RafStack: Rafael's OpenStack Blog

Dell: Tell us about yourself and what you are doing?

Anne Gentle: I’m Anne Gentle, I work at Rackspace and I like to think of the title, Content Stacker, which basically means that I work on the documentation for OpenStack  docs.openstack.org, api.openstack.org. I try to maintain that and keep it going with volunteers.

Q: How can someone become a volunteer?

A: We have active technical contributors in Openstack. OpenStack is open source cloud computing, so we are trying to build this massive structure of projects and OpenStack documentation and we invite people to submit a patch just like code. It is an interesting way of doing documentation, I am really interested in collaborative documentation.  I’ve been a tech-writer for a lot of years now, but I have always been drawn to new methods, new techniques, new processes. The one I am really interested in right now is collaborative authoring and authoring out on the social web where people have expectations for content nowadays that you should be able to interact with it, you should be able to comment on it, and most likely you probably want to edit it, too. That’s what we do with OpenStack docs, they are open source all the way down to the fonts that they are published, and anybody can contribute.

Q: You just recently published a book, can you tell us a little bit about that?

A: One of the most interesting techniques that I found in open source documentation is something called a Book Sprint. You gather together a group of collaborators and we run in a Book Sprint facilitator Adam Hyde who has been doing about 55 of these. I have participated with Adam on about three Book Sprints and so I knew that I wanted him to facilitate because I had seen him succeed. I also had a core group of people who are operating OpenStack clouds who could also write; great combo right? We put together a proposal and the OpenStack Foundation funded us to buy plane tickets for guys from Canada, Australia, from across the USA and to come together in Austin, Texas. We wrote the operation guide in five days as a collaborative group. It was amazing. What that really means is that we had an outline going in but that doesn’t mean we stuck to that outline right away but these guys knew each other and we had talked a lot beforehand about what we wanted the book to be, who we wanted to write for, what we expected out of it in the end, so we really wrote for three days, maybe three and a half and edited for a day and a half and had a book.

Q: Where can you get that book?

A: You go to docs.openstack.org/ops, it’s the ops guide and you can actually purchase a dead-tree copy from lulu.com.  It should actually ironically also be out on Amazon soon.

Q: Thank you very much, Anne.

A: Thank you!

Resources

Twitter @annegentle

Anne’s Blog JustWriteClick

Anne at OpenStack

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

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and SUSE’s engagement in the community - from Alan Clark, Chairman of the Open Stack Board and Director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE. 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 aims to deliver the industry’s best open source cloud software

Rafael: Can you give a brief overview over where OpenStack is now?

Alan: The foundation exists to create a ubiquitous cloud platform. We want to deliver the best open source cloud software out there. I think we are doing a great job with that. I was looking at the latest data, and there has been over 3,000 patches in the last quarter submitted to OpenStack. That’s a lot of work that the community is putting in. We’ve got around 800 contributors, we’re averaging about 200 contributors a month participating in the project, and we’re way over 7,000 members in the community.

A priority that we’ve been working on is accelerating the adoption of OpenStack and getting recognition for those that have already implemented after trying OpenStack in their environments. One of the first things we did last fall was to create the user group. It’s not just another user group, we’re actually getting them involved to the provide feedback into the development of the software. Lastly, we are making efforts to educate educating our ecosystem, so people know what the different components of the software do, how they can install, administer, do updates and so forth.

#2 Takeaway: It’s tough to compete with a consortium of 150 enterprises backing OpenStack

Rafael: OpenStack aims to be an alternative to Amazon and to VMware. Both are fully operational businesses at a billion-dollar scale, whereas OpenStack is in a proof-of-concept phase. How does the OpenStack community intend to close that gap?

Alan: First, there are lot of companies that have already deployed OpenStack or using it in their businesses day-to-day, and they are not small businesses. If you look at the case studies that have been put out - AT&T, Rackspace, eBay and others, those are big companies and they are using OpenStack successfully. We need to educate on that, and I think we’re pretty weak in the area of getting that news out.

Thinking about the number of companies and number of people that are involved, we get a community of over 7,000 members. We’ve got over 800 developers working on this cloud and over 150 companies that are involved.  VMware and Amazon are essentially competing with a consortium of 150 companies. That’s tough, that’s really tough. Although I think it’s not entirely fair to characterize VMware as competing because they’re actually a member of the OpenStack community.

#3 Takeaway: Billions of smart sensors everywhere – in the future, cloud computing might propel an ecosystem of new services

Rafael: How do you envision the cloud computing industry in five years? What will be different compared to now?

Alan: It’s very young technology, and I believe that cloud computing is going to look very different in the next 5 to 8 years. We’re going to have billions of smart sensors everywhere all over the world, for example at your home, where they are going to keep track of electricity you’re using, whether your securities are on or off etc. All that data is going to turn into services. Instead of reactive services they’re going to become proactive, they will require a lot of active computing, database processing and so forth. Those are going to create new, different and very exciting services over the next four or five years.

Ideally, much of that is going to be done in cloud because it’s going to have to be extremely elastic, very flexible - ebb and flow like. Cloud computing is a very natural fit for those. So I believe cloud is going to have to transform in order to fit those types of services.

#4 Takeaway: SUSE Cloud is a complete OpenStack implementation tied with SUSE Linux Enterprise

Rafael: How do you position SUSE within the OpenStack ecosystem?

Alan: SUSE focuses on the enterprise environment, and we’ve been shipping a product called SUSE Cloud.  It is the complete implementation of OpenStack tied with SUSE Linux Enterprise. The reasons why SUSE picked OpenStack is the robustness of the community as well as customers’ feedback. SUSE’s decision is based on customer demand, strength, vibrancy and innovative nature of the OpenStack project, and the track record as well as the ability of the community to deliver software.

Rafael: Thank you very much, Alan!

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and Cisco’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 might turn into a multi-billion dollar ecosystem

Rafael: OpenStack claims to be an alternative to Amazon’s public cloud and VMware’s private cloud offering. Both are multi-billion dollar businesses whereas the vast majority of OpenStack related projects are still in a proof of concept phase. How is OpenStack going to catch up?

Lew:  I think that’s simply a matter of time and maturation. I am very bullish and believe we will start to see the emergence of a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of companies that are building, deploying, servicing, supporting and running services on top of OpenStack. The IT industry has recognized that we will advance cloud computing much further and much more rapidly by working together on an open source cloud platform such as OpenStack.  And it is clear this is sorely needed in the market.

#2 Takeaway: It’s all about simultaneously driving both innovation and improvements for  production deployments of OpenStack

Rafael: What are the challenges ahead of the OpenStack community?

Lew:  The main challenges that I see are in keeping the technical excellence and innovation in the forefront while maturing as a production ready system. Commercial software companies do a very good job at productization, QA, and technical support so that their customers may bring their products into production. I think we are already seeing the OpenStack community take on some of these issues:  how do you easily install it, how do you easily operate and manage OpenStack as a running system?

#3 Takeaway: Walk your talk – Cisco is using OpenStack internally in various ways

Rafael:  What is Cisco’s experience with OpenStack and how are you guys utilising OpenStack?

Lew: OpenStack is being used internally in a number of different areas. At WebEx, we are running OpenStack in production at several of our data centers as the platform for rolling out  new applications and services.  Our OpenStack engineering team therefore works very closely with the WebEx operations team since I sincerely believe it’s almost impossible to develop good software without running it yourself in production.  There are additional efforts within our IT organisation to roll out an internal OpenStack cloud for use by our engineers for software development, testing, and simulation.

In terms of Cisco’s code contributions to OpenStack,  given our area of expertise in networking, we are particularly focused on enhancing OpenStack’s Quantum network service to meet a broader range of advanced network centric applications.

