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Is OpenStack the New Linux?
snydeq writes "As the self-proclaimed 'cloud OS for the datacenter,' OpenStack is fast becoming one of the more intriguing movements in open source — complete with lofty ambitions, community in-fighting, and commercial appeal. But questions remain whether this project can reach its potential of becoming the new Linux. 'The allure of OpenStack is clear: Like Linux, OpenStack aims to provide a kernel around which all kinds of software vendors can build businesses. But with OpenStack, we're talking multiple projects to provide agile cloud management of compute, storage, and networking resources across the data center — plus authentication, self-service, resource monitoring, and a slew of other projects. It's hugely ambitious, perhaps the most far-reaching open source project ever, although still at a very early stage. ... Clearly, the sky-high aspirations of OpenStack both fuel its outrageous momentum and incur the risk of overreach and collapse, as it incites all manner of competition. The promise is big, but the success of OpenStack is by no means assured.'"
...projects to provide agile cloud management...
Whenever I see "blaw...blaw AGILE blaw...blaw", I stop reading.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Stop being retarded.
I've HURD this before.
As a general rule, the only way to build something large and complex that works is to grow it from something small and simple that works.
OpenStack is a Linux distribution organized for deploying a compute cloud. Linux is the new Linux?
It sounds very exciting until you look at the code. Then you realise that the quality in the project is entirely in the marketing, and there's nothing of worth code-wise at all.
And something that does everything, no less. In general, this means it does nothing well. Big egos are just the hallmark of failure. Lets see whether anybody even remembers this in 20 years. Personally, I doubt it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just applying the rule I saw somewhere: if the title is a question, the answer is "No".
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Whenever I see "Whenever I see",
Insert self-referential sig here.
Is there some deficiency in Linux and the various BSDs that OpenStack is intended to remedy?
There must have been a lot of development going on in the OpenStack camp during the past year. Last time I checked many features that were already available in other open source cloud platform products were work-in-progress and setting up and configuring a functional private cloud was cumbersome at best. I wonder how they have managed to gain such publicity and backing over more mature competitors.
Just testing out that question in the title thing... :)
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Is slashdot the new infoworld?
Whenever I read a summary and think, this sounds like infoworld - it is.
Just like Linux has been the new DOS.
No way to compare pears and beans.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I was misled by the summary. This isn't a whole new OS from the ground up - it's a Linux distro with some python code included.
Is a Linux distro with some python the new Linux? Umm... yeah... how about no.
Any time the word "cloud' is used, a real tech wants to punch you in the face.
"The cloud" is a title so we don't have explain how the internet works to moronic Mr.CEO and pals.
FTFA:
It's a big change of scene for me. My last full-time job was in Windows Server product marketing, which prevented me from writing for InfoWorld or anyone else except my Redmond bosses for four years. Now I'm back in the game, laptop battery fully charged, ready to chronicle the next big thing in open source.
It sounds like marketing because it is marketing.
Someone once said, when there's a question in the title, the answer is NO. That's definitely the case here.
Like Linux, OpenStack aims to provide a kernel around which all kinds of software vendors can build businesses
Ah yes, I remember the original post from Linus, where he said, "I aim to provide a kernel around which all kinds of software vendors can build businesses." That's exactly why he did it. That's exactly how he talks.
I don't believe it's a Linux distribution because it's intended to be installed on Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.
http://wiki.openstack.org/InstallInstructions/Nova
As a "cloud OS for the datacenter" Open Stack clearly has to iconoclast on empowering croud-sorced segregation-effects within the namespace of its initial synergies. Anything else would be a paradigm shift.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
It's meant to be syllogistic.
As in:
Linux:Operating Systems::OpenStack:Cloud
At this point, though, OpenStack is still pre-1.0, perhaps equivalent to Linux circa 1993. Whether it can polish up and continue to deliver what is needed is yet to be seen.
The impetus behind cloud right now means that this will be a lot more high profile than Linux was in 1993. There's all sorts of politics (eg Why Citrix Left Openstack) at play, and no one has an OpenStack cloud of any significant size running. OpenStack has been tooting its horn for 18+ months and yet the most advanced player is really just going into production. Rackspace clearly sees OpenStack as an avenue to leverage outside development in an effort to go after Amazon, but whether that makes it viable for other people - and thus creates a rewarding ecosystem - has yet to be seen.
We have a stupid research group that is always chasing after the latest trend. "The cloud" is their new shit and they want OpenStack bad. They don't know why they want it, they just do. Of course when our Linux guy sets it up for them, they can't use it because they have no idea how. They don't like the idea of just using VMWare for some reason. It isn't cool enough to them.
is it smoke, vapor or just hype?
As a general rule, the only way to build something large and complex that works is to grow it from something small and simple that works.
Which is why the Saturn V booster used in the Apollo 11 mission to the moon was built out of Legos.
-- Terry
I stopped reading this thread when I saw "blaw .. blaw AGI
...we will hear every year for the next 20 how this year is the year of OpenStack on the desktop?
Dog is my co-pilot.
