RafStack: Rafael's OpenStack Blog

Join the 1st OpenStack User Group Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) 06-06-2013, Technopark Pomerania, Niemierzynska 17a (3rd Floor, room 301), Szczecin, Poland: with Boris Renski (Mirantis), Tim Bell (CERN), Eric Windisch (Cloudscaling) & Atul Jha (OpenStack India)

We are excited to announce our first OpenStack Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) on June 6th 2013, 5.00 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs) at Hackerspace in Technopark Pomerania, an IT hub for local public and private tech ventures. Our meetup will be accompanied by Google Hangout and IRC Chat sessions with some of the most respected members of the OpenStack community: Boris Renski of Mirantis, Tim Bell of CERN, Eric Windisch of Cloudscaling and Atul Jha of the OpenStack User Group India.

OpenStack aims to become the open standard for an ubiquitous cloud

OpenStack was launched jointly by Rackspace and NASA in 2010. It  is managed by the OpenStack Foundation. OpenStack is written in Python and licensed under Apache License 2.0. 

OpenStack is an open source software for building private and public clouds. It’s supported by a vast community of more than 200 vendors such as Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Redhat and VMware. More than 800 developers are contributing to the code base and 6,000 individual members are backing the initiative.

“OpenStack aims to be an alternative to proprietary private and public cloud solutions. But the ultimate goal is even bolder, as leading OpenStackers claim: to create an ubiquitous, free and open cloud standard - just as the internet as we know it today.” explains Rafael Knuth, who is co-organizing the OpenStack User Group Meetup jointly with Rafal Malujda and Michal Smereczynski under the patronship of Aegis  Foundation, a Poland based Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Foundation: “The current state of affairs with cloud is being compared to the internet in the 1990s: a collection of gated communities operated by vendors like CompuServe and Prodigy. Tearing down these walls might reshape the entire IT industry and create opportunities for businesses and organizations far beyond anyone’s imagination.” - explains Knuth.

Our meeting shall be the first meeting in the series to support the local community, especially gathered in the regional Cluster of IT companies (ICT Westpomerania Cluster) in understanding OpenStack soultions.

“ICT Cluster is an association of nearly 60 ICT companies in the West Pomerania Region. We cooperate to improve the potential of regional IT companies. And Pomerania Technopark is a place, where we can meet to exchange knowledge and experiences. We hope that the 1^st OpenStack User Group Meetup will begin an effective cooperation between members of the OpenStack community” – says Katarzyna Witkowska, ICT Cluster vice president.

Join our Google Hangout and IRC Chat at 5 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs)

Don’t miss the opportunity to chat online with our special guests. We will open our Google Hangout and IRC Chat session on June 6th at 5.00 pm CEST (GMT +2 hrs), and both will remain open until approximately 9 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs).

OpenStack Poland - IRC Channel

#openstack-pl
server: freenode
for non-IRC users: http://openstackpoland.aegis.org.pl/irc-channel/

Google Hangout

https://www.youtube.com/user/OpenStackPoland 

Boris Renski is member of the OpenStack Board of Directors. He is co-founder and EVP at Mirantis, the world’s largest independent OpenStack system integrator. Mirantis is serving customers such as at&t, NASA, Huawei, Dell, Cisco, HP and GAP. Earlier this year, Mirantis released FUEL, an open-source library packaging the company’s implementation experience into an OpenStack Do-it-Yourself-Kit. Mirantis is headquartered in Mountain View and operates across five additional international locations in Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Follow Boris at Twitter: @zer0tweets 

Tim Bell is member of the OpenStack Board of Directors. Tim works as Infrastructure Manager at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is an active member of the OpenStack community and openly shares their best practices. Their goal for OpenStack is to ramp to 15,000 hypervisors with 100,000 virtual machines by 2015. Follow Tim at Twitter: @noggin143 

Eric Windisch works as a Cloud Architect at Cloudscaling, the company behind the OpenStack distribution Open Cloud System 2.5 designed to meet the requirements of today’s web/mobile applications, SaaS/PaaS deployments and big data implementations. Eric is also contributing to Cloudscaling’s engineering blog Simplicity Scales. Follow Eric at Twitter: @ewindisch 

Atul Jha is an active member of the OpenStack community in India. He is engaging with a broad range of enterprises as well as with the higher education sector, the latter seizing opportunities in the OpenStack ecosystem for their students: “Open Source Software Isn’t Just Code. It’s Your Résumé” as recently stated in WIRED.com. Follow Atul at Twitter: @koolhead17

Targeting Central & Eastern Europe

We aim to serve the local IT community as well as the OpenStack ecosystem across the entire CEE region. For that reason we join forces with the OpenStack User Group in Hungary which is organizing the OpenStack CEE Day in Budapest May 29th 2013. Also, we will engage and share experiences with other emerging regions such as India, China and Brazil.

