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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.
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.
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.
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 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!
There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.
Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.
The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.
If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.
There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.
Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.
The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.
If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.
Funny, we just hired two COBOL programmers at $80K each to maintain some legacy mainframe systems. When cloud technology can permit hard core data entry, say for insurance records or the like, then I'll worry. But until then, throughput is more important than an app being able to run from wherever in the cloud. Besides, in my line of business. We don't run apps. We run programs that process millions of secure transactions. We have data entry clerks that key documents and data that can't be captured electronically.
You would probably say that we have our own private cloud. I would say that we have our own methods to allow secure access to our internal systems. By the way, I would predict that there will be COBOL programmers still programming even after cloud computing has been replaced with the next marketing hyped phrase.
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
This reminds me of a guy I knew in ~1994, who was griping that all his experience was in COBOL, and after getting laid off from making $75k/year, he couldn't find another job. At the time, I was in college, and so I wasn't really familiar with the idea of keeping your skills updated...
So I don't know that I would recommend cloud for you; there are reasons to use it, and reasons not to use it. As the technology and ops experience matures, it will be easier to adopt - basically like any tech. But for almost everyone, there are real benefits. Both capex and opex; and some people are using cloud in a way that their capex savings is ~0 (or negative) but their opex savings is huge. (See: Netflix running their entire infrastructure with 3 admins) Program ~= App. I file my expenses through an Oracle app, that runs in a cloud, that automatically fetches corporate card transactions from Visa, and lets me roll them into an expense report.
I'm one of the authors of Securing the Virtual Environment, and my co-author is a QSA, and one of the points of writing the book was to talk about the fact that cloud *can* be secure and can be compliant. (Although in the case of a public cloud, obviously compliance requires underlying compliance by your provider, as well as your own processes) Of course, there are a bunch of risks, too - but there are, for example, cloud services that have passed HIPAA and FISMA audits.
In short, cloud is more than just a buzzword; it's an evolution in the technology that powers IT. I'd say it's more evolution than revolution, but it is more than a buzzword.
"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
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