april 2010 as 11.04 is now.
so where's the distributed database system to go with this solution, that scales to thousands of nodes and billions of records in tens of thousands of either tables or hierarchical structures like xml, yaml or whatever?
LTS releases are supported for 5 years (server).
LTS is 5 years for servers
About two and a half years of that overlap between one version and the next. It takes about six months to get a .04.1 respin that's stable enough to offer as an upgrade to users on the LTS channel. There's even less overlap if you're trying to use the same LTS version on your development workstation/server and your production server. Let's take Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), the operating system currently offered on Go Daddy dedicated servers running Plesk, as an example:
Leslie Lamport' s comment on distributed systems applies:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down."
This is even more so with the "Cloud". Think 99.99% uptime? Then why had some Amazon customers recently to wait 5 days to get access to their data again only to find out it was not all there? Don't get me wrong, cloud computing has its place, for example short term high-CPU or high-bandwidth needs. It can be used as a redundant (secondary, _not_ primary) system for e.g. Web-Servers. It is also nice, if you can rent a high-memory instance when you have the occasional (rare) job that needs more memory than your own machines have. Also virtualization has its place, namely as a HAL on steroids.
One thing the "Cloud" is not usable for at all is high-reliable server services. Another is processing of any confidential data. It is not self-redundant either, there are single points-of-failure, as Amazon recently demonstrated. For redundant, reliable infrastructure, you have to do your own primary systems, the "Cloud" can at best serve as fail-over. These limitations do apply to private clouds as well. For longer-term high-CPU needs, your own infrastructure is far, far cheaper and better tailored to your needs. For processing anything confidential or secret, public clouds are unusable and private ones need the whole private cloud classified to the highest secrecy level processed on them. You may also have to have several ones of each classification level if there is a horizontal isolation need (i.e. you may not process secrets from A with secrets from B). At some point the cloud becomes a problem, not a solution.
Why everybody is driven to the "Cloud" like lemmings is beyond me. It is one more tool with specific limitations and strengths. It is not a one-size-fits-all at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are using of course LTS for your servers, right? Because otherwise it would be stupid... So, is 3 years support not enough for you?
Actually, Ubuntu LTS server is five years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system) In fact, 6.06LTS server support is just wrapping up this June. Desktop versions of LTS are three years.
Leslie Lamport' s comment on distributed systems applies:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down."
This is even more so with the "Cloud". Think 99.99% uptime?
(In many cases) The question is not whether the cloud gets you 99.99% uptime. It is whether it gets you better up-time than what you can run in-house for the same price. It's easy to insult the amazon guys when they fuck up, but the availability they offer is certainly better than what a small company can get from their single part-time admin who does something else as a day job. And even if you are a small tech company, where in theory anybody has the knowledge to run a few services, in practice it is very easy to make mistakes, even for smart people.
And when you scale up, the cloud can scale up with you. Of course, by the time you're google you'll be running your own data centers...
Hi. I'm one of the ARM Server developers who just attended UDS Budapest. In fact, I'm still here at the hotel.
Ubuntu did not _switch_ to OpenStack. Rather, Ubuntu has added OpenStack as another method of creating a personal Cloud using Ubuntu. By doing so, we're adding to the rich diversity available in the Ubuntu universe. It's not replacing Eucalyptus! Eucalyptus remains supported.
-Martin B
ARM Server Developer
(In Budapest)
"Don't worry about the problems you have in mathematics, I assure you mine are much greater." - Einstein c.1919
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Freaking awesome.. I work for Rackspace and didn't know that THIS was coming down.. ! :) :)
Anyone in here from the Ubuntu project involved want to comment on how it we came together on this? I know that we have a LOT of Ubuntu lovers at Rackspace. We even have our own internal mail list at Rackspace called ubuntu@rackspace.com (not external obviously).
My favorite distro and my favorite cloud storage solution... two great tastes..
Tweeks
MS's policy is 2x that of LTS.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
You can try this one instead.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Microsoft doesn't offer *free* upgrades to their next version of the their server OS though either...
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Interestingly at Canonical they are starting to use Go for their backend infrastructure.
I wonder if they will start to replace components of the grid stack with stuff written in Go like Doozer.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
> Why everybody is driven to the "Cloud" like lemmings is beyond me
Because the venders hope to make more money then selling the one server.
10.04 LTS was as stable in april 2010 as 11.04 is now.
Sure; however, for those using the LTS on servers, if they were on version 8.04 LTS server, they have until April 2013 to upgrade (when they drop support for 8.04). This means they could wait until 12.04 LTS to have a full year of stability patches before upgrading; meanwhile, they have a server that is very stable in the sense that their software packages continue to work the way they did when they first installed (no updates to newer versions, just patches to improve security/stability).
"Stable", in server terms, doesn't just mean "doesn't crash"...just as importantly, "stable" means "doesn't change". Give an LTS a year to mature, and it will give you both. Buy a server box to put it on, and by the time it has given you the four remaining years on the LTS, you might very well be looking to replace the server with something more powerful or with a fresher warranty anyway. Then, when you set up it's replacement, you skip an LTS for the latest and test to make sure it all works on the new version. Congratulations: other than regular security patches, you won't have to do much else with that box for another 4 years (assuming you have it set up the way you need initially, and that your needs for it don't change much).
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