Red Hat Releases Preview Version of Open Stack Distribution

hypnosec writes "Red Hat has announced the availability of a preview version of its OpenStack Distribution that would enable it to compete with the likes of Amazon which is considered one of the leaders in infrastructure-as-a-service cloud services. The enterprise Linux maker was a late entrant into the OpenStack world where players like Rackspace, HP and Internap have already made their mark. Red Hat's OpenStack distribution enterprises can build and manage private, public, and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. These companies will not only be competing with the likes of Amazon, but will also be competing against themselves to get a bite out of the IaaS cloud. What started as a project has quickly developed into an open source solution that enables organizations to achieve performance, features and greater functionality from their private and/or public clouds. The announcement of OpenStack Foundation acted as a catalyst toward the fast-paced development of the platform."

Comments

Distributed, libre cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

So are we looking at the possibility of an actually libre cloud?

My impression of torrent and associated protocols was that they were supposed to deliver on the libre cloud. Maybe I got it wrong? Or are they doing it?

I'd like to see an open, user-driven, distributed cloud where all data is encrypted at a low level, so participants in the cloud don't know what specific data is on their computer: just how much space it is taking up.

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[vlm]

I'd like to see an open, user-driven, distributed cloud where all data is encrypted at a low level, so participants in the cloud don't know what specific data is on their computer: just how much space it is taking up.

Freenet, which has been around since the 90s or so?

The killer with those architectures is pruning. How do you know when the info is no longer needed? Well you toss out the least recently requested data. This leads to really antisocial behavior like setting up two boxes who do nothing but request each others data over and over.

Another exciting architectural feature is random extremely high latency when fetching.

Finally ideally your fetcher would be content aware and failure tolerant. So if you're missing precisely one packet of a movie file, it doesn't just curl and die, but inserts a single blank frame. mpeg / whatever will work around it.

Summary: We've got what you requested, but we need 1) intelligent pruning 2) some kind of semi-intelligent pre-fetch algorithm 3) fault tolerant and content aware fetcher

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

People are misunderstanding the purpose of OpenStack.

OpenStack is just a way to charge people for what they already paid for. When you buy a system and colocate it, you get 100% of the system resources. When you use OpenStack (or any resource virtualization scheme) you lose 15% of all the resources to begin with, all hardware-acceleration (no TOE on the network), and you are pushing storage over ethernet.

To add, then you're charged for CPU time per core, Bandwidth by the byte, and disk IOPS by the IOPS.

This not going to end well. If you look at all the cloud infrastructure out there, it's pretty sad that nobody is competing with Amazon, everyone just matches what Amazon charges. Guess why that is?

Building this stuff is expensive, and using cheap commodity hardware is unreliable, so the only way to beat Amazon is to either have enough leverage to make the bandwidth free, or to use unreliable hardware configurations (I3/I5/I7 without ECC, MLC SSD's instead of E5/E7 with ECC and Dozens of drives in RAID configurations)

As much as "clouds" sound like a good idea, it isn't.

BitTorrent is not "cloud" anything other than transport. If you are part of a torrent swarm, you're not actually providing storage, you're just providing redundancy to a transport stream (not just zip files, you can make bittorrent download sequentially if you're going to stream a video.)

What may help is if the concept of "****stack" is eliminated. Instead of trying to create 4 VM's on one machine, it should instead be about virtualizing the storage system, so whatever you have on your local hard drive, exists in dozens of places on the internet, and can be retrieved at will, any time. If 5 people happen to have the same file, they get ... exactly the same file (eg a video or mp3)

This is the kind of thing the MPAA should be embracing, because that would get rid all the inferior copies, and save them money on distribution. But it'll never happen, Commercials,trailers and unskippable content is making physical media ownership too much trouble. Even a weak form of DRM would be acceptable (where the video, audio and meta streams are three separate cryto streams, and by buying the key for that stream, you unlock the video, audio/language,subtitles. Downloading it becomes a non-issue. By weak DRM, I mean, you literately have a file that you can save with the stream that the player will use to decode it, without sharing the key with everyone else, only your devices.

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenStack is the ability for organizations to offer the kinds of services that Amazon provides to internal (or even external) clients.

I have no proof one way or the other, but I'm convinced that Amazon got in to the "Cloud" business simply because they had already adopted the service and virtualization idiom for development and the infrastructure to support it internally for their own services, and then found they had a lot of idle hardware after the Christmas shopping rush. Opening up that spare hardware to the world to use was simply an attempt to monetize idle system using infrastructure they already had. I guess it turned out to be a pretty good idea in its own right. Who knew.