"the New Linux" is an analogy (you literal dorks). From the FAQ http://openstack.org/projects/openstack-faq/
What does it mean for the cloud ecosystem?
This is not yet code that comes with certification from operating system or hardware vendors. Instead it's aimed at providers, institutions, and enterprises with highly technical operations teams that have the capabilities and needs to turn physical hardware into large-scale cloud deployments.
Still, wide adoption of an open-source, open-standards cloud should be huge for everyone. It means customers won't have to fear lock-in and technology companies can participate in a growing market that spans cloud providers.
A great analogy comes from the early days of the Internet: the transition away from fractured, proprietary flavors of UNIX toward open-source Linux. An open cloud stands to provide the same benefits for large-scale cloud computing that the Linux standard provided inside the server.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Considering that a full Debian system (binaries for one platform) comes on eight DVDs, I think this project, whatever it might be, has a long way to go before it can really claim to be the "most far-reaching open source project." More mainstream, perhaps, but far less ambitious.
OpenStack is the answer to CPanel or Plesk, nothing more.
Here's why:
The software installed is not installed in an optimal manner, nor is it even remotely efficient.
So where you might only need one highly-tuned VM, you need instead 10 poorly tuned VM's to get the same performance. This allows Amazon and other Cloud providers to charge you by the hour at 10 times the amount. So please don't use pre-produced Linux installs in cloud infrastructure that bills you by CPU hours (no, they don't give you any credit for idle time either.)
If you're willing to go the extra mile and fine-tune everything to fit the clould VM so you can use 100% of it (you must make sure you disable page-file usage, otherwise your disk i/o charges will add up quickly) you've already spent 80% of the time it would have been to create the images offline.
It's like why the hell do people insist on re-inventing the wheel.
Make a program in straight ASM, it's 100% efficient
Make a program in C, it's 90% efficient
Make a program in C++,C#,OBJC it's 80% efficient
Make a program in Java, Javascript, Perl, or some other interpreted language, it's now 40% efficient
Make a program in HTML5+Javascript or Flash it's 10% efficient
The same for virtual Machines:
Install the OS on bare metal 100% efficient
Install an OS in a Hypervisor on bare metal, it's 90% efficient+1GB ram lost
Install the OS in a OS Paravirtualized, it's 80% efficient, and will die under heavy loads
Install multiple OS's in a Hypervisor on bare metal, with deduplication, each VM is now about 85% efficient if they run the same OS or 60% efficient if they're different, including different patch levels.
One bad sector on any hard drive= all virtual machines lost.
So I don't understand why anyone would use Virtualization at all. The only proper way to setup cloud infrastructure requires a much larger investment:
2 NAS+2VM hosts, so 4 physical machines. But in a high density setup, these 4 machines must be independent from each other, with their own UPS, power supplies, ram and networking. You can stack additional ones on top (eg 4+4, 6+6) until you meet the power draw limit in the cabinet, but you still need a minimum of 2 cabinets with two separate power supply sources.
The NAS systems are iSCSI accessed, to provide virtual hard drives for the VM machines. The NAS's are connected to each other to keep copies and load balance.
Inside your VM setup, in a LAMP stack, you always setup the file system against the same iSCSI mount locations, so that in the event of the VM hardware failing, you can restart the VM on the other VM hardware with no delay. If you need to share data, then on your first VM, you should set it up to share it's shared iSCSI mounts, and on all your additional machines VM's you mount the share to the same location instead of calling the iSCSI server.
There's lots of fun logic behind this too, like using PXE to boot the VM's so there's no physical drives in the VM machines.
If you need more than one copy of the VM, then you can use PXE to literately boot a copy from the NAS hardware. Or if the virtualizing software supports it, clone it. Subject to licencing.
It's not "the new Linux" until somebody on Slashdot proclaims:
"2012 is the Year of Open Stack in/on [the] {Desktop, Cloud, Mobile, Laptop, Dead Badger, etc.}"
There. Now it's the new Linux.
I always think of Betteridge's Law of Headlines
Headline I'd like to see: "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines actually correct?"
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
They could have made it clear by saying something like "OpenStack is to cloud solutions what Linux was to the many proprietary flavors of Unix"
As it was written, I read past the headline to find about the next new OS.
Can pianos become the new kaxons? They both make sound, but one sound is nicer!
Yes. Linus Torvalds is well known for his huge ego. ... or was it his self-deprecating humor?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
God I wish I had mod points. I'm reading the comments and wondering how so many people could ignore the giant whooshing sound of the point going over their heads.
I work for a .au university on an openstack cloud service providing compute infrastructure as a service for researchers. we currently have about 2000 cores on 84 compute nodes (plus swift storage and volume storage and nova-api and database and so on) and about 700 users (and anyone with a login at any australian university can have a login with a small allocation of cores/memory/cpu-time, with larger allocations on request), with another 2000 cores ready to go as soon as the regions/zones/cells (or whatever they're calling it this week) code in nova works. we're currently running a very hacked up version of Openstack "Diablo" on Ubuntu Lucid, and will be upgrading to Openstack "Essex" on Ubuntu Precise in the very near future (next week, most likely, unless something comes up to delay us).
any of our users can login, spin up a few VMs through the web dashboard (or via command-line tools), and run or develop the code for their research project. we've also got people working on tools to enable researchers to spin up entire HPC clusters on demand within our cloud.
the openstack "Cells" code is crucial to us, because over the next couple of years we'll be expanding the research cloud in stages to have nodes in more universities - it's a national science infrastructure project, funded by the .au federal government. in the not-too-distant future there will be tens of thousands of cores.
