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.'"

Comments

Noise without content

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Done.

[simcop2387]

I always think of Betteridge's Law of Headlines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenStack is a Linux distribution organized for deploying a compute cloud. Linux is the new Linux?

No it's not. It's a virtualization management platform with appropriate interfaces for clients that you can deploy on pretty much any Linux server.

Re:Done.

[gman003]

I dunno...

We're already hearing about "local clouds" - essentially building a small-scale cloud for your own large company. So, say, Hewlett-Packard could, instead of renting cloud space, could build a small "cloud" just for themselves.

Once that becomes relatively common, someone will come up with the "personal cloud" - a small home server, that "does" "everything" "the cloud" "does". I actually expect IPv6 may help with this - if you can access "your" cloud from anywhere, what advantage does "the" cloud have?

And then, once that becomes common for nerds and the tech-savvy wealthy, someone will decide to do it in software instead of a dedicated hardware appliance. I expect they shall call it a "desktop cloud".

And then the loop begins AGAIN!

Re:Done.

[radish]

I think "Cloud" is less about physical architecture and more about feature set. When I think "Cloud" I think dynamic, quickly reconfigurable, essentially "limitless". Where I work we're moving away from a traditional model where applications are installed on their own dedicated servers with dedicated DB and FS storage to a Cloud model where VMs can be dynamically allocated in seconds, cloned from images and ready to roll. Storage is via EC2 style no-sql object storage and doesn't need to be pre-provisioned. For a small shop this probably doesn't sound very exciting but when you're in an environment with tens of thousands of machines and are used to multi-week wait times for approval, purchasing and install of new hardware it's a pretty big shift.

So it's not the redundancy, or even use of VMs that's interesting, it's the pooling of resources - having compute & storage be essentially utilities you can take as little or as much of as you need. Places like Google have been doing this for a long time, but it's only recently becoming mainstream in other orgs.