Deploying cloud services to internal clients for development, deployments, testing, marketing, etc. has show to be an efficient use of both hardware as well as human resources in terms of easier management. OpenStack is one of sets of infrastructure that makes the management of such systems easier, and includes capabilities such as auditing and billing so that costs can be better and more easily allocated to internal operation units.

Nothing sinister here.

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can find a colo that charges the same prices for something like a "Small" instance on AWS or HP Cloud, please let us all know.

Don't forget to include the cost of the hardware and deprecation in that figure.

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[turbidostato]

"When you buy a system and colocate it, you get 100% of the system resources."

Yes. And 100% of the inconveniencies.

"When you use OpenStack (or any resource virtualization scheme) you lose 15% of all the resources to begin with"

Yes. And when the hardware breaks you lose 100% of said resources. Something a migration (maybe even live) can save you of. Now, how many servers do you know with *exactly* 100% load?

"All hardware-acceleration (no TOE on the network)"

Given that the standard live for a production server is about three years, you can bet that, unless you use a lessen OS, about half of that life you are better managing network packets on the OS than on the NIC firmware.

"To add, then you're charged for CPU time per core, Bandwidth by the byte, and disk IOPS by the IOPS."

Yes... or not. There's nothing in the IaaS business model that forces to charge for any single of those items. On the other hand, you *are* paying for CPU, network, etc. on your dedicated server, only it's not itemized, nor upgradable.

But there's something else you are not noticing. Openstack is basically two things: a manager for the IaaS provider and a standard API for the consumer. Nothing more, nothing less. There's absolutly nothing avoiding a provider to offer you a "dedicated server" (minus the virtualization overhead, and even this is probably going to change, given that Openstack is aiming at providing "bare iron" provisioning in the future) just like any other current provider, exactly on the same terms of service and then even more (if wanted/needed) because of the provider-facing facilities any "cluster manager" like Openstack adds.

"Building this stuff is expensive"

But not more expensive than your own datacenter/server room under other technologies.

"and using cheap commodity hardware is unreliable"

But much more reliable than a traditional server room under same conditions (you can't live-migrate instances on a traditional server room).

"so the only way to beat Amazon is to either have enough leverage to make the bandwidth free, or to use unreliable hardware configurations"

So you have done the numbers, didn't you? Just in case you didn't: http://www.buildcloudstorage.com/2012/01/can-openstack-swift-hit-amazon-s3-like.html

"What may help is if the concept of "****stack" is eliminated. Instead of trying to create 4 VM's on one machine, it should instead be about virtualizing the storage system"

You don't have the slightest idea of what Openstack brings to the table, do you? Well, here comes a starting point: http://www.openstack.org/

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[afgam28]

The cloud is much more than just a place to store files. IaaS is more like virtual web hosting than it is like Bittorrent/Freenet/Dropbox. You don't just buy storage space, you buy CPU time and bandwidth. It sounds like you and the parent poster are both thinking of something very different from what RedHat/OpenStack are building...

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[aergern]

You sound like a Republican.

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[codepunk]

Yes this cloud stuff i would completely ignore, nobody would ever use virtualization, it is just a fad.

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to know that Dems endorse porn and are the pro-porn party

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[drsmithy]

When you buy a system and colocate it, you get 100% of the system resources.

Which is fairly wasteful if all you need is 1% of them.

When you use OpenStack (or any resource virtualization scheme) you lose 15% of all the resources to begin with, all hardware-acceleration (no TOE on the network), and you are pushing storage over ethernet.

Utter rubbish. Outside of corner cases, virtualisation overhead is in the low single digits.

Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[cpu6502]

2011 was the year of Linux on the Cellphone (Android) with over 60% of sales. 2012 is looking like the year of Linux on the Tablet with linux distributions on the best-selling Amazon and Nook tablets/kindles. Is year of the desktop next??? (I won't hold my breath.)

What the fuck are you talking about?

[MrEricSir]

Please, this is a site dubbed "news for nerds." When you start throwing around buzzwords like "hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service clouds" it's painfully obvious that you haven't a clue what you're talking about, and the readers won't either.

If there isn't enough concrete information to even write a summary, how about skipping the story entirely?

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

2012 is looking like the year of Linux on the Tablet with linux distributions on the best-selling Amazon and Nook tablets/kindles.

Which combined are still outsold by the iPad by a wide margin.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Trepidity]

This particular offering seems to be in a more traditional Linux strength: Linux on the Server. OpenStack is intended for computing infrastructure, not for end-user desktop use.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[cpu6502]

>>>Which combined are still outsold by the iPad by a wide margin.