This effort has led us to work with several of our leading service provider customers on their OpenStack deployment. It’s been rewarding to see the great interest in OpenStack by many leading service providers as they start to plan out their next generation systems, recognizing that cloud platforms are going to be the way they want to roll out their new services.

I think there is now widespread agreement upon in the industry that cloud computing has clearly proven to be the fastest way to develop and deploy applications. Your basic IaaS is a very powerful concept – the application development team doesn’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure when they’re building or deploying an application.  Some of the service providers we are working with are therefore deploying OpenStack across their data centers not to become public cloud providers but rather to deliver their core services to customers.

#4 Takeaway: OpenStack is moving towards enterprise ready cloud – with Firewalls as a Service, Load Balancing as a Service …

An interesting OpenStack use case is to allow IT to develop and deploy traditional network functions as services integrated into OpenStack.  Think of  Firewall as a Service, Load Balancing as a Service, Monitoring as a Service, Security as a Service …and have the same kind of elasticity that you have in traditional web applications.  In the community we’re already making progress in this area.  This is further enabled in large part by another trend in networking: software defined networking. SDN APIs, operating at the level just below OpenStack Quantum  provide greater control over provisioning, allocation of resources, and retrieval of system information so these systems can be dynamically and elastically scaled through software.  SDN and OpenStack working at different layers but in concert with each other, provide much more capabilities than we actually envisioned earlier on in cloud computing.

#5 Takeaway: OpenStack is transitioning from hype to providing real value

Rafael: What is your view on OpenStack adoption?  Do you see any patterns in the way OpenStack is being adopted?

Lew: One of the things I learned at Sun Microsystems was that you need to be careful about the so-called hype cycle.  People initially thought of Java as well, … the next cure for cancer (laughs).  When that didn’t happen, they said Java was dead. Although the hype cycle may take off very, very quickly, you need to let it settle down, before people start to see the real value in a technology.  In the case of the Java platform, despite it’s enormous early overhyping, it nonetheless has become so widespread in the data center that today it’s considered legacy. With OpenStack we are already seeing the hype subsiding and a realistic view taking hold.  Many organizations are now asking the practical questions: “How does OpenStack apply to my situation? Should OpenStack be the foundational piece of my next generation data center strategy?”  People are running pilots and doing their own evaluations.

Related to this, Geoffrey Moore has been talking about an expected shift in IT from “systems of record” to “systems of engagement.” Systems of record are what we traditionally think of as being handled by IT:  ERP, financial, and HR transactional systems, e.g. traditional kind of business systems. These are fairly static, since you don’t often need to double your employee base or change the fundamentals of accounting over night. Systems of engagement, however, are partner, customer, or supplier facing systems. You have many more customers, partners, or suppliers than you have employees. These systems need to be much more dynamic in how they respond to changing needs, they might be seasonal and they need to be able to adapt much more quickly to changes in the marketplace.  Systems of engagements therefore are ideally suited for deployment on a cloud platform with it’s elasticity, rapid deployment, and self-service capabilities.

These characteristics line up very well with the kind of a cloud platform that OpenStack represents. As businesses start considering how they are going to engage more directly with their customers, start running big data and analytics to learn a lot more about their customers from their interactions with them,  a virtuous cycle is created between customer awareness, big data analytics and cloud computing.  OpenStack may therefore take on a central role in these future systems of engagement.

#6 Takeaway: Hardware manufacturers are responding to a need for programmatic control over infrastructure by opening up their interfaces

Rafael:  How do you think will OpenStack and cloud in general influence hardware providers?

Lew:  There is a need for more and better programmatic control over infrastructure. I think hardware manufacturers are responding by opening up interfaces. At Cisco we are making all of our interfaces open, so that these can be addressed by software.

I sometimes get asked: “Well then, isn’t cloud computing going to commoditize infrastructure?” I don’t think so. There’s always this synergistic relationship between hardware and software, and with a service like OpenStack Quantum, we now have a way for applications to make requests of the underlying infrastructure, which is then most easily accomplished when the infrastructure exposes software API’s. Applications and infrastructure working together deliver the best user experience.

#7 Takeaway: Application developers are welcome as participants – in order to better understand their needs and build those into OpenStack

Rafael:  Are there any contributors that you are missing in the OpenStack community?

Lew:  I think what we’re looking for particularly in this next year is to expand the OpenStack ecosystem to attract new software application and tools companies to build on top of the OpenStack platform.   While they may not be direct contributors to the platform itself, it is critically important that we can understand their requirements. So I think you’ll start to see concerted efforts being made to reach out to the application developer community to attract a growing set of apps and services running on top of OpenStack. In the end, it’s always the Apps that matter.

Rafael: Thank you very much, Lew.

Lew: You’re welcome.

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 Piston Cloud Computing’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!

Rafael: How do you envision OpenStack over the next 2 to 3 years?

Josh: OpenStack is the future of the datacenter. It’s the right metaphor for managing IT resources for the next 10 to 20 years. OpenStack’s vision should really be … and in fact is … to do a great job of abstracting and managing IT resources in compute, networking and storage, and then supporting an ecosystem of additional components like Database as a Service (DaaS) or Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS) that can be part of OpenStack but not part of OpenStack core … in the same sense that Linux is the kernel and a Linux distribution is the kernel plus a set of userspace packages.

#1 Takeaway: OpenStack is moving forward at warp speed, significantly expanding its aaS-is capabilities

Rafael: What are the key accomplishments in OpenStack and what still needs to be worked on?

Josh: That’s an interesting question. When we launched OpenStack I had a five-year roadmap on the NASA side of what we wanted to build next. We have gone through a lot of that roadmap in just two years. Quantum was definitely a huge milestone. What Nova network started out as was a very primitive approach … a barely good enough virtual networking. What we have now is an API defined ecosystem of SDN solutions. We really have every flavor of software defined networking from Nicira, Cisco, PLUMgrid, Big Switch, Midokura etc. Everyone has got a Quantum plug-in that delivers a different kind of SDN solution. On the networking side, Quantum has made OpenStack state-of-the-art in comparison to other infrastructure offerings.

With Cinder in the last release we now have an abstraction of Block Storage as a Service (BSaaS) that supports not just distributed storage solutions like Ceph or Gluster, but existing hardware such as EMC, NetApp or HP. Cinder is actually defining a totally new way of thinking about storage abstraction.

The last thing that I am really proud of is the work that a number of teams have done around bare metal provisioning. It’s really powerful because it gets away from this idea that cloud is about virtualization and hypervisors. Cloud is really about resource pools and the abstraction and self-service delivery of those resource pools. To the user it doesn’t matter whether there is a hypervisor or not. What they want is a run-time environment for their processes and applications.

Those are the milestones that put OpenStack beyond just best-in-breed, but in a class by itself on the technology side.

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.

#2 Takeaway: The ecosystem around OpenStack can be bucketed into distros vs. products, mature vs. immature products (with and without lifecycle in mind) and public vs. private cloud offerings

Rafael: Josh, can you help me understand the distribution ecosystem around OpenStack? How would you bucket the solutions people can find in the marketplace?

Josh: I would split them on two axes.

The first axis would be distribution versus product, and that’s a tricky one because the products have also been called distributions. We just recently started making this distinction. Traditionally a distribution is a collection of packages, and the expectation with the product is that it’s somewhat turn-key. What we sell in (Piston) Enterprise OpenStack is definitely a product. The Ubuntu Cloud is much more of a traditional distribution in the sense that it is a collection of packages. Not even Canonical says you can download and install that. They sell professional services and packages called Jumpstart, an intended week-long process to get you up and running.

Mirantis is doing the same thing. They sell professional services on top of that Ubuntu package. I think RedHat and SUSE are really following the Ubuntu model. They make all the OpenStack packages available, but they haven’t really made it opinionated.

