Red Hat Makes Supported OpenStack Release

judgecorp writes "The OpenStack project could be the 'Linux of the cloud', according to Red Hat, which just announced a fully supported distribution of the open source software. The plan seems to be to offer it as a competitor to VMware's vSphere. From the article: 'The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programs.'"

Comments

sorry, don't trust redhat

[NemoinSpace]

I like redhat, (Centos), I just think it's only a matter of time before they abandon yet another project. Like dumping the desktop. Guess I'm just old fashioned.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[vux984]

Redhat is all about servers so the desktop isn't really a valid comparison. I don't know whether they'll stick with it or not, but openstack llooks more up their alley than a linux desktop, not to mention more profit potential.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[bws111]

What do you mean, dumping the desktop? It is the first product listed on the 'Red Hat Linux' page.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[NemoinSpace]

I meant as in "Fedora". That was years ago. So maybe I stand corrected. Only goes to prove that once you lose a customer, you lose him for life. Haven't been to their site in five years. I used to buy a RedHat CD every year just to "help out" Now I find it's better to give directly to the authors. - keep those pay pal links!

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[AdamWill]

So, which OpenStack provider would you trust instead, which has been around for more than 5 years (the length of time between the first RH release in 1998 and the point where 'Red Hat Linux' turned into Fedora around 2003) and has never discontinued a single product?

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[AdamWill]

Red Hat is the sole, most significant contributor or one of the main contributors to to an awful lot of those 'other open source projects':

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions (and that's massively incomplete)

It's a core principle of RH work that as much work as possible is done or pushed upstream, and that RH products should be 100% F/OSS (the exception to this is when we acquire proprietary software and spend a couple of years doing the legal and engineering spadework to make it 100% F/OSS, which is just a terrible thing for us to do, I know).

All of the source for RHEL is publicly available - http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ (and other paths on that server), go knock yourself out. (This is not minimal legal compliance, BTW; minimal legal compliance would be providing only copyleft sources, and providing them only to customers. We don't have to put the entire SRPM set up for public download on our own servers). You can get an evaluation version of RHEL 6 for free at https://ca.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/server/download.html - where 'evaluation' just means 'you only get updates for X days'. You can buy the RHEL Developer Suite - https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/developers/rhel_developer_suite.html - which includes RHEL with every single add-on, and access to all updates, just like having a commercial support contract only without the commercial support - for a measly $99. Or you can just go download CentOS or Scientific Linux, which projects RH does nothing whatsoever to impede.

RH is the single leading contributor to upstream OpenStack: http://readwrite.com/2013/04/16/will-red-hats-openstack-contributions-turn-to-gold

Name me a company that manages to run a sustainable business while contributing more to F/OSS development. One company.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[iggymanz]

but we fanboys made that server business possible, we got linux in the door over the last 15 years in corporations. the services are a mixture of open and closed.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[Mitchell314]

Or, you know, somebody who develops software for linux. Which, given that this is /., is a safe assumption to make that there are a few here. Or somebody who wants to breath new life into old PC hardware.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Which distro is eating Redhat's lunch? Let me finish that thought for you, I think you mean Ubuntu, which has seen a large amount of angry users in the last 2 years.

Redhat is a fantastic server distro. Its rock-solid stable, has long term support, and you'll never find that you have problems with support. In fact, the Redhat folk bend over backwards to support you. They charge for their enterprise offering? What sort of a world do we live in when people charge money for a support contract?

Fedora is free, and RHEL is based on Fedora - its their proving grounds. "But that's not RHEL!" Of course not. Its the bleeding edge. RHEL is a few steps ahead of debian in terms of modern versions but is as stable.

Like you, I once talked badly about Redhat, this was many many years ago, before I had to support clouds of thousands and thousands of virtual machines. Try supporting and auditing that many servers with any other distro - let me know how it goes for you and how long it takes to support. (I program c, c++, perl, ruby, I've been using Linux for 16 years and have contributed to many open source projects. Don't even try to say I'm a newb or if I knew what I was doing I'd use .

Redhat's claim to fame is that you get what you pay for. Sure, there are other Linux distros you can pay for - but have you tried to support them in a large centralized manner with serious oversight? (Suse, I'm looking at you...)