Android Tablets have risen to 40% of all tablet share (Amazon and B&N are about half of those sales). Meanwhile the iPad is a mere 57% so the margin is not that wide and keeps narrowing.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Red Hat see this as a profitable standalone for their expertise? Do they simply need as in-house brand cloud service to offer to RH enterprise clients -- to make themselves look full-featured? Do they figure a big part of commercial offerings going forward will be essentially thin-client, a refinement of their current position to in-house off-site support?

My inner-gnome is kinda screaming right now. ("Hey! What's stage two?") What's the rational reason for this?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some PHB from one of their customers probably asked about Red Hat's cloud solution so they scrambled to throw something together.

Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

We should be happy-ish.

RedHat has a history of buying up open source projects and letting them flail without management/developers.
Recent example, see Redhat Enterprise Storage/GlusterFS; reads and writes of sequential files are terrible...4k random files are much much worse. CPU-bound/intensive.

At least OpenStack looks like it's being developed.
I saw a RH Virtualization Technician at work 6 weeks or so ago giving a presentation on RH's HPC and virtualization products. He touched on OpenStack, which isn't of interest to me or my top 3 US STEM university. It probably is of interest to Google, or other large players in the field who will take the source and leave the support. The problem is that RH QA has been so terrible lately (personally found 5 bugs at support level 3 and 1 critical bug in RHEL5 & RHEL6 in the last 6 months), that the Googles will probably go with pre-RH code and keep their improvements private.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Burning1]

Probably not in the form it takes now. Android based devices do a lot to improve usability of Linux, and feel pretty damn forign to anyone with heavy unix experience. On the upside, they are very easy to manage. If linux makes it to the desktop, it won't be in the form we see now.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[turbidostato]

"OpenStack is intended for computing infrastructure, not for end-user desktop use."

Whose to say? Openstack is an VDI target as good as any other and being open, once it's a bit more matured (and no question Red Hat with help to that) a very strong competitor to the likes of VMware on private and/or hibrid clusters.

Given that Red Hat is positioning itself in the VDI field and in the cloud infrastructure management, you do your own math with ease.

Ubuntu + openstack MAAS = broken as hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive spent the last 2 weeks trying to get the hopelessly broken P.O.S known as OpenStack up and running on one of our servers. Based on what ive seen, im going back to vmware esx et al until they figure out how to even the simplest things like syncing the time on new instances so they will actually commission properly. Im sorry for being so harsh, but if you want to compete with all the other platforms out there, you better MAKE SURE it runs before pushing it out and stepping on your dick (im looking at you Ubuntu). Hard to get ppl back once they've wasted time and moved on to other platforms.

A long way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

I am downloading all components of openstack as I write this post. The reason: I have started working on openstack as my employer is interested.
I am distinctly underwhelmed by the experience of working on nova and cinder that I was tasked to explore so far.
As with many of the FOSS projects, there is lack of documentation. I know about all the URLs out there, but nothing that could help get started properly which would have meant, I do not need to install it at home to take care of the task slippages at work. Read/work at home is unavoidable for the first time in last few years for me.
The other part that will come back to bite openstack is the nature of the software which does not seem to have played any role in architecture. It is essentially a business application. What we have is oh-so-sexy RESTful APIs. Either it will be installed by organizations for "private clouds" (hehehe I too used this word) or by service providers to its customer. I am quite sure, it is going to see major architectural restructuring from what it is now. At present it does not seem to be created to address any single use-case for such usage. There are "features" which are tweaks being added all the time, but all this looks like patch-work without following a grand-plan that an enterprise application is supposed to have.
Look out for more "it is buggy" claims in the days to come.
My employer wants to create a "private cloud" for its customers (looks like multiple projects will be available immediately). I see that the management types have still not foreseen the problems it can cause, but that is an opportunity too for them to provide additional features that will make it more usable in an enterprise setup.

Re:A long way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Swift, which is the basis of Rackspace's S3 clone, is the only usable part of OpenStack. The rest is alpha quality stuff at best put together by people that want to be all cool and cloudy.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Requirements:
Red Hat OpenStack Preview only works with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 or higher. You'll need a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for each server you install with Red Hat OpenStack.

The fine print:
The software you are downloading is for testing purposes only. It is a preview version of a future commercial product that Red Hat is working on. It is free, unsupported, and not for production use. The preview is initially based on Essex and will be updated to Folsom when it is released.

I read the Faq for their project

[agristin]

I'd rather use Fedora 17.

