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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
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/
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