Liberty, the 12th release of OpenStack, came out last week

With 1,933 individual contributors and 164 organizations contributing to the release, Liberty offers finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies such as containers in production environments ...

 

Quoting from its web-site:

“OpenStack Liberty, the 12th release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, offers unparalleled new functionality and enhancements. With the broadest support for popular data center technologies, OpenStack has become the integration engine for service providers and enterprises deploying cloud services.

With 1,933 individual contributors and 164 organizations contributing to the release, Liberty offers finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies such as containers in production environments”

 

Here you can see a short video explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7r2-p8Mki4?autoplay=1



And the press release is quoted below:
 

Newest OpenStack® Release Expands Services for Software-Defined Networking, Container Management and Large Deployments

AUSTIN, Texas // October 15, 2015 — Cloud builders, operators and users unwrap a lengthy wish list of new features and refinements today with the Liberty release of OpenStack, the 12th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. With the broadest support for popular data center technologies, OpenStack has become the integration engine for service providers and enterprises deploying cloud services.

 

Available for download today, OpenStack Liberty answers the requests of a diverse community of the software’s users, including finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies like containers in production environment.

 

Enhanced Manageability
Finer-grained access controls and simpler management features debut in Liberty. New capabilities like common library adoption and better configuration management have been added in direct response to the requests of OpenStack cloud operators. The new version also adds role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These controls allow operators to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.

 

Simplified Scalability
As the size and scope of production OpenStack deployments continue to grow—both public and private—users have asked for improved support for large deployments. In Liberty, these users gain performance and stability improvements that include the initial version of Nova Cells v2, which provides an updated model to support very large and multi-location compute deployments. Additionally, Liberty users will see improvements in the scalability and performance of the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s compute services.

 

Extensibility to Support New Technologies
OpenStack is a single, open source platform for management of the three major cloud compute technologies; virtual machines, containers and bare metal instances. The software also is a favorite platform for organizations implementing NFV (network functions virtualization) services in their networking topologies. Liberty advances the software’s capabilities in both areas with new features like an extensible Nova compute scheduler, a network Quality of Service (QoS) framework and enhanced LBaaS (load balancing as a service).

 

Liberty also brings the first full release of the Magnum containers management project. Out of the gate, Magnum supports popular container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum makes it easier to adopt container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.

 

The Heat orchestration project adds dozens of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capabilities in Liberty. Improvements in management and scale, including APIs to expose what resources and actions are available, all filtered by RBAC are included in the new release.

 

1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed to OpenStack Liberty through upstream code, reviews, documentation and internationalization efforts. The top code committers to the Liberty release were HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.

 

Focus on Core Services with Optional Capabilities
During the Liberty release cycle, the community shifted the way it organizes and recognizes upstream projects, which became known by community members as the “big tent.” Ultimately, the change allows the community to focus on a smaller set of stable core services, while encouraging more innovation and choice in the broader upstream ecosystem.

The core services, available in every OpenStack-Powered product or public cloud, center around compute (virtualization and bare metal), storage (block and object) and networking.

New projects added in the last six months provide optional capabilities for container management (supporting Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm) with Magnum, network orchestration with Astara, container networking with Kuryr, billing with CloudKitty and a Community App Catalog populated with many popular application templates. These new services join already recognized projects to support big data analysis, database cluster management, orchestration and more.

 

Supporting Quotes
“Liberty is a milestone release because it underscores the ability of a global, diverse community to agree on technical decisions, amend project governance in response to maturing software and the voice of the marketplace, then build and ship software that gives users and operators what they need. All of this happens in an open community where anyone can participate, giving rise to an extensible platform built to embrace technologies that work today and those on the horizon.”
— Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation

 

“We use OpenStack because it delivers the core services we need in a production cloud platform that can extend to new technologies like containers. The ability to embrace emerging technologies as an open community rather than going solo is a primary reason why we’re sold on OpenStack.”
— Lachlan Evenson, cloud platform engineering, Lithium Technologies

 

“OpenStack has emerged as an increasingly capable and widely deployed open cloud technology. The companies using it successfully are those that have done their research, engaged with the project’s community and deployed in manageable stages. We expect OpenStack-based service providers will outgrow the overall IaaS service provider market through 2019.”
— Al Sadowski, research director, 451 Research

 

“Notable Fortune 100 enterprises like BMW, Disney, and Wal-Mart have irrefutably proven that OpenStack is viable for production environments. These are regular companies, not firms that were born digital like Etsy, Facebook, and Netflix. OpenStack’s presence in the market is now accelerating, leveraging the success of these pioneers.”
— Lauren Nelson, senior analyst, Forrester Research, as written in “OpenStack Is Ready — Are You?,” a May 2015 report from Forrester Research.

Is the Operating System part of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in cloud computing?

I’ve recently debated about if Operating System (in a real Cloud Environment) is part, or not, of the IaaS, and therefore, if its control (management, monitoring and so on) is customer’s responsibility or provider’s.

 

On the one hand, according to the NIST definition of Cloud Computing (the most widely accepted, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing“, “Special Publication 800-145“) and quoting from it: “IaaS: “The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, network and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to able to deploy and run arbitrary software, wick can include operating system and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, bur has control over operating systems and deployed applications …”. So, puristically speaking, the Operating System is not part of IaaS, as it’s showed in the next picture emphasizing the control scope of the consumer and provider in an IaaS service:

 

  

On the other hand, in the practice some Cloud Providers, in their IaaS provision dashboards let you chose the operating system (“image”) to deploy in the Virtual Machine (VM) you provision. So they are responsible of guaranteeing the Operating System “image” is good; so in some way they have a partial responsibility on the Operating System level (crossing the border of the IaaS) but it’s only in the first deployment of the operating system in the VM; after then the customer gets the control of the operating System so he’s full responsible of it and software built up or installed on. This other picture shows this fuzzy border for the initial step in the VM provisioning responsibilities:

 

 

Note, of course, other (most) IaaS cloud providers let you to upload you own Operating System images, so they are responsible for providing you the VM on the hypervisor  (or container) chosen by them, but nothing else, matching the purist definition of IaaS. Note: this is the case of Tissat, we offer wide catalogue of operating system images but our Cloud Platform (called Nefeles, and based on OpenStack) let customer to upload its own images too.

