Can Red Hat Do For OpenStack What It Did For Linux?

Brandon Butler writes "Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack. Red Hat executives say OpenStack – the open source cloud computing platform – is just like Linux. The code just needs to be massaged into a commercially-hardened package before enterprises will really use it. But just because Red Hat successfully commercialized Linux does not guarantee its OpenStack effort will go as well. Proponents say businesses will trust Red Hat as an OpenStack distribution company because of its work in the Linux world. But others say building a private cloud takes a lot more than just throwing some code on top of a RHEL OS."

Comments

Re:RedHat be unsmart?

[AvitarX]

Red Hat better hope that throwing on the code isn't all it takes. Being an Enterprise Linux company takes more than throwing code on top of the kernel, and that's why Red Hat made a billion dollars, and Slackware didn't (not trying to knock Slackware, just trying to contrast two fairly early distros I used 15 or so years ago).

If all it takes is the code, Red Hat is screwed.

The headline is a question and the answer is Yes

[Attila Dimedici]

I think this is a headline that breaks the law of headlines which says the answer to a headline that is a question is always no. Red Hat certainly CAN do for OpenStack what they did for Linux. That does not mean that they will do so, even if they put the necessary effort into it. The last statement of the summary is irrelevant because Red Hat certainly knows that and almost certainly understands the magnitude of the project they are undertaking here. Red Hat is the sort of company that can do this. However, the project is complicated enough that they may fail.

Cloud computing platform

[ArcadeMan]

After all these years I still don't know what that is supposed to mean. I know about servers, FTP, server-side languages, etc. But "cloud computing platform" just sounds like a buzzword clusterfuck from the marketing department.

If I look on wikipedia then even a simple website with a CMS is "cloud computing".

Re:Cloud computing platform

[asmkm22]

Cloud computing is less of a definition about what it is, and more about how it's used. The general idea of cloud computing is to offload storage and applications from your local setup (workstation, network, etc) onto something "in the cloud" which basically means the internet.

The industry does a really poor job explaining that not all cloud experiences are the same, however. I've seen some cloud providers basically just offering seats to a Windows RDP server, which may not sound all that special to you or I, but they've managed to carve a business out of it.

Re:Show what an inferior OpenStack might look like

[Archangel Michael]

What? You data isn't backed up ... three times?

And you patched a production server, without testing?

You're screwed because you didn't do your job. For the crap that happens with RedHat, if you're paying for that support, pointing fingers at RedHat for their part of the blunder is why you pay for that service. Everything else, is your problem.

If you did that while working for me, I'd fire you. Quit trying to impart your mom and pop Linux views on Enterprise environments.

Re:NIST definition - Cloud computing

[ArcadeMan]

The fact that "cloud computing" needs 1.5 pages for definition alone is proof that the concept was created by the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Re:Show what an inferior OpenStack might look like

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everybody has a dev environment for everything.

Why the hell not? It's 2013 and virtualization is cheap.

Not everything works because it's been tested. Every time we release something out of software in-house dev, it goes through a month of dev testing. Then... it breaks 15 minutes after it's released, and takes 3 hours to un-break.

It sounds like your team is pretty bad at testing, then. Do you have dev or staging servers? Do they mirror the production setup? Is software versioning equivalent between the two (I'm talking distribution + supporting packages, clearly, not the software you're releasing)? Have you load tested to make sure your new shit isn't introducing something that will crush all resources in its path as soon as X people hit it? Do you have proper tests set up?

"Every time" is terrible, and I don't know your organization, but I'm pretty sure you should feel terrible, if only for having to work in such an environment.