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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."
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
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
>>>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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
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.
"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/
"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.
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...
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'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
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.
Yes this cloud stuff i would completely ignore, nobody would ever use virtualization, it is just a fad.
Got Code?
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
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.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"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.
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.
2011 was the year of Linux on the Cellphone (Android) with over 60% of sales.
For very small values of 60%.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Which is fairly wasteful if all you need is 1% of them.
Utter rubbish. Outside of corner cases, virtualisation overhead is in the low single digits.