 

Besides the first picture, the next one shows the PaaS and SaaS scope control of consumer and provider according to NIST definition:

 

 

 

Finally, the border between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, can be summarized in the following picture:

 

 

 

Or in a simplified way in this one:

 

 

CloudSpaces project gets the OCEAN’s Quality Open Cloud label

 

I’m proud to announce the R&D Project CloudSpaces, partially funded by FP7 Programme of the European Union, has obtained the Quality Check of the OCEAN  project.

 

   

As they say, only 20 over 74 open cloud projects in the OCD received an OCEAN Open Cloud label:

-  7 Open Cloud projects obtained the Quality Checked by OCEAN label 2014.

- 13 Open Cloud projects obtained the Reviewed by OCEAN label 2014.

 

The CloudSpaces project is been developed by a consortium integrated by 3 Universities: “Rovira i Virgili”, Eurecom (France), and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), and 3 Companies: EyeOs, NEC and, of course, TISSAT.

 

Besides, it should be remembered that CloudSpaces is the project where it’s been developed StackSync (a personal cloud software) that recently wined 3 “Software Libre 2014” open software awards (see my last post in 2014-nov-07).

 

Please let me partially quote its e-mail with more data about the OCEAN’s Open Cloud Quality label.

 

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Open Cloud Supporter,

I’m glad to inform you that your Cloud Project has been evaluated by the OCEAN project team (www.ocean-project.eu) and received the Quality Checked by OCEAN label.

 

The OCEAN Open Cloud labels recognize innovative assets, new concepts, architecture documentation and/or re-usable open source cloud components described in the Open Cloud Directory (OCD).

 

The Open Cloud Directory 2014 brochure contains a short description of your project. Included links and QR codes give access to project details such as technologies, licenses, classification, and quality reports about submitted open source codes.

 

Your OCEAN Open Cloud label offers several dissemination opportunities:

1- Your project is listed in the Open Cloud Directory Brochure – to be distributed at OpenStack Summit Paris and upcoming cloud events.

2- You can use the attached OCEAN Open Cloud label and place it on your website and documentation with a direct link to the Open Cloud Directory : http://www.ocdirectory.org/

3- Do not hesitate to mention your OCEAN Open Cloud label on social networks, in your dissemination deliverables and Press Releases.

 

Only 20 over 74 open cloud projects in the OCD received an OCEAN Open Cloud label:
-  7 Open Cloud projects obtained the Quality Checked by OCEAN label 2014
- 13 Open Cloud projects obtained the Reviewed by OCEAN label 2014

On behalf of the entire OCEAN project team, congratulations to your consortium!

StackSync has wined 3 “Software Libre 2014” awards

    

I’m proud to announce that StackSync (http://stacksync.org/), an open-source scalable software (for personal clouds built on OpenStack) developed jointly by the “Rovira i Virgili” University (Tarragona, Spain) and the company Tissat, inside the CloudSpaces Project that is partially funded by European Commission (under the FP7 R&D Programme), has got 3 “Software Libre” (free software) awards in the 2014 call (its 6^th edition). The “Software Libre” is an initiative of “PortalProgramas”.

StackSync has wined in the 3 categories it has competed:

- ESENCIAL PARA EMPRESAS (essential for companies)

- ESENCIAL PARA LA TECNOLOGÍA (essential for technology)

- MAYOR POTENCIAL DE CRECIMIENTO (bigger potential growing)

It that categories it competes against other famous software as, LibreOffice, Ubuntu, NetBeans, Gecos, QVD, and so on

More details here or clicking in the “GANADOR” word in the red label of the next award logos:

“Juno” release of OpenStack has just been delivered

This post is only to remember that last Friday (October the 17^th) the new version of OpenStack, named Juno, was released.

 

As Stefano Maffulli says in its e-mail to the OpenStack community, IT IS THE RESULT OF THE EFFORT OF 1.419 PERSONS, from 133 organizations, that contributed to its development. OpenStack Juno is tenth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds and it has 342 new features to support software development, big data analysis and application infrastructure at scale.

 

Let me make emphasis that in this new version, Sahara it’s completely integrated (it was in incubation in the previous vesion). Sahara is the Data Processing module based in Hadoop for Big Data processing suport, i.e. this module capabilities let automate provisioning and management of big data clusters using Hadoop and Spark. Big data analytics are a priority for many organizations and a popular use case for OpenStack, and this service lets OpenStack users provision needed resources more quickly.

 

Another significant advance is that the foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been consolidated in Juno, providing improved agility and efficiency in telco and service provider data centers.

 

Let me copy and mix from the Juno website and the Official Press Release for summarizing the main features (module by module):

• Compute (Nova). Operational updates to Compute include improvements for rescue mode that enable booting from alternate images with the attachment of all local disks. Also, per-network settings are now allowed by improved nova-network code; scheduling updates to support scheduling services and extensibility; and internationalization updates. Key drivers were added such as bare metal as a service (Ironic) and Docker support through StackForge. Additional improvements were made to support scheduling and live upgrades.
• Object Storage (Swift). Object Storage hit a major milestone this release cycle with the rollout of storage policies. Storage policies give users more control over cost and performance in terms of how they want to replicate and access data across different backends and geographical regions. Other new features include updated support for the Identity project (Keystone) and account to account copy feature rollout. Additional work on erasure coding within object storage continues and is expected sometime during the Kilo release cycle.
• Block Storage (Cinder). Block Storage added ten new storage backends this release and improved testing on third-party storage systems. Cinder v2 API integration into Nova was also completed this cycle. The block storage project continues to mature each cycle building out core functionality with a consistent contributor base.
• Networking (Neutron). Networking features support for IPv6 and better third-party driver testing to ensure consistency and reliability across network implementations. The release enables plug-ins for the back-end implementation of the OpenStack Networking API and blazes an initial path for migration from nova-network to Neutron. Supporting Layer 3 High Availability, the networking layer now allows a distributed operational mode.
• Dashboard (Horizon). Dashboard rolled out the ability to deploy Apache Hadoop clusters in seconds, giving users the ability to rapidly scale data sets based on a set of custom parameters. Additional improvements include extending the RBAC system to support OpenStack projects Compute, Networking, and Orchestration.
• Identity Service (Keystone). Federated authentication improvements allow users to access private and public OpenStack clouds with the same credentials. Keystone can be configured to use multiple identity backends, and integration with LDAP is much easier.
• Orchestration (Heat). In Juno, it is easier to roll back a failed deployment and ensure thorough cleanup. Also, administrators can delegate resource creation privileges to non-administrative users. Other improvements included implementation of new resource types and improved scalability.
• Telemetry (Ceilometer). Telemetry reported increases in performance this cycle as well as efficiency improvements including metering of some types of networking services such as load balancers, firewalls and VPNs as a service.
• Database Service (Trove). The database service went through its second release cycle in Juno delivering new options for MySQL replication, Mongo clustering, Postgres, and Couchbase. A new capability included in Juno allows users to manage relational database services in an OpenStack environment.
• Image Service (Glance). The Image Service introduced artifacts as a broader definition for images during Juno. Other key new features included asynchronous processing, a Metadata Definitions Catalog and restricted policies for downloading images.
• Data Processing (Sahara). The new data processing capability automates provisioning and management of big data clusters using Hadoop and Spark. Big data analytics are a priority for many organizations and a popular use case for OpenStack, and this service lets OpenStack users provision needed resources more quickly.