Register for the event at Meetup.com

Please register for the event at Meetup.com. Also, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We will happily answer your questions and discuss with you via the global OpenStack Community mailing list, our local OpenStack mailing list (URLs below) as well as via Twitter: Rafael Knuth (@RafaelKnuth) Rafal Malujda (@Raafael6000) Michal Smereczynski (@Smereczynski) - don’t forget to use the #OpenStack hashtag.

OpenStack Poland resources

Webpage:
http://openstackpoland.aegis.org.pl/

Meetup page:
http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-User-Group-Poland/

Global community mailing list:
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community

Local community mailing list (in Polish):
http://lists.aegis.org.pl/mailman/listinfo/openstackpoland

Cloudscaling just recently launched an engineering blog named Simplicity Scales: “This blog is about Cloudscaling’s engineers, engineering culture, and perspective on building elastic infrastructure clouds that don’t suck.” (Randy Bias, Cloudscaling). Below an overview over the first posts at the Simplicity Scales blog:

• Announcing the Python3 Compatibility Team
• Service Resiliency Doesn’t Always Mean “HA” or “Cluster”
• State of the Q – ZeroMQ in OpenStack Grizzly
• Cloud Networking – Part 1: The VLAN Problem

Rafael: Can you introduce yourself, Eric? What are you doing? Who are you? 

Eric: I’m a Principal Engineer at Cloudscaling. I have been at Cloudscaling for two years now, and I am an active developer and participant in the OpenStack community. I believe I have been - at least for the last 12 months - the second highest contributor to the Oslo shared library project within OpenStack. Also, I’ve been contributing to the Simplicity Scales blog.

Rafael: Tell us about the Simplicity Scales blog.

Eric: Simplicity Scales blog was set up to provide an outlet for Cloudscaling engineers to express their thoughts and views to the world and to allow them to show some of the cool things that they’re working on. The name comes from the idea that simple, loosely coupled systems are more scalable and fault tolerant than complex, tightly coupled ones. Simplicity Scales reflects our philosophy of building cloud and product design.

Rafael: Can you give some examples?

Eric: Sure. Presently I put out a post about the ZeroMQ work that I’ve been doing. That includes mostly the things that I did in Grizzly; it wrapped up this latest development cycle so that there was sort of a change log for that work that people could go and reference. One of the topics we will talk about is the Python 3 compatibility theme. That’s an effort that I’m personally working on. Also, we are going to talk about service inventory and health in OpenStack and how to have awareness of the hosts that are in there.

Rafael:  Do you plan to expand the author base to non-Cloudscaling engineers?

Eric: At this time we only have plans for Cloudscaling engineers.

Rafael: I noticed that you barely have any Cloudscaling branding at the Simplicity Scales blog. Why?

Eric: The idea is to present the engineers as themselves. These are Cloudscaling engineers, but these are not necessarily the thoughts and opinions of Cloudscaling. That’s one of the biggest differences between the Simplicity Scales blog and the Cloudscaling company blog. So, at Simplicity Scale we can allow ourselves some more free range.

Rafael: Can you give examples of topics where you deviate from Cloudscaling’s view?

Eric: Sure. I’m working on a post regarding running OpenStack Nova on a Raspberry Pi (laughs). This is something that Cloudscaling is not looking to actually do. It’s something I did for fun, and I just thought: “Hey, it would be kind of neat to let people know if you were to do this - for whatever reason - what it actually looks like.” And in no way this relates to what’s being done at Cloudscaling.

Rafael: Thank you very much, Eric. I am looking forward to read more at the Simplicity Scales blog.

Eric: You’re welcome, Rafael.

Simplicity Scales resources

http://engineering.cloudscaling.com/

@ewindisch

@simplicityscale (no typo here - Twitter allows only 15 character handles)

Over the last few months I did a series of interview with OpenStack board members, representing various types of organizations. Hence, allow me to share my key takeaways from those interviews: Why does OpenStack matter? OpenStack matters, because:

Enterprises want Amazon and VMware alternatives
“There was a lot of pressure in the market to have an alternative ecosystem to Amazon as a public cloud and to VMware as a licensed internal cloud.” Rob Hirschfeld, Principal Cloud Architect at Dell. As for the public cloud, hosting companies such as Rackspace and Dreamhost want to create an alternative ecosystem to Amazon AWS in order to differentiate through service. Private cloud users on the other hand, are seeking for alternatives, where costs do not scale linearly as they grow their infrastructure.

