Can OpenStack Avoid Fragmentation In China?

itwbennett writes "More people visit the OpenStack Web site from Beijing than any other city in the world and developers in China account for the second largest number of code commits. But beyond a high level of interest, there's another reason that the OpenStack Foundation might do well to host its next summit in Hong Kong: Avoiding fragmentation. China has a history of going its own way in technology. 'I watched it develop its own 3G technology, much to the dismay of global network and phone makers who were shut out of the market. More recently, Chinese companies have gleefully gone on their own with Android,' writes ITworld's Nancy Gohring. It seems like a long shot, but maybe by holding the next summit in Hong Kong, OpenStack can draw contributors into the fold."

Comments

what is OpenStack?

[Trepidity]

The summary does not tell me what this thing, apparently popular in Beijing, actually is! You could at least link their website. :)

Anyway, looking at their website, it looks like it's a "cloud operating system", i.e. infrastructure for managing a cluster in a virtualized, "cloud-like" way. Does anyone know how it compares to other such platforms, like Eucalyptus and the confusingly-similar-in-name CloudStack?

Re:what is OpenStack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Eucalyptus and Cloudstack, Openstack is a framework for managing a virtualization environment. It's basically an IaaS, written mostly in python to glue together:

Image provisioning, by way of a service called glance.

VM provisioning, by a virtualization technology of your choice. You can do kvm/xen/vmware/hyperv and I wanna say openvz as well, although kvm is the most supported with xen being the hypervisor employed in Rackspace's deployment of openstack. This service is called Nova. They took it from Nasa

Networking provisioning, by the way of linux bridges (and vlan management if you chose) using a service called nova-network, or by the way openvswitch/linuxbridges offering ip over ip or 8021q using a service called quantum. Clients can be assigned a shared network, their own network with their own vlan (using nova network), or Clients can be assigned a shared network and/their own networks linked between vm hosts using gre tunnelling or vlan management.

ISCSI is provisioned by a framework called cinder.

You can also configure an s3 like service called Swift.

Openstacks greatest feature and flaw is that it is extremely configurable, extremely extensible and that features are added very quickly. As a site admin, you are expected to upgrade every six months. The upgrade guide offers a facsimile of reality, which is its own pain point. Many features are not documented very well, some features are deprecated between releases and the upgrade guide sometimes fails to mention it.

I'm taking care of two installations of openstack. I've just upgraded one from the previous release to the current one, and another which was two releases back. It was painful. If you have an admin team that likes to fly by the seat of their pants, openstack is not for you. It requires a great deal of institutional restraint.

But when it works, it is a unix sysadmin's wet dream. The command line tools work properly in this release, and you can script everything you need to do for day to day maintenance in bash. If you want to use ec2's api to interact with your vms, it's a supported configuration. If you want to use openstack's better thought out apis to do so, all the better. If you know python, you can really make this thing sing. You can script snapshotting vms and have the snap shots go to glance. You can move vms from one host to another, so long as you have a common shared storage area for storing the vm images. You can write your own scheduler for deploying vms, you can make filters to make pick how resources are allocated very very easily. There's also a vm management web interface called Horizon. I think it exposes just the right amount of functionality to the user, especially those that don't care about the openstack underbelly.

When it works right, openstack is a dream to play with. When it doesn't, you have your work cut out for you.

Re:what is OpenStack?

[Natales]

The evolution of OpenStack is analogous to Linux. Linux is basically a kernel, no more, no less. You need a series of tools around it to make it useful. The kernel with the proper tools overtime became "distributions". OpenStack is undergoing the same process. RedHat just announced their own OpenStack distribution, and several others like Canonical (Ubuntu), Nebula, StackOps, Piston, Rackspace, etc, they all have their own distributions of OpenStack. They are all trying to make "easy" the installation and customization process. Some of them tend to be more enterprise-centric and other ones tend to be more service provider-centric.

Since I'm part of the OpenStack team of one of the corporate members of the OpenStack Foundation, I've had the chance to explore many of them, and I'm most impressed by StackOps which seems to be the most flexible of all so far, although Ubuntu with Jujus is not far behind, specially if you enjoy the command line.

Overall, I see a huge momentum in the OpenStack community and the potential is there to create a true API glue that can finally unite all software components, from proprietary to open source under a single IaaS framework.

Re:what is OpenStack?

[GPLHost-Thomas]

RedHat just announced their own OpenStack distribution, and several others like Canonical (Ubuntu), Nebula, StackOps, Piston, Rackspace, etc, they all have their own distributions of OpenStack.

You forgot about Debian. As the maintainer of the packages (working full time on them), I would really appreciate if you try to remember me! :)

They are all trying to make "easy" the installation and customization process.

...especially since I consider my packages the most easy ones to install (thanks to debconf things)!

Classic mistake

[NeutronCowboy]

It seems like a long shot, but maybe by holding the next summit in Hong Kong, OpenStack can draw contributors into the fold.

Only marketing flacks think that something like holding an event in a particular place is going to impress the locals enough to abandon their current priorities and go with the group hosting the event. Every Olympic Games and World Cup in dodgy countries, every peace negotiation in a symbolic place ever has demonstrated two things: hosting the event validates what the host is doing, and the other participants just complain about travel times to reach the destination.

This idea that hosting an event in a particular place can fundamentally change - or even influence - how the locals regard something is ridiculous, has long been proven wrong, and needs to die in a fire. If anything, hosting the next Openstack meeting in Hong Kong would merely validate the idea that the Chinese are on the right track with their own implementation.

Re:May I introduce you to Mr. Edward Snowden...

[Anonymous Coward]

May I introduce you to Mr. Edward Snowden who has been sharing with the world the extent to which American owned businesses are under their own government orders... and the extent to which they have been doing their government's secret agencies bidding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden