RafStack: Rafael's OpenStack Blog

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and 99cloud’s engagement in the community. My goal is to interview all 24 members of the OpenStack board (including former members like Ben), and I will post these talks sequentially at Dell TechCenter. In order to make these interviews easier to read, I structured them into my (subjectively) most important takeaways. Enjoy reading!

Rafael: What are the key accomplishments in OpenStack so far?

Ben: The key accomplishments it made was changing the world of cloud computing.

As for the service providers, not only the big players can provide cloud services, even small teams have the opportunity to use related technologies to provide the services.

As for the users, if they don’t want to be ensnared by vendor lock-in, they can try OpenStack. Cloud is inherently about open, and OpenStack was born in an effort to make technology more collaborative, affordable and available to everybody.

And last but not the least, it is the OpenStack Foundation. I think we should be proud of setting up the OpenStack Foundation!

#1 Takeaway: It’s all about usability … listening to users and incorporating what they ask for

Rafael: What still needs to be worked on? What are the “child diseases” that OpenStack has to cope with?

Ben: Winning the trust of its users will be key to our success. The OpenStack Foundation must engage with users and listen to their needs while also investing in user integration into the community. It will provide the most support and contribute the greatest value to the platform that draws the most customers.

The community-driven development must offer more stability process through open Design Summits. The changing nature of open source web-based development processes should play a positive role.

Rafael: What is the vision for OpenStack? …or what should be the vision in your opinon?

Ben: It is really about openness and the open source cloud mission. Openness is not only about open source alone but also the way OpenStack is applying to create cloud infrastructure. The open model is on the verge of being extended the collaboration and design process where collaboration and knowledge sharing extend beyond software. Other projects have donated to the Apache Foundation or opened the source. But OpenStack does more than that, it has set setup a new FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Foundation. It’s big news for the open source community.

Rafael: What are the major challenges ahead of the Board of Directors?

Ben: First, feedback is needed from users about what needs to be improved and which features should be added. If we can define a standard policy and handling exceptions, it will be easy for users to give clear feedback on potential impacts and discuss roadmaps for changes to limit the disturbance.

Second, in cloud open standards will play a critical role in how companies are architecting for the increased demand, scale and security required by cloud deployments. We look forward to collaborating with OpenStack Foundation and the community on the OpenStack project, as well as other open source standards bodies.

#2 Takeaway: The government wants open cloud, a broad open source community wants it and customers want it – OpenStack has definitely a stron momentum in China

Rafael: Can you please explain why OpenStack is so popular in China?

Ben: I couldn’t imagine the popularity in China today. When I organized the first events Shanghai OpenStack Conferece 2011, 400 participants came from across the country. After the conference we saw many companies joining China OpenStack User Group(COSUG). The number of members has increased from less than 100 to more than 1000. There are mainly two reasons for OpenStack’s popularity in China:

First, it’s good to see the government embrace open source software - though some members of the open source movement will feel a bit queasy about that. But the government is massively promoting open source, and their expectation is that within the next five years the development of cloud computing in China will further broaden.

Second, it is the power of the open source community in China. Through the power of community crowdsourcing, cloud computing software development accelerates and becomes more efficient. The cloud computing community is very active in China.

Third, using open source software significantly reduces deployment cost, and this is consistent with the direction of the development of cloud computing, and Chinese enterprises follow this pattern.

Fourth, most of the internationally leading enterprises use open source as their cloud platform, which immediately affects corporate decisions in China.

So, open source cloud platform will develop rapidly, and OpenStack will be widely used in China.

#3 Takeaway: Large Chinese internet companies deploy OpenStack on up to thousands of servers

Rafael: What are the adoption patterns for OpenStack in China?

Ben: Some people complain about OpenStack not being production ready, but I see some internet companies have already deployed OpenStack. Sina.com  has made some deployments, and we see other large internet companies deploying up to thousands of servers using OpenStack.

Rafael: What challenges does the OpenStack community face in China?

Ben: While the community is thriving a lack of sufficient support is limiting growth. Many enterprises adopted open source software, but they lack willingness to share more technical details. They are currently trying to tread a nice middle ground between completely embracing the open source community and keeping control over software it has developed.

#4 Takeaway: Challenge to future of OpenStack in China – growing number of contributors needed on the project

Rafael: What are the opportunities?

Ben: With the OpenStack Foundation actively working on open and transparent governance, the real challenge now is to grow more contributors and technical resources to fill out projects. We have a lot of good developers in China. And as mentioned above, given the vast growth potential of the market, it is assumed to be a pretty good prospect. Foreign companies operating in China have been quick to see this potential but they are largely unable to grasp it.

#5 Takeaway: 99cloud is contributing through code and evangelism

Rafael: How does 99cloud contribute to OpenStack?

Ben: I agree with your interview with Boris Renski. There are two sorts of contributions to OpenStack: writing code and evangelizing the project, with the latter being even the more important.

99cloud is pleased to participate as a member of the OpenStack community. At 99cloud, we were one of the original organizers of the OpenStack community in China. We initiated and lead a community project trystack.cn, and we donate to the Foundation.

99Cloud’s interest in OpenStack derives from community and customers who need local support. OpenStack should be sufficiently stable for customers running production clouds. 99cloud is focusing to provide cloud solutions and products using OpenStack for customers in China. We know from community events that most of the customers who want to use OpenStack not only need an open source project but they expect it to be production ready. So, our goal is to create value for the customers, especially for the Chinese users.

Furthermore we want to donate Trystack.cn to the OpenStack Foundation, but there are legal issues we have to clarify, we are working with OpenStack Foundation Community Manager Stefano Maffulli on that.

Rafael: How do you intend to monetize on OpenStack?

Ben: OpenStack is an open source technology, while cloud service is a business model. There will be a lot more “Powered by OpenStack” software and appliances in five years. Software and hardware vendors will treat OpenStack as a de facto open standard platform, and they will naturally develop and support drivers and applications for this stack. Those customers who are deeply involved in the community ecosystem want greater cloud choice/flexibility without vendor lock-in, and the ability to customize the solution to meet their customers’ needs.

The best thing about open source software systems has always been the fact that it is freely available and any programmer or company can use it to develop its own version of that software. The end users get exactly what they needed and are willing to pay for it. Companies that use OpenStack a lot and generate enough revenue from it  can afford to outsourcing service. And the specialists of OpenStack need to be trained, tested and licensed by a valid authority which will always need to route back to the service providers.

Rafael: What is your view on Hadoop in conjunction with OpenStack?

Ben: I have been reading some news on the web about elephants to join the OpenStack cloud. But to me, the business model in China is not very clear. From a Hadoop cluster to a Hadoop cloud … will it be a SaaS? In any case, 99cloud can provide the deployment service.

Rafael: Can you name resources (both in Chinese as well as in English) … such as blogs, community pages etc.?

Ben: First of all, I want to mention Trystack.cn. It’s a community project, the largest OS testing and Showcase Platform in China, built for the newest OpenStack Folsom release. It’s partnering with Intel and VMware for physical and marketing resources, it was announced during the the San Diego Design Summit 2012. They are working with the Cloud Foundry community in china to provide OpenStack deployment environments with the newest code now.

I also recommend http://openstack.csdn.net/.  There is a large number of Chinese articles about OpenStack. And also there are a lot of bloggers such as http://www.chenshake.com/and also good OpenStack manuals.

Also, it’s important to mention Ken Pepple, a good writer who wrote the book on OpenStack – “OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook.” The book is structured into questions on how to do things with OpenStack and the answers guide the readers through a series of repeatable steps. I am translating this book now, and it will be published this year for Chinese users.

Rafael: Ben, thank you very much for this interview.

Ben: You are welcome!

Resources

Trystack Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/trystack-china
Twitter: @OpenStackChina
Presentations: Slideshare
Weibo: @COSUG(China OpenStack User Group) or @trystack
LinkedIn Group: openstack-china

Feedback

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and Rackspace’s engagement in the community. My goal is to interview all 24 members of the OpenStack board, and I will post these talks sequentially at Dell TechCenter. In order to make these interviews easier to read, I structured them into my (subjectively) most important takeaways. Enjoy reading!

#1 Takeaway: The world wants an open cloud

Rafael: What are the key accomplishments of OpenStack so far?

Jim: First, the transition to the foundation. Setting up a foundation is a big move, and technically it removes OpenStack from Rackspace to the community, which attracts a large number of companies to the project. I think we should be proud of how the community comes together to work very well.

Second, two years ago OpenStack was more of a promise than a reality. We had a production grade object storage environment, but Nova, the compute project was at best a couple thousands lines of code. Here we are now 600,000 lines codes later with hundreds of contributors from nearly a hundred countries. It’s amazing to see the progress we made in maturing the product. At Rackspace, we’re using that code to power the world’s second largest public cloud … and there are a lot of diverse use cases such as MercadoLibre, eBay and PayPal to name a few.

Third, the world has decided that open matters in cloud. People are rejecting a closed cloud model, and that’s why we’ve seen so much traction on OpenStack.

#2 Takeaway: The OpenStack community needs to focus more on usability of OpenStack

Rafael: What needs to be worked on in OpenStack, Jim?

Jim: The first two years were a race for features. The project was dominated by developers and not as much by users … and that’s ok, that’s where we are with OpenStack are right now.  The tradeoff is that you get code that is not necessarily that stable, the product is not necessarily as usable and certainly one that requires you to be an expert. I believe slowing down the process of innovation and focussing more on stability and usability is a really critical goal at this point: making sure that the way upgrades are going to occur from one release to another is fully thought-out, enabling chargeback functionalities … these are things the community just starts to work on.

In terms of features … we now have block storage capabilities built into the latest release as a separate project. It’s hard to imagine building an enterprise-grade OpenStack deployment without these capabilities. Then, virtual networking capabilities are a huge step forward … especially for us as a service provider where you scale massively it’s extremely important.  I think most of the major components that are needed are built into OpenStack by now.