 

In Tissat we’ve been testing the last beta versions and they look great, and we are starting to plan the migration IN LIVE.

Yesterday VMware announced it own OpenStack distro

Due to last hard work weeks (even months) and further vacations period I’ve not been active in this blog, however the following news have made me change:

 

Yesterday VMware announced it own OpenStack distro.

Let me quote the original VMware’s advertisement (underlying, by my own criteria, some of the ideas):

 

Today (Aug 25, 2014) at VMworld 2014, VMware announced the following: VMware Integrated OpenStack

 

– VMware Integrated OpenStack is a new solution that will enable IT organizations to quickly and cost-effectively deliver developer-friendly OpenStack APIs and tools on top of their existing VMware infrastructure. The VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution will leverage VMware’s proven technologies for compute, network, storage and management to provide enterprise-class infrastructure that reduces CAPEX, operational expense (OPEX) and total cost of ownership for production-grade OpenStack deployments.

 

With the VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution, customers can quickly stand up a complete OpenStack cloud to provide API-driven infrastructure for internal developers, and to repatriate workloads from unmanageable and insecure public clouds. IT can manage and troubleshoot an OpenStack cloud with the same familiar VMware tools they already use every day, providing significant operational cost savings and faster time-to-value.

 

Read more about the forthcoming VMware Integrated OpenStack solution here.

Of course, VMware’s Integrated OpenStack doesn’t necessarily mean that VMware is pushing customers to use  OpenStack, as John Gilmartin, VP and GM of VMware’s software defined data center suite business unit, explained in an interview.

“Icehouse” release of OpenStack has just been delivered

This post is only to remember that, as foreseen, just a couple of days ago (Thursday, the 17^th) the new version of OpenStack, named Icehouse, was released.

 

As Stefano Maffulli says in its e-mail to the OpenStack community, IT IS THE RESULT OF THE EFFORT OF 1.202 PERSONS, from 120 organizations, that contributed to its development.

 

Approximately 350 new features has been added (rolling upgrades, federated identity, tighter platform integration, etc) , but in my opinion the most significant is that “OpenStack Database Service” (Trove), which was incubated during the Havana release cycle, is now available.

 

Other programs still in incubation (already developing during Icehouse) are Sahara (OpenStack Data Processing, i.e. to provision a Hadoop cluster on OpenStack), Ironic (OpenStack Bare Metal as a Service), Marconi (OpenStack Messaging) and, and we hope they go live in the next release of OpenStack, code-named Juno, foreseen in 6 month.

 

In Tissat we have been testing the last beta versions and they look great, and we are starting to plan the migration IN LIVE.

 

Quoted from the the official press release these are the main features (module by module):

• OpenStack Database Service (Trove): A new capability included in the integrated release allows users to manage relational database services in an OpenStack environment.
• OpenStack Compute (Nova): New support for rolling upgrades minimizes the impact to running workloads during the upgrade process. Testing requirements for third-party drivers have become more stringent, and scheduler performance is improved. Other enhancements include improved boot process reliability across platform services, new features exposed to end users via API updates (e.g., target machines by affinity) and more efficient access to the data layer to improve performance, especially at scale.
• OpenStack Object Storage (Swift): A major new feature is discoverability, which dramatically improves workflows and saves time by allowing users to ask any Object Storage cloud what capabilities are available via API call. A new replication process significantly improves performance, with the introduction of s-sync to more efficiently transport data.
• OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder): Enhancements have been added for backend migration with tiered storage environments, allowing for performance management in heterogeneous environments. Mandatory testing for external drivers now ensures a consistent user experience across storage platforms, and fully distributed services improve scalability.
• OpenStack Networking (Neutron): Tighter integration with OpenStack Compute improves performance of provisioning actions as well as consistency with bulk instance creation. Better functional testing for actions that require coordination between multiple services and third-party driver testing ensure consistency and reliability across network implementations.
• OpenStack Identity Service (Keystone): First iteration of federated authentication is now supported allowing users to access private and public OpenStack clouds with the same credentials.
• OpenStack Orchestration (Heat): Automated scaling of additional resources across the platform, including compute, storage and networking is now available. A new configuration API brings more lifecycle management for applications, and new capabilities are available to end-users that were previously limited to cloud administrators. Collaboration with OASIS resulted in the TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML v1.0, demonstrating how the feedback and expertise of hands-on OpenStack developers can dramatically improve the applicability of standards.
• OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer): Improved access to metering data used for automated actions or billing / chargeback purposes.
• OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon): Design is updated with new navigation and user experience improvements (e.g., in-line editing). The Dashboard is now available in 16 languages, including German, Serbian and Hindi added during this release cycle.

 

And these are other interesting links:

• The source code
• The Webinar: OpenStack Icehouse Release Update
• The release notes
• The Icehouse Activity Report
• The official press release

Virtualization vs. Cloud Computing (III): business differences, plus other technical ones, and conclusions

Once again let me start reminding that this post is referred to the scope and context defined in my first post of this series (titled “Virtualization vs Cloud Computing (I): what are we going to compare?”), although at the end of this post we’ll widen it.

 

Besides, as summary, in the two previous posts we concluded:

• Virtualization is an enabling technology for Cloud Computing, one of the building blocks used “generally” for building Cloud Computing solution (“generally” but not always, because nowadays Cloud is starting to use other technologies away from pure virtualized environments to offer  “Baremetal as a Services” …)
• The services provided by “Cloud Computing Management Environment” and by a “Virtualization Management Environment” ARE QUITE DIFFERENT IN HOW THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED: both the self service characteristic and location independence feature (in the sense of no location knowledge) are the main difference, but in some cases (depending on the platform) also massive scale out.

 

Going to the subject, another technological point of comparison is that Virtualization Management Environment (at the present almost none) does not offer to the user the knowledge in real time of how long it has been using the VM and other metrics of the service (“measured services” is a essential characteristic), or maybe the user can get that knowledge but not in a friendly way. The main reason for that is the different business model they were “initially” thought of:

• Virtualization was born to take advantage of unused resources in a physical machine, solving several problems that appeared in scale-out servers: different physical characteristics for different cluster subsets (after one or more expansions), coarse granularity in the resource assignment that led to unused resources, security issues when applications from competing companies were run on the same physical machine. However, although virtualization allows to take advantage of unused resources in a secure way, in the practice it let to traditional DataCenter Service provider to pass (or add) from a (physical) “Hosting” business model to a “Virtual Hosting” model with lower prices, but the billing model was the same: in general the customer is billed in the same way as for physical hosting: a monthly fixed rate where the cost is proportional to the power (performances) of VM and the associated resources it has contracted, but disregarding of the real usage (the user does) of the virtual machine.
• Cloud Computing was born to “allow” a real pay-per-use model. For this reason it’s as important the self-serving feature as the capability to turn on or off the VM whenever the customer wants, because (s)he doesn’t pay for the standstill period. About this subject, please note that the technological Cloud Computing concept only defines that the services must be metered (and that information must be continuously available for the customer), what allows the provider to bill for the real usage, but it’s not mandatory to do it.
• Of course, both business models mentioned above were the two extremes of a broad market and represent the “pure” business models, but today there are several intermediate hybrid business models: for example, cloud computing environment based model that offer discounts if you contract for long fixed period or that offer lower price-per-hour if you pay a monthly fee (one of the Amazon options) or pure technological Virtualization Management Environment that offer pay-per-use business model, and so on. AMAZON (the great Cloud innovator) is a good example of that: for example, “Reserved Instances” give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance (there are three Reserved Instance types: Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances, that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price), the also offer volume discounts or “Spot Instances”, and so on.

 

Finally, concerning to the comparison points in the initial (reduced) scope defined, new customers needs are emerging to deploy applications on your physical servers, as well as your virtual servers, but keeping all the cloud model advantages (and essential characteristics): that’s the case, for example, when your application requires physical servers, or your production environment is too performance sensitive to run in VMs. Actually you don’t need to have a virtualized environment to be considered a cloud environment: your “virtual” instance might be a “container” which is not virtualized but running on bare metal (just sharing it with other containers) or even running directly and using completely the bare metal: “containers”, as aforesaid, are considered by some authors as sort of virtualization; so let me present an example of the latter case: OpenStack is currently developing the new “Iron” module that it’ll provide “Baremetal as-a-Service”, so  it’ll be possible to use the same API and the same pipeline to build, test, and deploy applications on both virtual and physical machines. Therefore, cloud technology is starting to use other technologies away from pure paravirtualized environments.

 

We initially limited the scope of this comparison to “compute as a resource”, but if we slightly widen that context to include (as usual) any computing related resources, i.e, storage, and communications resources, then new differences arise (depending on the solution that was used for building both the Cloud Management Environment and the Virtualization Management Environment):

• Most (but not all) of Virtualization Management Environments offer only compute and block storage services, but usually they do not offer Object Storage as a Service; besides they use to offer “Storage Virtualization” (SV, i.e. capacity is separated from specific storage hardware resources) but don’t offer “Software Defined Storage” (SDS), that differs from the former (SV) because in the SDS not only capacity but also services are separated from the storage hardware.
• Moreover, and almost none of them (Virtualization Management Environments) offers communications management as a Services. I mean not only virtual networks, but also main communications devices provided as a service: router, firewallls, load balancers and so on. Moreover, the “Software Defined Networking” (SDN) it’s a technology that, as far as I now, is been currently used only in Cloud Computing Environments where this kind of services are starting to be offered. Of course, some Virtualization Environments offer this kind of communication services, but not in a self-service way and where you can self-define your internal communications layout and structure, and so on, e.g. as shown in the next picture (taken from the topology designed by a customer using the TISSAT’s Cloud Platform mounted on OpenStack):

TISSAT’s IaaS Cloud Platform

 

 

At the end of this 3 post series, as summary, three conclusions:

1. The technological concepts (virtualization and cloud computing) should not be confused with the pure business models they were initially intended for: virtual hosting (a fixed monthly rate lower that physical hosting) and pay-per-use (that some person call the Cloud Computing business model), respectively. And don’t forgot that at the present there are a lot of mixed business models disregarding the underlying technology.
2. Both virtualization and cloud computing allow you to do more with the hardware you have by maximizing the utilization of your computing resources (and therefore, if you are contracting the service you can expect lower expenses). However, although currently there is an inevitable connection between them, since the former (virtualization) is “generally” used to implement the latter (cloud), this connection could be broken soon with the arising of new technologies and innovations, and they are not exactly the same: BOTH ARE QUITE DIFFERENT IN HOW THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED (self service feature, no location knowledge, massive scale out, even metered service in some cases) and there are some technical differences between them. Additionally, depending on user’s needs one of them could be better or not: a lot of customers have enough with server virtualization, and it could even be the best solution for their needs; but in other cases cloud is the best solution for the customer’s needs, and no virtualization.
3. Although still circumscribed to IaaS (i.e. forgetting PaaS and Saas), when we widen the comparison scope to include (as usual) any computing related resources, (not only compute but also storage and communications resources), then new differences arise since, for example, communications related Services (routing, firewalls, load balancing, etc.) are seldom (or never) offered as a Service in Virtualized Management Environments (in a self-service way and where you can self-define your internal communications layout and structure, and so on, taking advantage of Software Defined Networking technology). Besides, another main difference is how the Storage as a Service is provided: in a Virtualization Environment use to be reduced to Block Storage, no including Object Storage (as Cloud Environments do), and provided as Storage Virtualization but not as Software Defined Storage.

Note: Please, let me add that  Tissat (the company I’m working for) is offering all this sort of real IaaS Cloud Services as well more traditional DataCenter services (such as housing, hosting, virtualized hosting, DRP, and so on) based on its Data Centers Federation (that includes Walhalla, a DC certified as Tier IV by The Uptime Institute)  and using different product and solutions (currently VmWare, OpenStack, and so on) and most of the ideas of this post series are extracted from that experience.