From the FAQ:

It supports the Essex version and will support the next rev when released, but this part bothers me:

"What are the requirements for using the preview software?

A: The preview version of the Red Hat OpenStack software only works with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 or higher. You'll need a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for each server you install with the Red Hat OpenStack software."

It maybe less work than with Fedora 17- but 17 includes OpenStack and has a how to get started (some bash-ing required).

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_OpenStack_on_Fedora_17

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

not so insightful. the way android works has little to do with its sucess that is comparable.
for example, osx is pretty successful yes?

well its pretty close to a regular linux in its architecture in case you havent noticed

the success has little to do with that really. it has to do with (DUH) marketing, apps support, commercial support and the like.

heck if android was more linux like underneath you wouldnt even see it as a user and itd have even more dev support.
rivht now many portions of android are a pile of hacks (again you dont see that as a user)

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[dbIII]

Calling android linux is a bit like calling linux gnu. The parts may be there but it doesn't really define the whole.
I'd like real linux on tablets. Android doesn't even have a fully working version of X yet let alone all the other software you can run as part of a linux distribution.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Rob_Bryerton]

This gets you most of the way there; check it out, it's good stuff...

Debian Kit for Android http://sven-ola.dyndns.org/repo/debian-kit-en.html

Recommendations for Cloud?

[Compaqt]

Does anybody have some good recommendations for cloud servers?

I.e., a setup that would allow you to easily add webservers and possibly database servers as demand increases and decreases?

Using Ubuntu or RHell?

Preferably working with Rackspace et alia in addition to Amazon.

Re:Recommendations for Cloud?

[AJodock]

Does anybody have some good recommendations for cloud servers?

Well the really cool thing about these clouds is the API that allows your services to manipulate the servers.

Imagine a couple of app servers behind a load balancer, that are monitored by another service. This monitor service can watch response times and as traffic grows and the response times increase the monitor service can hit the API and deploy another app server. Once the app server is running the monitor service can hit the API on the load balancer and add the new node into the spray. Once traffic dwindles down you can do the opposite and spin down the extra instances saving you server resources (or money if you are on the public cloud) that can be used for other things. Basically if you build your applications to scale properly you can use the cloud to use your resources where they are actually needed.

The cloud also makes deployments easier. Lets say you have updates to apply. You can simply apply the updates to your golden image, and deploy to dev. The image has automated scripts that deploy the services on the machine for the environment. You can then test the changes in dev/test and promote the new image to prod. Instead of applying updates directly to the currently running machines just add in new instances with the new image into the load balances and then remove the old instances.

Now imagine if this was all automated. Have your sysadmin install the updates during the week and test out that everything is working, dev automatically gets redeployed every day in the morning with the new image and any new code to go with it. QA during the week and then promote your image for the auto redeploy into prod on Sunday mornings.

It seems like a lot of people are scared of the cloud, or think that its all hype, but I think that if you can architect your environment properly the cloud can be a very powerful tool.

Should we care?

[Heretic2]

"Should we care?" is what I'm trying to figure out. Redhat has lost almost all relevance in the Cloud-arena. CloudStack is in Apache Incubation, and OpenStack Essex is already live in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Redhat's OpenStack is presumably all KVM-based as it's built on RHEL6. Does it support bare-metal Cloud instances? Granted, this feature is 'beta' on CloudStack, but it is still there to use.

It seems like a desperate play to stay relevant. With Redhat's "virtualization brain trust" posting erroneous and irrelevant FUD while moderating/rejecting all replies, it appears there's a severe lack of strategy outside of "stop all the Xen-based clones with dom0's based on our OSS distribution!" Redhat shot themselves in the foot pushing KVM down people's throats to thwart Oracle and Citrix clones.

As someone that's built Private Clouds, and runs significant amounts of infrastructure, I personally have a hard time caring. None-the-less, I'm checking it out to see if the Swift object storage part is in any way cleaner integrated. If it's just some pre-built, probably back-level RPMs, I'll be highly unimpressed.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Burning1]

Not sure you're proving what you think you're proving by citing OSX. From a user perspective, OSX is pretty far seperated from BSD. The BSD under-pinnings are certainly there if you want to dig down into them, but your average OSX user has no need or desire to do so. In fact, your average OSX user probably knows as much about BSD as your average Android user knows about Linux.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Plumpaquatsch]

2011 was the year of Linux on the Cellphone (Android) with over 60% of sales.

For very small values of 60%.

Re:Linux on the Desktop? :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

"If linux makes it to the desktop, it won't be in the form we see now."

Great point. I really hope someone makes a desktop Linux distribution someday!