Sure, Debian is great. But when it comes to convincing the director/executive level folk to go with Debian and then pay some 3rd party company of unknowns to support it.................Well, I'm just saying, Redhat is my choice, and I think they are fucking awesome.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[Lunix Nutcase]

I can get an evaluation of competing distros and get updates forever. That includes the distro that is eating Red Hat's lunch and has surpassed it in number of server installations. And the derived distro based on that which is dominating the Linux desktop.

The one that Mark Shuttleworth admits is not profitable while Red Hat is? Eating Red Hat's lunch? Good joke.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[ChunderDownunder]

Superior alternatives to websphere? Guess what, redhat owns jboss.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[clark0r]

... and JBoss also kicks ass - from someone who's had to support multiple clusters of application servers distributed around the globe. RedHat + JBoss make this dead easy to manage and monitor, thank god!

P.S. it's now called WildFly.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[clark0r]

The last corporation I worked for had their entire estate of developers running a mixture of CentOS / RedHat on their developer desktops. You can't tell me 5000+ employees of this corporation are 'fanboys', can you?

The current business I work for has all of their systems administrators running Linux on their desktop (Fedora and/or CentOS). If you're a serious user of the Linux technology stack, you'd better not be using Windows as by comparison it's shit.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[chill]

Thanks.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[__aajwxe560]

"Thousands and thousands of virtual machines. Try supporting and auditing that many servers with any other distro ..."

Puppet, CFEngine, Tripwire, etc. all play well with other Linux distros as well. If you're talking about just using RedHat Satellite to manage such a beast, get out of 2001, RH really missed the boat on pushing such potential in the Enterprise space and only over past year seem to be winking at Puppet. If you're talking about their efforts on OpenStack, great, but you still need that next layer down.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[bill_mcgonigle]

Almost entirely in agreement with your post, but this one:

Or you can just go download CentOS or Scientific Linux, which projects RH does nothing whatsoever to impede.

isn't so. Check out the Centos-devel list from 2010/2011 and/or KB's blog. Redhat does not release its build system, and it's not entirely self-building (in the GPL sense, and yes I know the distro in whole isn't under GPL). The CentOS guys had to do a tremendous amount of trial-and-error work in the build system to build CentOS 6 from the SRPM releases. SL just winged it and got out earlier but did not achieve binary compatibility that way.

I understand this is because of what Oracle does, and kinda get it, but SL and CentOS get caught in the turbulence of that spat.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[AdamWill]

I'm not sure we're not talking at cross-purposes, but the thing we basically did to spite Oracle (can you tell I'm not in corporate communications?) was make our kernel sources a big glob instead of carefully splitting out the individual patches we were applying. That doesn't have any particular consequences for a distro that just wants to build whatever RH is building; it's only a problem if you want to claim you know exactly what's going on. You know, like someone who's selling...professional support....might want to...

I don't know if there's another issue you're referring to, though, I don't actually *use* RHEL or CentOS myself at all (only Fedora). I could have written something more specific, though, which would have communicated my meaning better: RH doesn't actively take decisions with the intent of causing problems for freely-distributed RHEL clones, whereas we certainly could start doing that if we chose to. It's possible that choices RH makes for other goals might sometimes cause them inconvenience, I don't discount the possibility.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[NemoinSpace]

oh, a pissing contest? I'm sorry my 10 bucks wasn't enough to impress you. Hopefully it hits a nerve with a few people out of the 90% of people that suck the tit of "free" software. I'm sure they cashed the check. What I don't care about is your useless attack of my motives.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[iggymanz]

slightly superior but still crap.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[iggymanz]

angry desktop users. we're talking servers here.

Fedora means making QA department out of users. screw that mentality.

we've been throwing out the Red Shat at my employer, things go much better on other distros. Red Hat is shaky jello next to Debian, for instance.

Re:sorry, don't trust redhat

[iggymanz]

yes, people are throwing out the Red Rat and last mid-year it was surpassed in use on servers. You are unclear how open source works. Redhat will never get those people back, we see the butt naked emperor and he's a dying fool

Everytime I hear the word "cloud"

[future assassin]

I now associated with "rental fee" No more ownership.

