- Nati Shalom – CTO, GigaSpacesTechnologies, says:
OpenStack was first announced three
years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I
heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever
since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking
back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.
Is it the fact that it's an open
source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn't be the main reason. OpenStack
was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later
Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.
There were two main elements missing
from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the
initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that
a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and
thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact
that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought
its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such
infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also,
knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their
commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the
OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its
predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is
essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud
war. I'm happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word
by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local
community which also grew extremely quickly
over the past two years.
OpenStack as an Open Movement
Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of
the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew
interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of
thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that
of OpenStack.
Paul also drew an interesting
comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open
market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent:
APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted,
but the reality is that common currency isn't yet trivial in many countries
even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like
without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even
if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.
As individuals, we often tend to
gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is
those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large
companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as
of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this
report. Also, the fact that the number of
individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another
strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.
Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS
OpenStack essentially started as the
open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as
Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of
innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is
the Neutron
(network) and BareMetal
projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud
infrastructure.
Only on OpenStack
We often tend to compare OpenStack
with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.
The open source and community
adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to
OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:
Run the same infrastructure on
private and public clouds.
Work with multiple cloud providers;
have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.
Plug in different HW as cloud
platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell,
Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from
Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.
Choose your infrastructure of choice
for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with
OpenStack-supported plug-ins.
All this can be done only on
OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the
level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.
Re-think the Cloud Layers
When cloud first came into the
world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS,
PaaS and SaaS.
Typically, when we designed each of
the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to
create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high
availability etc.
The fact that OpenStack is an open
source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and
re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on
OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn't reuse the same security,
metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure.
The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across
all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project
and Ceilometer
in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are,
therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana
release of OpenStack.
Looking Into the Future
Personally, I think that the world
with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as
opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud
providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are
still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still
at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for
contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new
world that we are creating.
OpenStack Birthday Events
To mark OpenStack’s 3rd
Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around
the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack
will host their official birthday party on July 24th. There will
also be a celebration in Israel on the 21st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.
For more information about the
Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.
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