OpenStack Has Finally Arrived
With the latest big technology guns—IBM, VMWare (through its purchase of the SDN pioneer Nicira), and Cisco—jumping on the bandwagon, I think we can all agree that the OpenStack cloud infrastructure project has now officially arrived as a major player in the IaaS space.
The Folsom OpenStack Summit was held in San Diego, October 15–19, 2012. Niki Acosta’s Vapor Trail blog has a nice summary of the many vendor announcements. Suffice it to say, it is all about the proliferating distros—more on that topic coming soon.
The latest Folsom release has several new modules and features of interest to the enterprise and cloud service provider alike:
Quantum—Software Defined Networking (SDN), the latest darling of the cloud world, is moving forward quickly with some really valuable features including L2 to L3 tunneling and a network API.
Cinder—Cinder is the old volume component within Nova. Now that it has been separated out as its own named project, expect to see more features to allow block storage to better support virtual machine image storage, including real snapshots, live migration, simultaneous start of hundreds or thousands of VMs, and others.
Keystone—New features include support for role-based identify management, PKI functionality, and tools to add integration capability with enterprise-grade account management systems such as Active Directory and other LDAP based systems.
To further affirm that OpenStack is now a major contender for the cloud infrastructure crown, pretty much every major cloud provider except Amazon (obviously) has either built or announced that they are offering an OpenStack service offering.
Now with Comcast’s announcement in October, this is just the latest of a string of service providers offering OpenStack-based IaaS cloud service, starting with Rackspace back in 2010. The roster now includes HP cloud (live since May 2012), AT&T, Internap, Korea Telecom, and the Chinese MSP Sinia.
From the service provider's perspective, what's not to like about the system? Designed from the ground up to appeal to cloud service providers, the system supports massive horizontal scaling, modular architecture, and features a highly customizable—read underdeveloped—toolset.
While the enterprise has been a bit more hesitant to build OpenStack private clouds, there have been several companies who have had success, including eBay.
Walmart recently announced that plans to build their new ecommerce platform on OpenStack. While cost was clearly a driving force, Walmart would not build their ecommerce on OpenStack if they did not think it was mature enough to support one of the world’s largest ecommerce websites.