On the opinionated side - the other axis - there are folks who are building software for service providers versus those who are building software for private clouds. Cloudscaling is definitely on the service provider side. We are definitely on the enterprise or private cloud side. The emphasis is how the system is configured, whether it supports lots of hypervisors or simply one really well, supports different storage backends and different Cinder drivers or whether it bundles one solution for that. That level of opinionatedness is part of how we see it being a product instead of a distribution.

I guess the question that all of these products are trying to answer is: “How much control do your people want versus how well do they want it to work and be reliable?”

If I were to be so bold to say: There are mature products and immature ones. The mature products are the ones that have lifecycle in mind. There is a way to do upgrades and updates without a ridiculous amount of downtime and without ridiculous amounts of manual intervention. This is something we built from day one in order to be able to do upgrades with zero downtime and zero administrative involvement.

In fact, upgrading the cloud is really a much more drastic event than upgrading an operating system. You’re upgrading a whole datacenter, especially when you take advantage of software defined networking or your virtualized storage. They have SLAs that are a lot higher than you would expect for a single server.

That’s why the term “distribution” has been used by operating system vendors to describe their product. The Canonicals, RedHats and SUSEs understand the “one server at time” collection of packages. But I think it’s more the IBMs, Dells and HPs who really understand larger distributed systems and the planning, processes and orchestration that goes into managing and upgrading the entire system as opposed to a single server.

#3 Takeaway: Piston Cloud Computing offering Enterprise OpenStack is a private cloud solution providing a turn-key user experience

Rafael: Let’s talk a bit more about OpenStack raw versus Piston Enterprise OpenStack, which is the Piston Cloud Computing product. What is unique about it, and how are you positioning your product?

Josh: Piston Enterprise OpenStack is very opinionated software. The big difference with Piston Enterprise OpenStack: It’s turnkey. From the bare metal up to the operating system, the hypervisor, the distributed storage framework, master election, high availability services and all of OpenStack. It includes update services that I mentioned before, that allow you to upgrade the entire cloud without turning VMs off. It’s an enterprise private cloud solution as opposed to a service provider solution. The thinking out there today is that a VM in a cloud is a transient thing and you should build your application to expect that the VMs go away. That’s what Amazon does. They have a zero uptime SLA on VMs. It’s not what we do. I don’t think it’s inherent in cloud, but it is inherent in lazy IT architecture. Piston Enterprise OpenStack delivers highly available VMs in storage, and they are even available through an upgrade and update process. In order to do that we’ve built a number of components that are not open source and we license some technology on the hypervisor side to support true live migration to support memory oversubscription and to deliver scale out experience so that when folks want to expand the amount of capacity in their cloud they can add additional servers and not manually think about rebalancing of the loads. Most of what Piston Enterprise OpenStack has that folks are really excited about are these enterprise ideas around availability… it just works, it stays up and it’s a lot simpler to administer.

It’s ironic that we usually think that we are selling software and the customer often thinks that they are buying support. The upgrade service and the security update service that we provide, and frankly the fact that we answer the phone 24/7 - that’s a lot of what our customers are buying. That’s the value that they are getting out of working with us. We do obviously do the integration work I mentioned where folks that need OpenStack to connect to other systems they have in their datacenter are serviced.

We’ve worked very hard to build the technologies that work under the hood to make OpenStack better. We don’t ever change OpenStack in our product. If we are going to improve OpenStack, we do that in the open source community. Historically we have done a lot of contributions to Cinder and to Nova core. We also did a lot of work to support Cloud Foundry as a PaaS solution. This is part of our interoperability story: If it’s going to touch the APIs or if it’s going to affect the user experience in the cloud, it has to be in OpenStack.

#4 Takeaway: Government agencies, public cloud providers, financial services, life sciences … OpenStack thrives on a very diverse user community

Rafael: Who are the early adopters and do you see OpenStack going main stream?