But we need to find an answer to the question: What is the definition of OpenStack? It’s a brand that encompasses a broad range of subprojects … what should be included in core? How should we think about incubation?  All these things are very important … not only in terms of what we are going to build with OpenStack. The community needs to understand what the scope of OpenStack is, so that they frankly can have the opportunity make money around it.

#3 Takeaway:  A broad ecosystem of OpenStack distribution tightly connected to Linux distros accelerates market adoption

Rafael: There are a lot of distributions popping up around OpenStack … what trends do you see in this area?

Jim: Some people call what Rackspace does a distro …  I would say it’s rather a packaging. We are trying to make OpenStack trunk easily consumable by a non-OpenStack epxert, by making cloud up and running very quickly. People can use it however they want without being tied to a license or support. At Rackspace we make money by providing services on top of that, and some companies are following a similar model.

Some folks are following the traditional Linux distro model by putting OpenStack distros together with Linux distros, which is a well known and established process. Almost every major Linux distro includes OpenStack at this point, which is great in terms of a broad market adoption.

Also, some companies are taking OpenStack and doing proprietary work around it to solve specific use cases or to provide differentiation.

At Rackspace, we firmly believe that one of the promises of OpenStack was to make it easy to consume. It’s an approach very similar to the way you consume Linux. You don’t consume the Linux project, you do so through one of its many distributions. I think with regards to OpenStack, we want people to get as close to consuming trunk as possible, thereby making OpenStack truly open and free.

#4 Takeaway: 25 % of all Fortune 100 companies in the US have downloaded Rackspace’s OpenStack Private Cloud software within the first 45 days after the release

Rafael: Let’s talk about market adoption, Jim. Do you see signs of OpenStack going mainstream?

Jim: Honestly …  we are still a bit away from mainstream, I think that also holds true for cloud in general. At Rackspace, we have two OpenStack products which I can speak of … public and private cloud. Public cloud is still a small share of IT spent and I think that the large enterprises, the traditional IT buyers are just starting to get their hands around and how to consume public cloud and how build on it. Previously it was mostly developers and startups, but it’s certainly going mainstream.

Private cloud is even a little bit further behind in terms of being adopted by companies. But at this point, what has happened is that mainstream CIOs decided that the architecture of the future is cloud. Forget whether it’s in a public cloud or in their datacenter … the concept of consuming physical resources via APIs and building those APIs into applications is the way people are thinking about IT in future. That’s now worked into almost every CIO’s plans.

Rafael: Who are the current early adopters of OpenStack?

Jim: -The most obvious early adopters in the industry are financial services, large enterprises that do experiment with those emerging technologies.

Besides that, at Rackspace we have a good mix of other businesses eager to try OpenStack because of its promise in terms of service model, cost and speed to market.

We just recently released our private cloud software to the market. Over the first 45 days since the release 25% of the Fortune 100 companies in US downloaded it. Over all, we had downloads from 125 countries from all continents. We see a very broad interest in OpenStack.

#5 Takeaway: China is leapfrogging into OpenStack (just as they did with cell phones by skipping landlines)

Rafael: What regions are adopting OpenStack? China seems to be very keen on OpenStack …?

Jim: For certain the biggest market right now is the United States, second biggest market is China … both in terms of contributions as well as commercial interest. Third would be other South and East Asian countries such as India and Japan. Europe is certainly a little bit less … but certainly I would say US, China and broader Asia are showing the most interest in OpenStack at this point.

Rafael: What’s the reason for China’s massive involvement in OpenStack?

Jim: I started working in China with Rackspace about 5 years ago. They didn’t know anything about hosting and the managed services space at all at that time. They didn’t know much about cloud, and the evolution of knowledge has been substantial over that period of time.

When you take a look for example at telecommunications in countries like China: they basically skipped landlines and went straight to cell phones. In part that is happening in the cloud. China didn’t have a large IT infrastructure five or ten years ago, and many enterprises are jumping right into the cloud.

Certainly in a market like China where cost is a concern, where access to technology is a concern, OpenStack is of interest with code for all to have. Actually a significant number of companies that are significantly contributing to OpenStack as well as early adopters and deployers are based in China.

#6 Takeaway: Dell’s great advantage is the broad customer base and the trust these customers put into Dell

Rafael: Jim, how do you view Dell in the OpenStack game?

Jim: Dell is one of the first companies I called when we started OpenStack. We invited Dell to take a look at what we were doing in spring of 2010, even before we announced it. Dell participated in the first OpenStack Design summit, which at that time wasn’t open to everybody … we invited jointly with NASA 25 companies to brainstorm about the project.

Dell from the very beginning brought in a very impressive group of people to work with us on OpenStack. Dell has abroad reach, they know enterprise customers very well, and they engaged with customers very early, helping them to understand and adopt OpenStack. They contributed around OpenStack with Dell Crowbar, and they are very good community participants.

Dell sells to a lot of companies, which trust Dell on how to design and build IT infrastructure for the future. Dell is using that opportunity to bet on OpenStack, and it makes me really happy to see that happen.

Rafael: Thank you very much, Jim. It was a pleasure talking to you!

Resources

Rackspace: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/openstack/

Feedback

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com