Development and application of open source cloud platform OpenStack

According to a recent report published by Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, companies are carefully evaluating open source cloud platforms. At the 2013 Beijing (International) Open Source Conference, we learned more about the development and application of open source cloud platform in China, which involved the main two open source cloud platform OpenStack and Cloudstack in the market now. In the afternoon session, the open source OpenStack promoter, OpenStack User Group (COSUG) sponsor Du Yujie's speech gave a detailed description of the development and application of OpenStack.

OpenStack may not be a market leader in the cloud, but it is the way to the cloud architecture. Open source cloud services are a strategic choice for manufacturers, from Hewlett-Packard to Cisco; for many others it is a cloud service framework, including Rackspace. Unlike Amazon's Web services Ec2,openstack, which is primarily offered as an enterprise software and public cloud service, has sparked media debate, but not just a hype. OpenStack has its own innovation, especially in the virtual network, but also in the front-end. Du Yujie says the OpenStack project is now the fastest growing and the most focused on open source projects.

Open Source Community Activity comparison (click to view larger image)

As an open source project, OpenStack is updated every six months, and every change is automated, and then any code base changes are manually audited. Du Yujie describes OpenStack's ability to maintain a new release every six months because of the way in which it is socialized to develop, the process of knowledge management--requirements-versioning--code review--continuous integration, saying that the best code in OpenStack is not necessarily successful, and social management is the core competitiveness.

The newly released OpenStack, called Grizzly (Grizzly Bear), includes several incremental changes that add better scalability and high availability, which is what attendees expected last year at the OpenStack Summit Forum. In terms of scalability, OpenStack Grizzly introduces the "Cell" concept and provides a way to manage multiple distributed OpenStack computing clouds under an interface. Service decentralization in the OpenStack cloud is also the subject of this release. A new feature called Nodb modifies the architecture and reduces OpenStack's reliance on the core MySQL database.

The Keystone V3 Identity Management Application Interface (API) changes the way recognition management is implemented, so this is a more distributed "Signal Exchange" series, rather than having to go through a centralized identity server at a time. This makes the interaction between services faster and makes OpenStack more scalable. In terms of high availability, the Cinder block storage API has matured in this release, with Plug-ins from 10 vendors, including EMC and NetApp, allowing the construction of cluster pools and highly available block storage. Another api--quantum now offers five new plug-ins from vendors, including VMware (Nicira), Brocade, Cisco, and Big Switch NX, enabling network virtualization.

At the same time, Du Yujie also said that some of the most difficult challenges for early adopters using OpenStack are deployment issues. At last year's Spring &cloud Foundry Developer Conference, the OpenStack Community experience platform Trystack.cn first appeared at home. This Du Yujie also details the role of trystack.cn for the enterprise, as a catalyst for the domestic OpenStack Open source project, China OpenStack user Group (COSUG) The relevant member units together to build the deployment of this openstack based on the latest version of the development test platform trystack.cn for the vast number of cloud computing start-ups and technology enthusiasts to provide an open test environment. The project, which originated in the well-known OpenStack community project Trystack.org, provides localized resources and support for the project, which is entirely community-driven. In addition, trystack.cn always keeps up to date with the latest OpenStack source code, provides the latest version of all features and APIs to provide developers with the latest technical support.

It is understood that many companies have started the OpenStack Open source cloud tour, such as our well-known HP's cloud platform and Cisco's cloud platform are based on OpenStack infrastructure creation. Best Buy, a consumer electronics retailer, uses OpenStack to provide a continuous delivery cloud for bestbuy.com. During the 2012 Thanksgiving Day, Best Buy noted that only 25% of bestbuy.com traffic was not brought by cloud services. Best Buy old Product browsing and search pages take 7-30 seconds to load. With the cloud schema, the current page load takes about 2.5 seconds. The company now specializes in using OpenStack to build a continuous delivery cloud CDC component for next-generation architectures.

OpenStack has so far dominated, but some people want to know if there are potential candidates, and now OpenStack options include Eucalyptus, Cloudstack and Opennebula. The final choice for an enterprise that tries to make a choice depends on why they build a private cloud. If the private cloud is the next logical step after server virtualization and consolidation, Vcloud director and similar products are likely to be preferred if the enterprise's goal is to mirror the private cloud as close to the public cloud as possible, but within the corporate firewall, focus on the open source solution.

Now, OpenStack has an inherent technical agenda and enjoys extensive support from hardware and software participants. Because it is open source, technology has no cost and ensures early market attraction. If OpenStack continues to strengthen and improve at the current pace, it is likely that OpenStack will become the biggest threat to AWS. Du Yujie that the next OpenStack summit will be held in Hong Kong and that China's role in OpenStack is growing.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)