OK, I’ve been back and forth with this and I’m ready to say, “I don’t get OpenStack”. I mean I get OpenStack. I understand what it is but I don’t understand why I should be interested in it from an enterprise perspective. It’s the “Kernel” of the cloud. I don’t want a kernel, I want a solution. I don’t choose Linux based solutions because I have access to the kernel. I implement Linux solution because they meet my requirements. What requirements is OpenStack meeting for me?
OpenStack, is positioned to allow the Rackspace’s and HP’s of the world to compete with Amazon. As my sons would say about dominate athletes, Amazon is a BEAST. They dominate the IaaS market and mindshare. OpenStack hits all of the sweat spots that people complain about AWS. It’s open so the community can band together and create a robust ecosystem based on the OpenStack kernel. But let’s look at the typical enterprises’ IaaS cloud requirements.
If you are redesigning your DC around a private cloud with the ability to scale out to public cloud what’s important to you? I would say Security, Elasticity, Support and Availability. Maybe not in that order but more or less that would be the list. You may have noticed portability isn’t in the list. By design my applications and systems should be based on a portable architecture that’s not reliant on my cloud providers API. That’s why the industry has provided us solutions like RightScale. If I have RightScale and my private cloud management stack be it Eucalyptus, vCloud Director or System Management Server 2012 why do I care what my provider is running on their backend? I need solutions that are ready for deployment today and have a decent amount of support. There are plenty of reasons for HP, Rackspace and even VMware to care about OpenStack. I just don’t see any of those reasons existing in the enterprise data center. Agree/Disagree?
As more and more hosting providers (RackSpace and DreamHost are perfect examples) are moving into the cloud provider business they might adopt OpenStack. When they do, it might be more and more interresting for enterprises to be running OpenStack, because the closer/more compatible the environments match, the easier it is to move workloads ?
Assuming an open standards underlying Hypervisor is being used.
I don’t understand, OpenStack supports 4 hypervisors: Xen/XenServer, VMWare, Hyper-V, Qemu/KVM. Is there one that OpenStack should support ? You can hopefully find a provider which uses the same hypervisor that fits your needs. I think HP Cloud and DreamHost use KVM, RackSpace uses Xen/XenServer.
Right. To be portable the Hypervisors have to be the same. My point being you can’t just take an image from one provider to a different one if they aren’t compatible.