Cloud is open by nature …
“Cloud in general is a baby of the open source culture.” Boris Renski, Co-Founder and EVP at Mirantis. Large consumer internet companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google built their cloud infrastructure out of components they invented and then later on outsourced as well as on already existing open source solutions:  “These companies understood that if they took the traditional enterprise route, the price for licenses ultimately would be greater than the revenues they could ever achieve. So they built the superefficient infrastructure stack completely leveraging open components and paying licenses to nobody.”

… and so is OpenStack
“From day one it was not positioned central to any particular vendor but as a conglomerate of different independent organizations. Because cloud is about open, and OpenStack is THE thing in the open cloud, it is effectively going to be one of the most disruptive movements in infrastructure computing during the next 5 to 10 years. OpenStack is going to change the entire industry upside down.” Boris Renski.

OpenStack matures at rapid pace
“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.” Jim Curry, GM Private Cloud at Rackspace.

Its fundamental architecture is very sound
“If you want to build Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a scale out manner, then you need an asynchronous, loosely coupled, message based type of solution, so that you can create a distributed software system.”Randy Bias, Co-Founder and CTO at Cloudscaling. OpenStack meets those expectations, unlike many other open source IaaS projects.

It’s driven by a diverse, huge community
“We have probably the most dynamic, engaged and diverse community ever. Linux had a perfect recipe of academic partners, enterprise partners and non-profits that had really moved the project forward. OpenStack has that same mix of academic users such as CERN and NeCTAR in Australia, and commercial users like eBay, Sony and PayPal, and a certain amount of non-profits like Wikimedia as well as big entities like IBM, HP and Intel.” Joshua McKenty, Co-Founder and CTO at Piston Cloud Computing.

OpenStack is ready to scale
“One of the developments we have been watching very closely has been the cells development.  Clearly a number of sites are pushing the thousand plus hypervisor scale at the moment, but the key break through will be with the OpenStack Grizzly release when the cells functionality is there, and this will allow us to construct hierarchies of cells of compute resources. This would remove one of the major limitations in terms of the total scalability.” Tim Bell, Infrastructure Manager at CERN.

If you want to learn about OpenStack, its components and capabilities please go to the OpenStack Foundation website. And if you have the opportunity to join the crowd in person, visit the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Portland (OR).

Can you explain briefly what Chef is?
Opscode Chef is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating at scale. Using Ruby-based ‘recipes’ and ‘cookbooks’ of code commands, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout an entire infrastructure. Through a combination of configuration management and service-oriented architectures, Chef makes it easy to create fully automated infrastructure, while simplifying systems management. Chef is available as an open source download, a SaaS subscription, or as software installed behind the user’s firewall.

What’s different about Chef compared to other automation solutions such as Puppet?
Puppet provides a declarative model for systems administration. It works well in small, mostly static environments, with low complexity. Opscode Chef provides a more flexible automation framework that allows enterprises to model their current workflow, at any scale, from development through to deployment and operations. Chef is based on primitives that create patterns that can be bent to any workflow/environment. Puppet is based on declaratives that can’t be changed. 

You recently released Chef 11. What are the major enhancements compared to the previous version?
Chef 11 was re-written from the ground up and leverages best-of-breed infrastructure technologies including the Erlang programming language and PostgreSQL database, delivering a rock-solid automation platform that can easily scale up to 10,000 nodes from a single Chef server – which is far greater than any previous Chef generation. Opscode is also two tiers of commercial support for open source Chef users (who are running Chef 11) covering both live system support and cookbook code troubleshooting. Other enhancements include:

• Comprehensive Testing: Chef 11 features the Pedant Testing Suite, delivering robust testing capabilities that can be executed with a single command, automating more than 2,000 end-to-end tests that ensure the Chef server is installed and working properly.
  
  
• Easy Installation: Chef 11 comes packaged with a ‘one-click’ installer, enabling easy and rapid deployment of Chef regardless of IT environment.
  
  
• Enhanced Windows Support: With the Pedant Testing Suite, Chef 11 includes automated testing across seven different versions of Windows, improving functionality and integration within Windows environments.

What resources (blogs, webinars, events) do you provide to get a solid technical understanding of Chef?
The most visible resource is the open source Chef Community, which is an important, active and vibrant online community where users can find recipes and cookbooks for everything from Windows to Hadoop, as well as a wide range of best practices, instruction guides, and more. However, the most important and helpful resource is likely our Documents page, where users can find out everything they need to know about Chef, from getting started, to basic deployments, to advanced use cases, recipes, cookbooks, patches and more. We’re working hard to make our Documents page your one-stop-shop for all things Opscode Chef.

Who owns Chef?
Chef is an open source systems integration framework stewarded and licensed by Opscode.

Which language is Chef written in?
The back-end API is written in Erlang. The front-end is Ruby.

How is Chef licensed?
As a free, open source download, a SaaS solution, or as enterprise software installed behind the firewall. The latter two are commercial solutions sold through a subscription model.

How many contributors / commits do you count?
Over 1,000 individual contributors, 170+ corporate contributors and tens of thousands of registered users. Open Source Chef has been downloaded nearly 2 million times in less than four years of availability. 

Which functionalities is the community particularly focused on?
That’s a tough question to answer because the Chef Community is so diverse, active and large that there are few “core focus” points. That said, ensuring Chef works seamlessly with MySQL, Apache and the many public cloud providers are frequent topics of conversation and code contribution, as is Chef + Windows.

Can you give us examples of typical use cases for Chef?
We call it the “three C’s of Chef”: Configuration Management of servers in physical data centers, private and public clouds; Continuous Application Delivery in any environment; and Cloud Management for public, private and hybrid clouds. The vast majority of use cases for any of the three flavors of Chef fall into one or more of these categories. We have solution pages on each of these use case available here, as well as a wide range of customer success stories available here.

Which prerequisites should enterprises meet when interested in using Chef?
There are no specific prerequisites needed to use Chef. However, familiarity with Ruby within IT and your Dev teams will be helpful, as is a willingness to deploy infrastructure as code for greater agility and less risk. 

Tell us about your collaboration with Dell and Chef integration in Crowbar – Dell’s deployment mechanism for OpenStack.
We’re excited that Dell has embedded Opscode Chef in Crowbar and are very appreciative of the patches and cookbooks Dell has contributed back to the Chef Community. Dell has been a great partner in the OpenStack project and we look forward to more collaboration in the future.

Thank you, Lucas.
You’re welcome, Rafael.

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

Over the next couple of weeks, Dell’s new OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution partner Inktank will host a series of four webinars providing a step by step walk through the cloud storage capabilities of Ceph. Ceph is ideal for the cloud as it combines object and block storage in one open source solution.

We will conduct one webinar per week, starting on January 17th (duration: 60 minutes).

As part of this series, Dell will be joining Inktank to host a webinar specifically on Ceph, Crowbar and OpenStack on January 24th. You can register to all four webinars or to those you are particularly interested in on the Inktank Webinar page. Please find below an overview over the topics covered:

#1 Webinar: Getting Started with Ceph
January 17, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

Join to learn:
• The architectural requirements of the Ceph Cluster
• The role of the core RADOS components
• What happens if an OSD fails
• How to spin up a cluster using a VM image
• What is required to expand the cluster

#2 Webinar: Intro to Ceph with OpenStack
January 24, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

During this webinar you will learn:
• What you need to consider for selecting the best cloud storage system
• Overview of the Ceph architecture and unique features and benefits
• Best practices in deploying cloud storage with Ceph and OpenStack

#3 Webinar: DreamHost Case Study: DreamObjects with Ceph
February 7, 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

This webinar will discuss best practices and lessons learned in creating DreamObjects, including the need to manage scale, speed, monitoring, uptime, security and cost.

#4 Webinar: Advanced Features of the Ceph Distributed Storage System Delivered by Sage Weil, Ceph Creator
February 12„ 2013
10:00AM PT, 12:00PM CT, 1:00PM ET
Register now

Join to learn about the following advance features of Ceph:
• Deploying Ceph
• Enhance Deployment
• Block Devices

This webinar will focus on advanced features and configuration of Ceph. Attendees should have
a basic understanding and preferably hands-on experience with Ceph before attending this
webinar.

Looking forward to see you soon! In case you have any questions, feel free to contact us:

Jude Fitzgerald (Inktank)
Jude.Fitzgerald@inktank.com
@JudeFitzz 

Rafael Knuth (Dell)
rafael_knuth@dellteam.com
@RafaelKnuth

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and Cloudscaling’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: OpenStack fundamental architecture is very sound

Rafael: Let’s start with a very basic question, Randy. What is the value that OpenStack brings to the table?

Randy: The core value of OpenStack is that the fundamental architecture is very sound. If you want to build Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a scale out manner, then you need an asynchronous, loosely coupled, message based type of solution, so that you can create a distributed software system.

We looked at a number of different technologies on the market place today including CloudStack and OpenNebula, and we missed a combination of both components. In case of CloudStack, where we did one of the three largest deployments, the code base is monolithic. All the code runs in one place. And in the case of OpenNebula you have distributed software, but it lacks an asynchronous message passing paradigm.

#2 Takeaway: OpenStack key accomplishments are: 1) high profile contributors, 2) regular release cycle, 3) governed by a foundation and 4) broad suit of services

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

Randy: First, a number of high profile appointments like AT&T, HP and Dell. Second, a regular cadence in the major release cycle, which is a key factor in any large open source project. OpenStack has a six-month cadence with six major releases so far, and it’s becoming better and better with every new version. Third, the formation of the OpenStack Foundation, a single neutral entity that can support OpenStack and its mission, rather than being owned by any one organization. Fourth, OpenStack branched out from the core of Nova and Swift into Nova, Cinder, Horizon, Glance, Swift, Quantum and Keystone in the current OpenStack Folsom release. With that, OpenStack has a full end-to-end suite of services you can pick from, whereas other IaaS open source projects are focusing on a single piece of the problem like compute or networking, for example.

#3 Takeaway: OpenStack needs a broader market adoption and a clear mission

Rafael:  … and what does still needs to be worked on in OpenStack, Randy?

Randy: We still need significantly more adoption in the marketplace, although I don’t know how to quantify that well. A lot of people are in the process of evaluating OpenStack, and I think that a broader market adoption is just a matter of time.

Also, since the formation of the OpenStack Foundation, there’s an opportunity to re-evaluate what the mission for OpenStack should be. Initially the mission for OpenStack was defined by Rackspace. Now that Rackspace doesn’t own OpenStack anymore, the project’s mission needs to be clarified.

#4 Takeaway: OpenStack Foundation has two options: 1) a hands off and 2) a hands on approach to govern the project

Rafael:  What are viable options for OpenStack?

Randy: One option would be a similar approach to how the Linux Foundation exists in the market place.

The Linux Foundation doesn’t really say what Linux should be. It allows the marketplace and the key contributors to make those decisions themselves. Linux has a reasonable amount of standardization across the distributions, but yet all of them are designed for completely different purposes. RedHat Enterprise is seen by many as designed for servers in the way that Ubuntu is for desktops. There are even more specialized Linux distributions for things like embedded systems.

That sort of hands off approach would mean that OpenStack becomes a framework that can be used by anybody in the ecosystem to build all sorts of clouds. In that case the market forces would determine which distributions rise to the top and which don’t … just like is the case with Linux.

Alternatively, the OpenStack Foundation could take a hands on approach and make top down determinations about OpenStack standards … what OpenStack supports, which other cloud software it’s compatible with etc. That approach might get us sooner to interoperability with other clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Google Compute Engine, but it may alienate those members of the community who don’t want to go in the direction which the OpenStack Foundation and Technical Committee may decide makes sense. These folks might then want to build their own system, and that might create a threat of forking OpenStack.

Rafael: Hands off or hands on: Which approach would you prefer for OpenStack?

Randy: I have seen in the past that standards in interoperability seem to bubble up through market adoption. Once customers decide what they want, developers can respond to that rather than trying to predict what the market might want. We all know: Human beings are the worst predictors of the future (laughs).

#5 Takeaway: Cloudscaling focusses on improving OpenStack’s computing capabilities and API compatibility with other public clouds

Rafael: Let’s talk a bit about Open Cloud System – your company’s OpenStack distribution. What makes it unique in the marketplace?

Randy: Before I answer that question let me explain briefly that we use 100% stock OpenStack in our product, Open Cloud System. We don’t modify it, we don’t fork it. Our team has a background in building large scale out, production grade systems that are compatible with other clouds, and that’s our primary focus with OpenStack. We’ve built an integrated system solution rather than a bunch of separate components.

OpenStack from our point of view is a great technology, but it’s a little bit like the Linux kernel. You probably wouldn’t take it and run it in production. Just as with the Linux kernel, you actually have to do a number of things in order to make it robust and production ready … and by production ready we mean that there is a focus on availability, security, performance and maintainability.