Virtualization vs. Cloud Computing (II): more technological differences

First of all, it is quite important to remember that this post is referred to the scope and context defined in my last post (titled “Virtualization vs Cloud Computing (I): what are we going to compare?”), where I defined Virtualization and Cloud Computing concepts used for this comparison; those definition could be others, of course, but then the conclusions will be others too, so due to its importance let me summarize them in the following points (if you need a more detailed explanation, please read my previous post):

• By “Virtualization” we are going to refer ONLY to the “Hardware virtualization”, i.e. the creation of a virtual machine (VM) that acts like a real computer with an operating system (quoted from wikipedia)
• In Cloud Computing we´ll use the most clear and currently accepted Definition: the NIST one that says: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” and consequently,  disregarding the Service Model (IaaS, PaaS or Saas) and the Deployment Model (Private, Community, Public or Hybrid), states 5 Essential Characteristics for a CloudComputing service:
  • On-demand self-service,
  • Broad network access,
  • Resource pooling (multi-tenant),
  • Rapid elasticity,
  • Measured service.
• Besides, to make the comparison possible we must focus ONLY in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and in this discussion we forget other cloud service models as PaaS and SaaS.
• Finally, as in the virtualization concept, to easy the comparison we ONLY speak about the “compute resource” inside the IaaS Cloud Computing concept.

 

In this context,  in the last post we saw how Virtualization is an enabling technology for Cloud, one of the building blocks used for Cloud Computing. Nevertheless, let me advance that at the end of this post will review and nuance this point because of both the recently arisen customer’s needs and the technological innovations.

 

Referring to the other essential characteristics defined by NIST for Cloud Computing, for example, “pure” Virtualization” itself does not provide the customer a self-service layer and without that layer you cannot deliver Compute as a Service, i.e. a self-serving model however is not an essential component of virtualization, as it is in cloud computing. The next picture (quadrant) shows, on one hand, the evolution of IT technology in the last 3 decades (roughly) starting in the top-left corner (maverick niche IT) when any company department provisioned itself any IT infrastructure it wanted (according to its selves criteria), to when the provision was controlled and the management was unified but any department had its own machines (bottom-left corner or “managed IT infrastructures”), to last decade when the IT were provisioned and managed by IT department and shared by all or several departments (using virtualization), to the current times of Cloud Computing; and on the other hand, it also shows how self-service is one of the differentiation between Virtualization and Cloud computing (Note: I’ve used this quadrant other times since I saw in some publication, but I cannot remember where, so I apologize but I cannot refer it; besides I recreate it, so something could be changed).

 

Break: In the above picture doesn’t appear the older times (lasting more than a decade) of mainframes, a realm where IBM was the king. In such environments the provision and management was controlled, and the infrastructures were shared, so it would be placed the same corner that virtualization, i.e. in the bottom right corner.  The transition from mainframes to the free-riders’ ”maverick niche IT” was due to several factors but, in my opinion, two were more significant: on one hand, the commercial labor of IBM competitors, as Digital, that offer to universities very low cost computers (as the VAX and PDP series of Digital) achieving that the computer sciences graduates wanted similar computers in his hew jobs, and on the other hand a disrupting technology as the emerging of PC (by IBM); both of them, among others fostered and fueled del “selfie” spirit (please, let me use this modern buzzword with a different meaning: the wish to be self-sufficient, as natural in human being) that boosts the gradual transition to the self-service dedicated infrastructures (i.e. from the bottom-right corner to the top-left one); and a last thought about this point: certainly Internet rising as well communications and other enterprise needs also contributed to this transition but, in my opinion, once the movement was already started.

 

Coming back to the self-service essential characteristic, some Virtualization Management Environments  include a self-serving component (but it’s not mandatory) as well as features to allow the customer to know how much usage it has made (metered services) and the resources are elastically provisioned and released (rapid elasticity). Once again, all this features are mandatory in the Cloud but they are optional in a “Virtualization Management Environments” since they are not intrinsic in the virtualization technology. In fact, a “Virtualization Management Environments” will become a Cloud Computing Environment if it meets all the 5 NIST essential characteristics, an evolution that, for example, VMware has been following these years … Given that in the enterprise market, VMware’s (ESX hypervisor and vSphere) virtualization management environment is king, let me analyze little deeper this last subject as an good example of this point:

• Although I’m a supporter of Open Source and therefore of OpenStack when speaking about Cloud, it must be recognized that VMware has a powerful suite of virtualization and cloud products. Concerning to this point of discussion, right now two products must be discerned: “vCenter” and “vCloud Director”:
• On one hand, vCenter is what manages your vSphere virtual infrastructure hosts, virtual machines, and virtual resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network), i.e. a pure virtualization management environment.
• On the other hand, vCloud Director (vCD) is at a higher level in the cloud infrastructure. It´s a software solution providing the interface, automation, and management feature set to allow enterprise and service providers to supply vSphere resources as a Web-based service, i.e. it takes advantages of vCenter to orchestrate the provisioning of Cloud resources by enabling self-service access to compute infrastructure through the abstraction of virtualized resources. In other words, it abstracts the virtualized resources to enable users to gain self-service access to them through a services catalogue. i.e. it provides the self-service portal that accepts user requests and translates them into tasks in the vSphere environment via the vCenter.
• In summary, vCenter is required to administer your virtual infrastructure but it doesn’t create a cloud. The first piece required to create your cloud is vCloud Director. vCloud Director will talk to your vCenter server/servers but certain tasks will have to be done first in vCenter, such as creating a HA/DRS cluster, configuring the distributed virtual switch, adding hosts, etc.
• Note: By the way, now that VMware has announced that it splits vCloud Director into vCenter and vCloud Automation Center (a product that is derived from VMware’s DynamicOps acquisition) and it also seems that capabilities like multi-tenancy management and self-provisioning would be pushed into vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), while constructs like the Virtual Data Center would fall into vCenter, everyone that relly wants a Cloud environment with VMware it shall to buy (or migrate) vCAC, a heavyweight software, much like an IT service management product, requiring deep integration with IT business processes and an ERP-like implementation scenario, since pure vCenter will keep lacking the cloud-like self-service feature.

 

However, THERE ARE STILL MORE DIFFERENCES because according to NIST (and it’s intrinsic to the Cloud Definition) the “Resource pooling (multi-tenant)” property implies “a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter)”. However, as you know, most of the “Virtualization Management Platform” let you choose in what physical machine your VM is going to run, o let you move your VM from a physical machine to another exact physical machine (chosen by the customer). In fact, some customers want (even need) such features, and that is one of the points that let know if the customer really wants or needs and Virtualization Environment or a real Cloud Computing Environment (for example, If you listen to your customer that he wants to move by himself its VM from one physical machine to another, he’s not specifying a Cloud environment, but a Virtualization Management Environment). This no location knowledge is also applied a other features as High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT) and so on: for example, in a Cloud Management Environment you can specify as much as a different “infrastructure area” (for example a different DataCentre, or something like) for locating the stand-by VM, however in a pure “Virtualization Management Environment” you’re able to choose the specific host (physical machine).

 

Moreover, and associated with the previous idea of no location knowledge, Cloud is intrinsically thought to massive scale out, i.e. without limit, and for physically (possibly in different places) distributed resources, but much of virtualization management environments are intended to manage a number reasonable (maybe big, but not enormous) of physical machines (hosts) and in most cases in the same emplacement.

 

Finally, as advanced at the beginning of this post, new customers needs are emerging to deploy applications on physical servers, instead of  virtual servers, but keeping all the cloud model advantages (and essential characteristics): that’s the case, for example, when your application requires physical servers, or your production environment is too performance sensitive to run in VMs. Actually you don’t need to have a virtualized environment to be considered a cloud environment: your “virtual” instance might be a “container” which is not virtualized but running on bare metal (just sharing it with other containers) or even running directly and using completely the bare metal: “containers”, as aforesaid, are considered by some authors as sort of virtualization, so let me expose an example of the second case: OpenStack is currently developing the new “Iron” module that it’ll provide “Baremetal as-a-Service”, so  it’ll be possible to use the same API and the same pipeline to build, test, and deploy applications on both virtual and physical machines. Therefore, cloud technology is starting to use other technologies away from pure paravirtualized environments.

 

So far, as consequence we’ve seen in the previous post and in the current one, we can conclude that:

• Virtualization is an enabling technology for Cloud Computing, one of the building blocks used “generally” for building Cloud Computing solution (“generally” but not always, because nowadays Cloud is starting to use other technologies away from pure virtualized environments to offer  “Baremetal as a Services” …)
• The services provided by “Cloud Computing Management Environment” and by a “Virtualization Management Environment” ARE QUITE DIFFERENT IN HOW THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED:
  • the self service characteristic is mandatory in Cloud, and optional in a virtualization environment.
  • the location independence features (in the sense of no location knowledge) is intrinsically essential in Cloud, however most of virtualization environment lets know or operate with the location of VM.
  • massive scale out is also inherent to Cloud Environments, but much Virtualization Management Environment are only not prepared for manage “enormous” quantities of machines distributed in different emplacements.

 

Next post, I finalize this comparison focusing in a couple of technological differences:

• The first one, “measured services”, in some way arise from the different business models that both, Virtualization and Cloud Computing, were INITIALLY intended for, and that will let me to compare those business models too.
• For the second one, we will widen lightly the comparison scope to include (as usual) any computing related resources, (not only but also storage, and communications resources), and then we’ll analyze new differences: for example communications related Services (routing, firewalls, load balancing, etc.) are seldom (or never) offered as a Service in Virtualized Management Environments (in a self-service way and where you can self-define your internal communications layout and structure, and so on).

 

Note: Please, let me add that Tissat (the company I’m working for) is offering real IaaS Cloud Services as well more traditional DataCenter services (as housing, hosting, virtualized hosting, DRP, and so on) based on its Data Centers Federation (that includes Walhalla, a DC certified as Tier IV by The Uptime Institute) and using different product and solutions (currently VmWare, OpenStack, and so on) and most of ideas of this post series are extracted from that experience.

Virtualization vs Cloud Computing (I): what are we going to compare?

In this post series (compound of two more posts) my final intention is to clarify the differences between a “Cloud Computing Management Environment” and a “Virtualization Management Environment”. To achieve it, first of all, I should clarify the differences between Cloud Computing and Virtualization, two technological concepts that are frequently confused or mixed, but there are significant differences between them. Finally, another goal is to differentiate between Cloud Computing as technological concept, from the Cloud Computing as a business model: some people thinks of Cloud Computing is only a Business concept (I hope to show they are wrong) and other confuse the initial business model Cloud Computing was intended for with the technological concept: currently (and Amazon it’s the best exponent of it) there are a lot of different or mixed business model to explode the Cloud Computing Services.

 

The first question is: Is it the comparison possible or are we going to compare apples with oranges?  I think the comparison is possible but in the appropriate and well defined scope.

 

So, first we need to spend some paragraphs clarifying both concepts, because both of them (by different reasons) use to be interpreted in different ways by different persons. First of all, let me say that I don’t want to state that my definition are the correct ones (besides they are not mines, I choose the at least, the most widely accepted currently), but the comparison will be based on these definitions, and no others, in order to be able to focus the points.

 

On one hand, “Virtualization” is an abstraction process that as an IT technology concept that arose in 60s, according to Wikipedia, as a method of logically dividing the mainframes resources for different applications. However, in my opinion, its diffusion and source of actual meaning is due to Andrew S. Tanenbaum author of, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and also author the several very famous and well-known books as “Structured Computer Organization” (first edited in 1976), “Computer Networks” (first edited in 1981), “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” (first edited in 1987) Distributed Operating Systems (first edited in 1995) and some of them, evolved and updated are still used in the Universities around the world for example, last edition of some of them have been in 2010. It also was a famous for its debate with Linus Torvalds regarding kernel design of Linux (and Torvarlds also recognized that “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” book and MINIX O.S, were the inspiration for the Linux kernel; well, by the way , as you probably have notices, I’m biased in this subject because I like a lot of its book, and I used them  a lot when I was an University teacher). Coming back to the point, last edition of “Structured Computer Organization” in US was in 2006, but the first one was in 1976 where he already introduced the concept of Operating System Virtualization, a concept that he spread along all its books in different contexts treated.

 

Currently, in the IT area, “virtualization” refers to the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including but not limited to a virtual computer hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or computer network resources. And between all of these concepts, in this post we are going to refer ONLY to the “Hardware virtualization”, i.e. the creation of a virtual machine (VM) that acts like a real computer with an operating system. Software executed on these virtual machines (VM) is separated from the underlying hardware resources. For example, a computer that is running Linux may host a virtual machine that looks like a computer with the Windows operating system; and then Windows-based software can be run on the virtual machine (excerpted from Wikipedia).

