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."

Comments

Re:Ubuntu

[at_slashdot]

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?

Re:Ubuntu

[the linux geek]

Typically about ten years (Server 2000 support ended last year, and 2003 is still supported.)

Overlap between one

[tepples]

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:

• 2008 April: Ubuntu 8.04 released; five-year period starts
• 2008 October: Ubuntu 8.04.1 released and officially blessed as LTS
• 2010 April: Ubuntu 10.04 released
• 2010 October: Ubuntu 10.04.1 released and officially blessed as LTS
• 2011 April: Support for desktop components of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ends
• 2013 April: Support for server components of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ends

Complexity kills reliability

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Complexity kills reliability

[gweihir]

No security against the cloud provider is the main issue. Also any security audit would have to include the cloud software as well, in the version that is going to be used. For higher classification levels, it is often illegal to put the data on hardware that also processes non-classified data or data from other organizations. With EC2 you have no control what other data will be on the same hardware. It is still forbidden, for example, to process credit card information on EC2 and with good reason.

You can also not process encrypted data in any meaningful way today. Fully homomorphic encryption is still very much a dream, although with a recent (eminently non-practical) breakthrough by IBM Research, it may not be impossible after all.

Re:Complexity kills reliability

[MichaelSmith]

Cloud computing services are ideal for situations where you have a startup which might fail in two months and you don't want to have to install a warehouse full of computers to get it going.

Re:Ubuntu

[polaris20]

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.

Is it good enough?

[js_sebastian]

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...

Re:Is it good enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have anything to back those claims up? Anything at all? What you describe is not what we're finding in the real world, when dealing with real businesses and real "cloud" platforms.

Over the past few years, over 30 of my business clients moved to some sort of a "cloud" platform. Of those, about 20 have admitted that they were wrong and have moved back to more traditional hosting for their web applications and infrastructure. This has mainly been due to reliability issues, and also because these "cloud" providers turned out to be far, far more expensive than running their own servers in-house. Of the remainder, several of them went out of business due to their "cloud" platforms making them uncompetitive, and a few more are seriously considering a move away from their current "cloud" platforms.

You may think that I dislike cloud computing, but I don't. I'm very glad that it has arisen. Fixing all of the problems it has caused has been a very profitable venture for me! Not only that, but it has also helped make my clients realize how much value there is in dealing with real servers that are in their possession, or at worst at a nearby data center.

Cloud computing is a fad, and its time is already almost over. It has failed to live up to the hype, and it has failed to live up to just about every promise made about it. Businesses are abandoning it faster than ever.

Ubuntu is adding, not switching, to OpenStack

[martinbogo]

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)

Re:Ubuntu is adding, not switching, to OpenStack

[slashdot_commentator]

1) Eucalyptus will be supported for as long as Ubuntu versions are supported. So, for 10.04 LTS server, that will be until 2015. (barring some catastrophic dissolution of the Eucalyptus company.)

2) Eucalyptus is not dependent upon Ubuntu for its existence. Amazon is currently the largest cloud vendor using eucalyptus tools to interface with its services. If Amazon drops eucalyptus (ha ha), then you can start the death clock. You're not going to be able to get openstack to nicely merge stuff with EC2, so its not likely openstack will supplant eucalyptus anytime soon.

3) Canonical has no announced plans to remove eucalyptus from its distributions. Most likely, eucalyptus will be in 12.04, and that means it'll be around for at least 2017.