Slashdot Mirror
OpenStack: the Open Source Cloud That Vendors Love and Users Are Ignoring
Brandon Butler writes: "OpenStack has no shortage of corporate backers. Rackspace, Red Hat, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and many others have hopped on board. But many wonder, after four years, shouldn't there be more end users by this point? 'OpenStack backers say this progression is completely normal. Repeating an analogy many have made, Paul Cormier, president of products and technology for Red Hat, says OpenStack’s development is just like the process of building up Linux. This time the transition to a cloud-based architecture is an even bigger technological transformation than replacing proprietary operating systems with Linux. "It’s where Linux was in the beginning," he says about OpenStack's current status. "Linux was around for a while before it really got adopted in the enterprise. OpenStack is going through the same process right now."'"
If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter. If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS.
And you get the usual proprietary issues from both. The promise of OpenStack is that you develop in house, then push it out to whatever commodity provider(s) meet your needs at the time, x number of times in y number of locations.
It's not entirely unlike how you can assume that most any popular PHP package will run on whatever hosting provider you choose, but at the machine level instead of the app level. All the usual caveats about standards apply.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This has nothing to do with cloud computing service providers. OpenStack is more about companies using the software for private clouds in which case they would be running it in their own data center.
In this case, customers are still not picking it up even though they could have cloud computing without the service providers dicking them over.
I think the software will have to prove itself over time in addition to companies figuring out how it fits into their data centers. Red Hat throwing it's support weight behind it will definitely help.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
...until upstream bandwidth in the USA catches up with the rest of the world, self-hosted "clouds" like this are just not happening. Sure, you can colocate a server, but that's expensive for a SMB and you can spend that same money on a bigger Internet pipe instead, but with such cheap turn-key on-demand scaling services like EC2, why set up your own?
There's many more OpenStack users and operators than you think. OpenStack is good for small cloud vendors, people that want to run a private, in-house cloud. It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing, or enthusiests that want to try setting up their own private cloud for toying with.
OpenStack holds a summit every 6 months. This last one (just last week) had over 3500 people in attendence - developers from those sponsoring it, operators, and user; and they were talking about how phenominal the growth has been - the first from what I heard had like 500 people.
So while you may want to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Compute for a non-managed, public cloud; if you want to do something in-house, you have fewer choices. VMware certainly has their offering; but it also comes at a high price (yes, I've looked at it in the past). I'm not sure where the various hypervisor support is, but I do know they use KVM and have the ability to use others (Rackspace uses Xen, others use VMware or Windows HyperV if I am not mistaken; at the very least there's discussion on it).
Now, I wouldn't expect high growth for OpenStack. Why? It's a big budget item to run in-house, and most are probably not going to market they use it. If people are not devoting a lot of money up-front to run it, they may be testing and slowly rolling it out as resources allow. And yes, you can run it from the SMB level to the Enterprise level.
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace; I've got a few servers that I may try to install OpenStack on to play with myself as well.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The only people with the business case to use cloud infrastructure are the corporate backers themselves. SMB have no reason to chase clouds and mid-level B2B computing crap gets outsourced anyway.
Yeah, because your typical SMB out there really want to use time and resources on managing their own IT systems, administrating their own servers and perform regular updates and security patching. It's not like they really want to focus on something else.. I know it is popular to make fun of the cloud hype on Slashdot, but IT as a managed services has real value especially for SMB (not at least compared to a very typical SMB scenario of the IT role being filled part time by the guy in the firm that knows most about computers and stuff)
OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services. As with many "open" technologies, the realities aren't quite as simple as the article here suggests, though.
It's certainly true that proprietary high-end networking gear and virtualisation software can be expensive. In that respect, alternatives like OpenStack are potentially disruptive.
On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.
Also, just because big name brands are keen to be associated with the shiny new buzzword, don't mistake that for sincere support. OpenStack poses a direct threat to the established business model of some of those networking giants, and just like everyone else, the executives at those businesses are wondering where the industry is going next and how to look like you're playing nicely while really still trying to optimise your own financial position.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm not sure what they mean by "end users". I've been keeping an eye on OpenStack, and it seems to be useful for developing cloud applications, but I might be missing the point a little. So are we calling developers of large-scale applications "end users"?
I don't think people are ignoring it, but as far as I know, OpenStack doesn't really service your standard network IT market yet, and it's not really something that will service "end users" as I think of them. It seems to be something to provide scalability for development, but if you're a developer working on a large application, it's often smarter to go with a vendor rather than trying to build your own infrastructure. That means that they go with AWS or Rackspace or something.
So my question is, who do you expect to be implementing OpenStack other than cloud providers (e.g. Rackspace) and a relatively small number of companies looking to build their own cloud infrastructure?
As an IT guy (not a developer), the whole thing is still pretty unclear. What would I use OpenStack for? If I wanted to test it out, what would I need to get started? How would I set it up? What, then could I do with it? Most of the appeal of "the cloud" at this point is the potential to divest myself of responsibility for its maintenance. The only people that I can imagine making use of OpenStack are large companies with large public, business critical web applications, and even then only those who, for whatever reason, don't want to use AWS or Rackspace or some other vendor, and have the resources to build and maintain a bunch of cloud infrastructure. Yes, there are businesses that fit that description, but it's not a large percentage of businesses.
And I'm not sure I'd call them "end users".
yes, this is what OpenStack does/is supposed to do. You can migrate your virtual machines, and the storage and networking infrastructure from your local datacenter, to a remote datacenter, to AWS, or Rackspace or any other openstack compliant hosting provider. In the grand sceme of this things it's really quite impressive and awesome. In reality it's still a mess, but getting better all of the time.