Re:Everytime I hear the word "cloud"

[LordLucless]

That's probably because you're hearing it in the context of "using" the cloud (ie: using other people's systems to store data). OpenStack is more about "running" a cloud.

Re:Everytime I hear the word "cloud"

[IMightB]

I like openstack as well, to the point where I rolled our own rpms for it based on the epel stuff. Because Openstack (to use all the neat stuff like OpenVSwitch) needs a lot of fairly cutting edge tech that was not available when RHEL6 was released, I had to package our own kernel to support things like newer virtualization features, OpenVSwitch, new versions of sqlachelmy etc etc etc.

I guess what I'm curious about is, are they backporting all the kernel features and various tech (OpenVSwitch) that will make it a true competitor? or are they sticking with a somewhat lackluster rollout on RHEL6 to maintain compatibility and save the nifty stuff for RHEL7?

That's great, but Cannonical already does that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cannonical (the makers of Ubuntu) already does this - full support from the OS on up through the entire stack, and includes their own tools (juju, etc.) in addition to the OpenStack stuff.

Have been doing it for awhile, too.

Plus, they're supporting VMWare as a VM hypervisor, and integration with VMWare for their various layered tools, too.

So, I think this is just RedHat playing catchup.

Note: I just had a Cannonical presentation today, but I don't work for them.

OpenStack competes with vSphere?

[BitZtream]

No, not even close.

Have they used vSphere/ESXi? Other than both of them do something with Virtual Machines, I'm fairly certain they've never compared the two things.

OpenStack is your typical big open source mess that requires more than some assembly of parts that were clearly designed for Amazon scale sites rather than what most of the world would want.

VMware's products are semi-polished tools that a semi-competent Windows admin can fumble their way through and work with pretty GUIs to make it all work without much effort.

VMware is like normal furniture and OpenStack is like Ikea ... except you also have to cut most of the parts out yourself as well with OpenStack.

OpenStack is about 9 billion times more complicated than it should be for limited amount of functionality it actually provides overall.

Re:OpenStack competes with vSphere?

[IMightB]

I don't find openstack to be overly-complicated for what it provides. Coming from a "I have managed both Openstack and VMware solutions" point of view, it is a rapidly evolving project with many big names behind it that, as as of yet, does not have much polish. That being said there is a tidal wave of support behind openstack at the moment.

If you have the money, VMWare is currently a superior solution, Give OpenStack a few years and I believe it will be on-par or ahead of VMWare.

Re:OpenStack competes with vSphere?

[trollebolle]

Summary is wrong. Openstack would be a (probably, I haven't compared the two) competitor to vCloud. The direct competitor to vSphere is RHEV.

Re:OpenStack competes with vSphere?

[thule]

OpenStack in cloud. Cloud is more than VM's. VMWare is about VM's. RedHat's answer to VM's is RHEV. RHEV is not as complicated as OpenStack.

People, please do NOT use OpenStack as a replacement for VMWare, you will be burned!

We eat our own

[robla]

So, to the Red Hat employees reading this: thank you! Red Hat does great work for the world. We as a community also tend to undervalue a $1B/year publicly traded company with a large sales force out explaining to every potential enterprise customer that will listen the virtues of free software.

The Dev Suite thing is kinda cool. Not that I'd buy it :-), but interesting to know that option exists.

Re:We eat our own

[AdamWill]

Yeah, I only learned about it from Thomas Cameron at LFNW this year! I actually had no idea we sold that :P

Re:OpenStack

[halltk1983]

Maybe that excessive cost is why the "suits" keep asking? Being expensive doesn't necessarily make things better. Just because you can't make something work doesn't mean it doesn't work well.

/Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace. But my opinions are my own.

Re:OpenStack doesn't make a lot of sense to me

[halltk1983]

There are a lot of companies out there that would love to have their own cloud infrastructure, either because they don't want to trust it to someone else, or because they need specialized hardware or have specific requirements, or even just because they get grants for capital expenditure but not ongoing costs. OpenStack is to help those people build their own cloud, in arenas where it makes sense for them.