OpenStack has lot of configuration parameters, and we simply took advantage of that in order to provide functionality that isn’t available in default OpenStack. Let me give you one example.

Default OpenStack comes with Nova, the compute component. It has two deployment modes. The first deployment mode is a centralized service, that all of your network traffic goes through. It has VLANs behind it, and every tenant of your cloud is on a VLAN. The challenge is that you have a central choke point for all your traffic. Regardless of how fast your switch fabric is … you’re driving traffic for all your VMs through this central Linux box which is obviously not ideal.

The second deployment mode is distributed, where you are also using VLANs … with your Nova network controller running on all your hypervisors. Obviously there are security concerns around that. But taking that aside, you end up making some compromises, because of the Nova network controller architecture with both public and private IPs running on your internal switch fabric. A lot of people don’t like to do that, they prefer to keep their public IPs at the edge of the network. In addition to that you have these weird bugs that crop up, because the network address translations are happening on each of the hypervisor nodes, instead of at the edge of your network like you would normally expect. There is a bug right now in OpenStack which is not fixable because of the architecture and you cannot use floating IPs.

This is really clunky. Open Cloud System takes a very different approach. We don’t use any VLANs. We use Layer 3 network routing just like Amazon Web Services does. Our networking model looks exactly like Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

We have a separate NAT service that runs at the edge of the system. Your public and private IPs are not running together on the switch fabric. We have a distributed DHCP service that runs on all hypervisors; the Nova network controller is off to the side and no network traffic goes through it anymore. Because of that we get full end to end bandwidth between all the VMs and tenants, and we get full throughput to the internet ingress and egress.

Rafael: Can you give some more examples of what your distribution does differently than raw OpenStack?

Randy: Sure. Default OpenStack comes with RabbitMQ as the messaging broker, and we felt that created a single point of failure which didn’t make sense to us, especially in larger deployments. So we came up with an Alternative Approach to OpenStack Nova RPC Messaging.  

We also spent time on pushing code back into OpenStack for API compatibility; we do a lot of work on AWS EC2 API and we recently announced that we are providing a set of APIs that are compatible with Google Compute Engine. Now people have a choice when they use OpenStack compute project Nova, whether they want to use the OpenStack native API, the AWS API or the GCE API.

#6 Takeaway:  Early adopters such as the finance sector are embracing OpenStack, businesses with less sophisticated IT needs might jump in later

Rafael: Randy, we talked very briefly about market adoption earlier. Let’s dwell a bit more on that. Who are the early adopters and do you see signs of OpenStack going mainstream?

Randy: Cloud computing is a new paradigm in cloud computing which is driven by large scale web companies. When you look Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter data centers: They don’t build up systems that look like traditional enterprise data centers.

OpenStack will be broadly adopted by the enterprise over time. If you look at other open source projects such as Hadoop … it gives the average enterprise a competitiveness that Google previously had with MapReduce. Many companies are comfortable with Hadoop already, and I believe the same will happen with OpenStack over time.

In general, we see two sets of customers. You have companies that see IT as a competitive advantage. They will refresh their datacenter infrastructure over the next 5 to 10 years, and they will embrace models such as OpenStack and Hadoop. Financial services companies are already very much involved with both open source projects. Usually they are a good indicator for other industries to follow later.

And then you have companies for which IT is not a significant competitive advantage, such as shipping, and logistics … they are just tracking where their ships or containers are and they don’t have significant need for sophisticated IT solutions. I think that over time those companies might adopt public clouds designed to run their workloads.

#7 Takeaway: Getting the software & solutions provider DNA into Dell is crucial for the future

Rafael: Last question, Randy. How do you view Dell in the OpenStack game?

Randy: We are currently in the middle of a fundamental change in IT, which can be compared to the transition from mainframe to enterprise computing. A lot of the mainframe companies didn’t survive. Those who did like IBM took a very close look at emerging technologies, and they changed their business model.

Dell is making a lot of changes in order to become a software and solution company. I think being a solution provider is the only way for a company like Dell, which is traditionally a hardware supplier, to survive in the future.

All the right moves have been made at Dell, and it’s more a question of execution: How do you get the software DNA into Dell? How do you get system thinking DNA into the business? It’s all about finding answers to those questions.

Rafael: Thank you very much for this interview, Randy.

Randy: You’re welcome!

Resources

Cloudscaling

Company website: http://www.cloudscaling.com/

Company blog: http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/randybias

Feedback

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com