 

On the other hand, “Cloud Computing” is a concept that arise from several previous concepts Probably, I share the opinion of  more experienced people, is a mixture of two previous ideas; the “Utililty Computing” paradigm (a packaging of computing resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service and provisioned on demand as the Utilities companies do) the “Grid Computing” (a collection of distributed computer resources collaborating to reach a common goal: a well-known example was the SETI program). Currently as everybody knows, Cloud it’s also a hyping concept that it’s misused for a lot companies that state to offer (fake) Cloud Services, but there are also plenty of real Cloud Services Providers. Besides I think Cloud Computing is an open concept that could be redefined in coming years in function of the way Customers (companies, organizations or persons) use its services and demands new ones, providers imagine and develops new services and, also, technical Advances enable new ideas or services. But, currently there’s a some good and clear definitions and, probably, the most used and accepted is the one of NIST that says: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” and consequently,  disregarding the Service Model (IaaS, PaaS or Saas) and the Deployment Model (Private, Community, Public or Hybrid), states 5 Essential Characteristics for any CloudComputing service that I copy below (excerpted from NIST’s Cloud Definition) because it’s worth remembering them:

• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.
• Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).
• Resource pooling (multi-tenant). The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth.
• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
• Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

 

Besides, to make the comparison possible we must focus ONLY in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), that is defined by the NIST as “The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls)” and in this discussion we forget other service models as PaaS and SaaS. Besides, as in the virtualization concept case, to easy the comparison we ONLY speak about the “compute resource” inside the IaaS Cloud Computing concept.

Inside this scope and context, virtualization is one of the technologies used to make a Cloud, mainly to supply (implement) the “resource pooling (multitenant)” characteristic (following the NIST definition). Besides, currently it is most important technology enabling such goal, but not the only one since other could be used, for example containers (although some people consider containers as sort of virtualization), or grid technologies (as the SETI program). Besides, other developments or software are needed to provide the remaining features required to be a real Cloud (NIST definition). Some authors consider “Orchestration” as what allows computing to be consumed as a utility and what separates cloud computing from virtualization. Orchestration is the combination of tools, processes and architecture that enable virtualization to be delivered as a service (quoted from this link). This architecture allows end-users to self-provision their own servers, applications and other resources. Virtualization itself allows companies to fully maximize the computing resources at its disposal but it still requires a system administrator to provision the virtual machine (VM) for the end-user. In other words, Virtualization is an enabling technology for Cloud, one of the building blocks used for Cloud Computing.

 

However, in the next 2 posts of this series we’ll review this last point  because of both the recently arisen new needs of customers and the innovations and technological advances; i.e. the previous paragraph will be revisited, since cloud technology is currently starting to use other technologies away from pure virtualized environments (as containers or “baremetal as a Service”).

 

Besides, and what it’s more important, we also see that the differences between Cloud and Virtualization go beyond of the well-known and aforesaid “Virtualization is an enabling technology for Cloud, one of the building blocks used for Cloud Computing”. We will analyze more differences: self service feature, location independence (in the sense of no location knowledge), massive scale out, even metered service in some cases, and so on, and we will conclude that  BOTH ARE QUITE DIFFERENT IN HOW THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED (to be shown next week).

 

And let me advance that we’ll also differentiate between the two pure business models they were “initially” intended for: hosting virtual (a fixed monthly rate, but lower that physical hosting rate) and pay-per-use (that some person call the Cloud Computing business model, even the confuse the Cloud technology with the Cloud business model): some people confuse the technologic concepts with the business models;  besides it should be taken into account that at the present there are a lot of mixed or hybrid business models disregarding the underlying technology, what increases the confusion too.

 

Moreover, coming back to the technological arena, when we will widen lightly the comparison scope to include (as usual) any computing related resources, (not only but also storage, and communications resources), then new differences will arise as we’ll analyze in the third (last) post of this series: for example communications related Services (routing, firewalls, load balancing, etc.) are seldom (or never) offered as a Service in Virtualized Management Environments (in a self-service way and where you can self-define your internal communications layout and structure, and so on).

OpenStack keeps gaining momentum in Cloud market, as evidenced by Oracle support, in spite of Gartner opinion

A few weeks ago, Gartner analyst Allessandro Perilli recently says the project has a long way to go before it’s truly an enterprise-grade platform. In fact, in a blog post he says that “despite marketing efforts by vendors and favorable press, enterprise adoption remains in the very earliest stages” … The main reasons for that, in its opinion, are:

• Lack of clarity about what OpenStack does.
• Lack of transparency about the business model.
• Lack of differentiation.
• Lack of pragmatism.

OpenStack backers rebuffed such claims, and I must recognize that I’m biased because I work in a European company (Tissat, based in Spain, and with several DataCentres and one of them -Walhalla- certified as Tier IV by the Uptime Institute) that offer IaaS Services using OpenStack. But I also have to recognize that OpenStack is a solution that is continuously evolving and growing, and therefore I agree with some of the statement of Mr.  Perilli, but I disagree with its main conclusion:

Maybe he’s right and the fact that big companies are contributing to its code as well as they also are supporting and using it to deliver services it’s unusual, but let me mention some of them that are supporting and using it: RackSpace and Nasa (maybe they aren’t the biggest, but they were the first ones), IBM (IBM’s open cloud architecture), HP (HP Cloud Services), Cisco (WebEx Service), they don’t seem small player, do they?  (I beg your pardon for the irony). Besides, relatively smaller companies are contributing to, supporting and selling services on OpenStack as the traditional Linux Distro Providers: RedHat, Novell (Suse), Canonical (Ubuntu). Finally other big player that are using OpenSack are PayPal-eBay, Yahoo, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), ComCast, MercadoLibre, Inc. (e-commerce services), San Diego Supercomputer Center, and so on., that aren’t small player either …

Could you think in player in the IT providers market as big as the firsts mentioned? Sure, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, … Well, surprise, last week Oracle announced that they embrace OpenSatck. Yes, although Oracle acquired Nimbula on March (and maybe the Nimbula shift from its own proprietary private cloud approach to become an OpenStack-compatible software supplier was the first sign of the change), they are going to integrates OpenStack cloud with its technologies: “Oracle Sponsors OpenStack Foundation; Offers Customers Ability To Use OpenStack To Manage Oracle Cloud Products and Services”. Oracle’s announcement said that:

• Oracle Linux will include integrated OpenStack deployment capabilities.
• Solaris too will get OpenStack deployment integrations
• Oracle Compute Cloud and Oracle Storage Cloud services will be integrated with OpenStack
• Likewise, Oracle ZS3 Series network attached storage, Axoim Storage Systems, and StorageTek Tape Systems will all get integrated.
• Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud hardware for running applications will get its own OpenStack integration as well.
• And so on.

i.e. Oracle speaks about a significant new support for OpenStack in an extremely ambitious manner, pretty much saying that it would support OpenStack as a management framework across an expansive list of Oracle products. Evidently, Oracle movement is a great support for OpenStacck (and for my thesis, too, and probably another point against Mr. Pirelli’s opinion) …

However, to be honest,  let me doubt (at the moment) about the ultimate motivations and objectives of Oracle: I’ve got the impression that Oracle is simply ceding to the pressing of the market, adjusting to the sign of the times, but it’s not committed to what makes OpenStack means: a collaborative and inclusive community: On one hand,  as I stated that in my  “Cloud Movements (2nd part): Oracle’s fight against itself (and the OpenStack role)”  post that Oracle is fighting against itself due to its traditional and profitable business model is challenged by the Cloud model, and it has been delaying its adoption as much as possible (as IBM did when its mainframes ran mission-critical applications on legacy databases, and a new -by then- generation of infrastructure vendors -DEC, HP, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle- challenged it and disrupted the old IBM model): it was conflicted about selling the lower-priced, lower-margin servers needed to run them (even Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used to disdain Cloud Computing, e.g. he called cloud computing “nonsense” in 2009). On the other hand, the recent Oracle announce doesn’t necessarily imply a change in this matter.

Besides the Oracle movement raise suspicions, even disbelief, not only in me but in other people. Let me quote some paragraphs of Randy Bias’ (co-founder and CEO of cloud software supplier CloudScalin post titled “Oracle Supports OpenStack: Lip Service Or Real Commitment?”. Randy’s position could be summarized in its words “Oracle is the epitome of a traditional enterprise vendor and to have it announce this level of support for OpenStack is astonishing”. Randy also wonders “Can Oracle engage positively with the open-source meritocracy that OpenStack represents? Admittedly, at first blush it’s hard to be positive, given Oracle’s walled-garden culture.” And to back its answer, Randy review some Oracle facts:

• “Oracle essentially ended OpenSolaris as an open-source project, leaving third-party derivatives of OpenSolaris (such as those promulgated by Joyent and Nexenta) out in the cold, having to fork OpenSolaris to Illumos.
• Similarly, the open-source community’s lack of trust can be seen ultimately in the forking of MySQL into MariaDB over concerns about Oracle’s support and direction of the MySQL project. Google moved to MariaDB, and all of the major Linux distributions are switching to it as well”.

However, finally Randy concludes: “It’s hard not to have a certain amount of pessimism about Oracle’s announcement. However, I’m hopeful that this signals an understanding of the market realities and that its intentions are in the right place. We will know fairly soon how serious it is based on code contributions to OpenStack, which can be tracked at Stackalytics. (So far, there are zero commits from Oracle and only two from Nimbula, Oracle’s recent cloud software acquisition.). Personally, I’m happy to see Oracle join the party. It further validates the level of interest in OpenStack from the enterprise and reinforces that we’re all building a platform for the future”.

And the last words of Randy gets me back to my initial point: I really think OpenStack is already a mature enough platform to make business (in all the ways other IT products or solutions) as the giants and other big companies of IT area are showing (IBM, HP, Cisco, Oracle, RackSpace, Yahoo, PayPal, ComCast, RedHat, Novell, Canonical, etc.).

Finally, let me end this post with some partial pictures extracted from an Infographic elaborated by OpenStack (you can get the whole infographic here):

The current OpenStack deployment comprises 56 countries:

Covering any-size organizations and a wide range of industry sectors:

       

Besides, any type of deployments is currently made:

And currently the 10 types of applications most deployed on OpenStack are:

OpenStack HAVANA release has been delivered today

Please, let me copy this e-mail sent by Thierry Carrez to all OpenStack community:

 

Hello everyone,
 

It is my great pleasure to announce the final release of OpenStack 2013.2. It marks the end of the “Havana” 6-month-long development cycle, which saw the addition of two integrated components (Ceilometer and Heat), the completion of more than 400 feature blueprints and the fixing of more than 3000 reported bugs !

 

You can find source tarballs for each integrated project, together with lists of features and bugfixes, at:

OpenStack Compute:        https://launchpad.net/nova/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Object Storage: https://launchpad.net/swift/havana/1.10.0

OpenStack Image Service:  https://launchpad.net/glance/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Networking:     https://launchpad.net/neutron/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Block Storage:  https://launchpad.net/cinder/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Identity:       https://launchpad.net/keystone/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Dashboard:      https://launchpad.net/horizon/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Metering:       https://launchpad.net/ceilometer/havana/2013.2

OpenStack Orchestration:  https://launchpad.net/heat/havana/2013.2

 

The Havana Release Notes contain an overview of the key features, as well as upgrade notes and current lists of known issues. You can access them at:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes/Havana

 

In 19 days, our community will gather in Hong-Kong for the OpenStack Summit: 4 days of conference to discuss all things OpenStack and a Design Summit to plan the next 6-month development cycle, codenamed “Icehouse”. It’s not too late to join us there, see http://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-summit-hong-kong-2013/ for more details.

 

Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this development cycle and participated in making this awesome release posible!

CERN, another “big giant” that is going to use OpenStack (currently deploying)

CERN is another “big giant” that is going to use OpenStack. In fact, right now is deploying the OpenStack cloud this month, and it has already been in use by pilot testers with 250 new VMs being created each day.

 

The figures are impressive: 150.000 virtual machine, running on 16.000 physical machines distributed in two DataCenters (the oldest in Genève and the new one in Budapest) that will provide IaaS to Nearly 11,000 physicists across the globe working on official CERN experiments would be eligible to use this private cloud: “Scientists will be able to request whatever amount of CPU, memory, and storage space they need. They will also be able to get a virtual machine with the requested amounts within 15 minutes”.

 

This approach let media publish that:

  

150,000 cloud virtual machines will help solve mysteries of the Universe

  

OpenStack, Puppet used to build cloud for world's largest particle accelerator.

 

 

 

The full new and more details can be read in:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/150000-cloud-virtual-machines-will-help-solve-mysteries-of-the-universe/?utm_campaign=Tweets+Q2+2013&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_content=42817