Josh: Main stream … absolutely.  OpenStack has been adopted by three very different communities: There is the service provider community, including The Rackspaces, the Dreamhosts etc. … those folks who are running public clouds. They led OpenStack because it gives them a competitive advantage. I don’t think of them as being mainstream, I think we will see gradually more and more folks using those platforms, in fact not even realizing it’s OpenStack. It starts to become more and more ubiquitous.

The second is the academic community, including CERN, NeCTAR, the French government etc. I think those folks are particularly interesting because they help drive requirements, help us understand what else we need OpenStack to doand represent really large scale deployments. But they are not where the business ecosystem happens; they are not by-and-large where commercial dollars are to be made.

That third category is large private clouds. By large I mean an organization that needs to have a few dozen physical servers as a private cloud in order for the economics to really make sense. The break-even point for a mid-sized to large enterprise to benefit from cloud is a minimum of a couple of racks of gear.  The folks we’re are seeing as early adopters are the ones who have this economic incentive to go to cloud and who for security or performance reasons can’t take advantage of public clouds.

Our target has always been financial services, governments and life sciences. Weirdly enough we do see governments as early adopters. That may be because of the work we did for NASA. We blazed the trail for government into cloud.  But it’s bizarre because they are interested; they are very early adopters by government standards, but that still means their procurement cycle is two years long. I am not hearing of many OpenStack deployments in government, simply because in their POC phase it can take a year or two to close out.

What’s interesting on the financial services side is that OpenStack adoption is not happening at the business unit level, nor is it happening one division at a time. It’s a major strategic initiative for these larger organizations, and it has been driven by the CIOs and CTOs. It’s been driven by them wanting to be an internal service provider to their business units. But that level of strategic decision means that they are cautious, so there are long POCs and they will remain in that phase for a while.

But on the biotech and life science side, I think it’s that they don’t have a choice when you take a look at the cost of a super computer versus the cost of a private cloud. They need to get these kinds of commodity solutions, they need to be able to buy a Dell C6220, lots of direct attached storage and a lot of commodity 10 Gb switching from the Dell Force10 portfolio for example. They also need to pull together a solution that gives them the capabilities they need to handle enormous amount of data. They don’t have the budget anymore to do this with traditional super computing so they need to get more value out of their dollars.

#5 Takeaway: Dell is viewed as an engaged community member with a clear willingness to help OpenStack suceed

Rafael: Last question, Josh. How do you view Dell as a member of the OpenStack community?

Josh: I will tell you a story. We were at VMworld as a sponsor, as part of our partnership with VMware originally around Cloud Foundry and more broadly around OpenStack. We won Best of VMworld for private cloud computing technology, which was bizarre and surprising because we are an OpenStack company presenting at VMworld. And this was before VMware joined OpenStack.

Shortly after it was announced that we won this award, Michael Dell came by our booth … with no entourage. He hung around and chatted with me and some of my team members for about ten minutes, and I congratulated him on rationalizing Dell’s cloud computing strategy. Because at that point it was clear Dell was going to build a public cloud using OpenStack, and they would sell their private cloud using OpenStack … and they have done I think seven partnerships so far in OpenStack. First with Rackspace and Equinix, then Mirantis. They also just recently announced a collaboration with Morphlabs.

There are two or three interesting things that Dell has done. They keep showing up. They are always there and they are always supportive. They are an open source contributor, and I think that was tough for Dell initially as they tried to stake out something they could own: “Hey, we’ve got Crowbar and this is our thing …” Unfortunately, the space for OpenStack installers just got really crowded and noisy pretty quick including Chef recipes from two or three different teams, Puppet recipes etc. Crowbar I think does some things in an interesting manner, but my take was: It was really a tool for very talented administrators to use, rather than intended to replace those very talented administrators.