So, yeah, there are openstack deployments of significant size already running.
nothing's ever perfect - the current openstack code has a lot of problems....but there's also a lot that's good or even great about it, and the rate of improvement is impressive.
actually, one of the biggest problems with openstack is terminology. the various components of openstack began as separate projects, and they have re-used the same terminology (especially the word "zone") to mean very different things, which tends to make things confusing. that's one of the things that is being worked on.
So you are saying that the cloud is just an alias for virtualization? Given your vast studies in this arena, can you explain the difference between hypercloudification and paracloudification?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
OpenStack makes no sense if you have fewer than 100 VMs. It is too complex, too cumbersome, and too hard to setup on 1 machine for production. You really need 2 boxes, but for all that effort, you are still screwed by the complexity of the solution when Proxmox or even just a group of KVM/LXC servers can handle the same job.
If you are an ISP then OpenStack **is** what you want. Start now, so you aren't left behind. Just don't over think the networking if you want shared VLANs across multiple sites.
If you are a large telecom, OpenStack may or may not be useful. The networking becomes highly complex, very quickly and your internal security and network security teams are going to freak out if you do the "best practices" for OpenStack networking. Seriously - it is very complex and completely unmaintainable. COMPLETELY.
Like I said initially, if you have fewer than 100 VMs or 50 physical servers, then forget OpenStack. It isn't worth it. Get comfortable with libvirt, KVM and LXC, those are really what you want anyway.
Oh, and if you are looking at virtualization in the cloud - paying someone else to run your infra - personally, I think you are completely crazy and haven't talked it over with lawyers who understand the risks you are accepting in doing that. Sure, putting your corporate main web page on an external host makes perfect sense, even front-end web boxes with static content out there is a great idea too, but not your financial or DB servers. No way. If you are too small to handle having those in-house, then you need to pay a service provider for the "service", not try to manage it yourself on an IAAS cloud offering. If you do buy a service, be certain that your contract has penalties for any breach regardless of cause and downtime. Basically, for every hour down (unapproved), you should get a day of free service. Anyone doing virtualization right, should be able to have downtimes under 5 minutes a month.
I strongly disagree that it's a general rule.
I find that a lot of people I would not ordinarily view as idiots have this absurd idea ingrained in their psyche that it's possible to incrementally get from thing ABC to thing XYZ. Mostly I have to believe that these people have never had to reverse engineer anything.
One of the places this happens most often is in Open Source software, where people have drank the Eric Raymond kool aid about "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Sometimes you need to build a cathedral, and there's simply no way to get there from a mud hut. I think SourceForge "declarative projects", where people believe that by simply declaring an Open Source project, they will get droves of willing bodies to implement it from scratch. This is the big lie that was Mozilla for a long time, until they finally had working code for people to tinker with, and even then, they attracted tinkers. It shows: they ended up with a bricolage.
Another example is the idea that you can get from a system with a small set of capabilities to a system with a large set of capabilities without sitting down, mapping out the problem space, and then designing a framework in which it's actually possible to represent the entirety of that space. This misconception is often perpetrated in things like Portage, which is a glorified package management system which is frequently pressed into service as a build system, a task to which it is demonstrably unsuited.
I'm generally annoyed when anyone portrays something that was revolutionary at its time as part of a natural evolutionary progression on a straight line route from point A to point B, and that it as somehow "obvious" that this revolutionary idea was the next step in the progression. 20/20 hindsight (or Monday morning quarterbacking, if you prefer) aside, it does a great disservice to the revolutionaries who came up with the idea/application at a time when no one else was doing anything similar.
-- Terry
NO
The only important thing about OpenStack is that it supports implementation of managed, dynamically allocated and partitioned clusters (what "cloud" really is) with LXC, a non-virtualization host partitioning technology.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
more hype, not much substance, more effort
It was until now.
Play Command HQ online
It sounds good on paper but actually getting OpenStack to work on our hardware was a nightmare. It took multiple man months just to get our test machines to fully boot up. We recently switched to Azure and we're not going back any time soon.
I always think of Betteridge's Law of Headlines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines true? .... though there is only one logically consistent answer.
Only you can decide!
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines false? I just realised that I could do better. Now I've got you ... answer that one!
A suite of tools to manage a data center being the "most far-reaching open source project ever"? Seriously?
What a joke.
Lots of buzz words, lots of coolness. It could well be the next Hurd.
So intriguing that I've never heard of it before?
I can't wait to refocus my synergies on webscale agile technologies.
Funny you should mention HP: https://www.hpcloud.com/ It looks like they are implementing OpenStack very similarly to Rackspace, which should help back up OpenStack's claims of freedom from vendor lock-in. -Dan