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Red Hat Launching Its Own Community Distro of OpenStack
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat still doesn't have a fully supported commercial version of OpenStack in the market yet (coming this summer) as it lags behind Ubuntu and SUSE. But Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done, they are launching a brand new bleeding edge build of OpenStack that will update weekly (or faster). The best part? This isn't a fork. It's all upstream work, meaning everyone in the OpenStack Community benefits. From the article: '"Our developers will continue to work in the upstream OpenStack, and "whenever we find we need to make changes to make RDO work, we get that work done upstream first," Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said. "RDO won't change in any way our active involvement in the upstream OpenStack development."'
For those who aren't up on it, from the web site:
OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
Who's behind OpenStack? Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system. Our mission is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.
Who uses OpenStack? Corporations, service providers, VARS, SMBs, researchers, and global data centers looking to deploy large-scale cloud deployments for private or public clouds leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open source community.
Why open matters: All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers.
Three Squirrels
Glad to see the community benefiting from a fork. Usually when canonical makes a new project the community loses because we get two of the same thing and neither work well (see GNOME3/Unity or Wayland/Mir). I fully support RedHat's approach to improve existing technologies rather than scraping existing project and creating crap.
Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done
... Gentoo? And Daniel Robbins' Funtoo project?
These two distros are very similar, with a few key differences but in both you can choose how stable or not stable you would like. If you want stable, you can have stable. If you need bleeding edge, you can have bleeding edge.
Granted its not "automatic updates" but I don't like the idea of my server doing updates like that without me initiating them.
I think you mistook "Red Hat will commit updates weekly or faster" with "You have to install updates weekly or faster".
While you can set up machines for auto-update in the Red Hat Universe, I don't and never have. If I did, I'd probably go more for selecting downloading on schedule, manual review and manual update of only the components I wanted to change. YUM will help me do that pretty well.
Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done
... Gentoo? And Daniel Robbins' Funtoo project?
These two distros are very similar, with a few key differences but in both you can choose how stable or not stable you would like. If you want stable, you can have stable. If you need bleeding edge, you can have bleeding edge.
Granted its not "automatic updates" but I don't like the idea of my server doing updates like that without me initiating them.
The point is that RDO isn't a new distro, or a specific RH flavour of OpenStack, but just plain vanilla OpenStack builds, nicely packed in RPM's and with a "yum" repository. So RH based distros like Fedora 18, CentOS, Scientific Linux can install and maintain it, just by enabling the RDO yum repo.
There is a quickstart guide and lots of documentation here:
http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart
All in all, this makes it really easy to test and play around with OpenStack.
"Oh yeah, we're raising our support fees by 20x and doing our best Oracle impression...but here's a shiny toy! Whatever you do, don't switch to CentOS, or God forbid..Ubuntu!"
That may well be the point ;)
If you only get prebuilt packages for Gentoo, there are plenty of other distributions that make way more sense. If you build your own packages, like the folks at Gentoo have designed it, it's merely a big script and a repository.
A distribtution is meant to give an administrator or a consultant some sort of idea what he's heading in to when having to work on a machine they didn't install themselves. With Gentoo, you never know what you're going to get. While Gentoo is great to learn about Linux, compiling, porting and such, or to build a special purpose machine, it's not suitable for large scale deployments where more than one person will have to work on the machine. The amount of time spent actually documenting and learning the specifics of the exact deployment(s) simply make it way too expensive and error prone to be a good choice.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How does this interact with their other cloud offering, OpenShift?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I've installed OpenStack 4-5 times now without any success. I installed this new RedHat pre-built OpenStack in a few hours with no trouble! Used CentOS 6.3, worked like a champ.