What I have seen now is Dell making a very concerted effort under Nnamdi Orakwue’s team to engage with OpenStack on all fronts, in a way that makes sense. I think that’s a tough process for Dell to go through because there are now five teams engaged with OpenStack in different ways, but certainly as a hardware vendor they have been great to work with. As a community partner they are willing to dive in and contribute. As board members, John Igoe and Rob Hirschfeld are fantastic and I really appreciate having them there.  I think at the highest level (from Michael Dell) Dell really cares about OpenStack’s future and Dell is doing the right thing about OpenStack.

Their commercial strategy for OpenStack may be very confusing. It’s still confusing to me, but I have never doubted that Dell wanted OpenStack to succeed. We certainly have other large hardware vendors involved in OpenStack whose commercial agendas are way more clear, but their relationship with the community is a little bit more hazy.

Rafael: Thank you very much for these answers, Josh!

Josh: You’re welcome.

Resources

Piston Cloud: http://www.pistoncloud.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jmckenty

Feedback

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Rafael: Can you give us an overview over your trainings? What’s your offering?

David: About a year ago, we announced our 2-day Bootcamps for OpenStack program, to get people deep fast on OpenStack. Since then, more than 250 engineers have been trained through our Boot Camps. We offer them in public monthly, so developers and engineers learn about the open source cloud operating system that has rocketed to popularity throughout the industry. We also offer them as private on-site training for companies that want a dedicated training.

David: Since there’s a lot of hype around OpenStack, we wanted to avoid something that was all theory. So our instructors are Mirantis engineers who are active code committers to the OpenStack project and also consult for some of the most notable companies using OpenStack today – including PayPal, The Gap, AT&T, WebEx, HP, Dell and NASA. We developed the course content based on our experiences of real-world implementations of OpenStack; we feature lectures, hands-on labs, and one-to-one coaching. Upon successful completion, students are able to stand up and trouble-shoot an OpenStack cloud.

David: The high demand for the Mirantis training is more evidence of the growing adoption of OpenStack and the need for skilled engineering talent and expertise in OpenStack. Typical students are developers and systems administrators and IT professionals from SaaS vendors, service providers, enterprise IT … everyone who needs to build practical skills to put harness OpenStack’s advantages to their cloud effort.

We expect attendees to be comfortable with Linux CLI, have a good understanding of virtualization and hypervisors, and have some experience with Linux networking.

Rafael: Which are the most popular topics around OpenStack?

David: Our goal with the Boot camp is to cover the information you need to get started on an OpenStack cloud deployment. It includes overviews of OpenStack and OpenStack Networking, use cases, basic operating and deployment principles, cloud usage patterns, Swift Object Storage, OpenStack in production, and advanced topics such as software defined networking, deployment and issues workshops, and comparing VMware and OpenStack. We provide each student with a high-powered laptop, and then network them all together as a ‘tabletop cloud’.  SDN – with a view of networking before and after it – is an especially popular topic.

By “cover”, I don’t mean just death by slideware; about 50% of the class is labs and discussion. This is stuff you have to learn by doing it, and we have designed our labs to put that understanding to the test. For example, we have a break/fix session where the instructor will introduce some kind of flaw into the cloud that students have built earlier in the day, and pit them against one another to see who can troubleshoot the problem first. Because our instructors learned the technology the hard way – deploying OpenStack in successive releases dating as far back as Cactus – they are also well versed in what works and what doesn’t work yet.

Rafael: How can people register for trainings / keep up to date on upcoming trainings?

David: Register for the February 21-22 and March 20-21 Bootcamps for OpenStack at http://www.mirantis.com/training/. There’s another session in March listed there as well; we typically hold them each month in Mountain View, CA. It’s important to note that these public Bootcamps are so popular that they usually sell out well in advance, The January Bootcamp was the tenth consecutive sold-out public session.

We also schedule special workshops during certain industry conferences. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve delivered the bootcamp format in on-site classes for more than a bunch of companies to train staff at their own location. Class descriptions and reviews from past class participants are at www.mirantis.com/training.

Rafael: Thank you, David!

David: You’re welcome.

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