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OpenStack is a cloud operating system that
controls large pools of computers, storage, and networking resources throughout
a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control
while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
About OpenStack
OpenStack is a cloud
operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking
resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives
administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources
through a web interface.
OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other
instances which handle different tasks for managing a cloud environment on the
fly. It makes horizontal scaling easy, which means that tasks which benefit
from running concurrently can easily serve more or less users on the fly by
just spinning up more instances.
For example, a mobile
application which needs to communicate with a remote server might be able to
divide the work of communicating with each user across many different
instances, all communicating with one another but scaling quickly and easily as
the application gains more users.
And most importantly,
OpenStack is open source software, which means that anyone who
chooses to can access the source code, make any changes or modifications they
need, and freely share these changes back out to the community at large. It
also means that OpenStack has the benefit of thousands of developers all over
the world working in tandem to develop the strongest, most robust, and most
secure product that they can.
Who uses OpenStack?
P Corporations
P Service providers
P VARS
P SMBs
P Researchers
P Global data centers looking to deploy large-scale cloud
deployments for private or public clouds leveraging the support and resulting
technology of a global open source community.
How is OpenStack used in a cloud environment?
The cloud is all about
providing computing for end users in a remote environment, where the actual
software runs as a service on reliable and scalable servers rather than on each
end users computer.
Cloud computing can refer to a lot of different things, but
typically the industry talks about running different items "as a
service"—software, platforms, and infrastructure. OpenStack falls into the
latter category and is considered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Is OpenStack Ready For Production?
Though
OpenStack still lacks the polish of competitive approaches, it is sufficiently
rich in its service offerings and most of the core components are stable for
production environments. Moving to OpenStack is now about taking a
calculated risk.
Vendors
like Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis, OpsCode, Persistent, have launched testing
tools and programming toolkits to make OpenStack deployment and programming
relatively painless. You need Linux system administration skills and might need
some beginner scripting skills, but the tutorials are easy to follow – you can
deploy OpenStack in a multi-node environment in a matter of hours.
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Are
there issues with release rollouts? Yes,
but the issues are marginal compared to the situation in 2012 or 2013.
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Are
the data models across L2 and L3 networking layers perfect? No, but they are on the right track and there is better
commitment from vendors with skin in the game. The current design is good
enough to interoperate with existing networking topologies.
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Is
there any coolness to the platform? Absolutely
– look at Heat for orchestration and Ceilometer for metering. These are value
added services, going beyond basic Compute/Network/Storage services.
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Are
consulting and support services available? Yes, and growing. Vendors like Mirantis, MetaCloud, and Persistent are
deploying OpenStack and offering development services for their customers.