OpenStack is big.

It's a communication language popular among cloud developers around the world,

It pursues openness, compatibility, and is committed to creating a pervasive open source cloud platform,

It has tens of thousands of fans in dozens of countries,

It is OpenStack, the reputation of the open source cloud architecture.

A friend of the reporter, November 11 Zero, in the online "blood spell" prepared to pay, but because the checkout too many people and was paid treasure "kicked out" until 7 in the morning again to pay to achieve success. Many people lament the "double 11" and then break the sales record, who would have thought of the big electric power business's IT infrastructure under pressure. To cope with business spikes and improve infrastructure flexibility, many enterprise users, including Internet companies, are slowly experimenting and accepting open source cloud architecture, while OpenStack is the most favored of many open source cloud architectures.

Open compatible

November 5-8th, the OpenStack Summit was held in Hong Kong, China, the first OpenStack summit outside the United States. Jonathanbryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said the conference attracted more than 3,000 listeners from more than 50 countries, many of whom were attending the OpenStack Summit for the first time. "OpenStack's mission is to provide customers with a pervasive open source cloud platform, whether public, private, or cloud sized, to build an easily deployable and scalable infrastructure based on OpenStack. "Jonathanbryce said.

Just as people need a language that everyone can understand when they communicate, OpenStack is a common language that people in cloud development can apply. OpenStack is an Open-source project launched by NASA and the US network hosting company Rackspace to provide software for the construction and management of public cloud and private cloud. Launched from 2010 to now, although only a short period of three years, but openstack by virtue of the architecture, the effectiveness of the operation and licensing mode of flexibility, etc., has been widely welcomed by developers and enterprises and support. OpenStack similar to the cloud computing open source projects, although there are many, but whether from the visibility, influence, breadth and concrete results such as measurement, OpenStack can be described as the most influential cloud computing open source project.

About two weeks before the summit, OpenStack released its latest and eighth software version of Havana, the most important of which was metering and choreography in its nearly 400 new features. The Havana version attracted 910 developers to participate in development, Jonathanbryce said. OpenStack's latest survey shows that more than 72 countries have deployed OpenStack platforms in 358 cities worldwide.

The OpenStack Summit also has a special point, that is, the daily meetings are shared by the user experience of the opening, it can be seen that the combination of technology and application attaches great importance.

To benefit the user

During the summit, OpenStack China User Group held a small forum, the General Assembly also in the next morning specially arranged the experience of Chinese OpenStack users, including Archie Art, Qihoo 360, Ctrip. This on the one hand shows the OpenStack Foundation to the Chinese market attention, on the other hand also shows that Chinese users to OpenStack have a high degree of recognition, and began to actively explore.

"Three years ago, we started to deploy virtualization with VMware, followed by the Cloudstack open source technology, changed to OpenStack a year ago," said Yeyaming, vice president and chief technology architect of Ctrip Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. "At present, Ctrip has a 13,000-terminal desktop virtualization system, based on the OpenStack built cloud architecture to achieve business expansion provides strong support." "Our goal is to increase our business by 10 times times in 2020 and 10 times times the number of active users," he said. Yeyaming believes that the Open-source cloud architecture can help Ctrip achieve these goals.

Archie chose OpenStack when building its own private cloud architecture. In Archie's view, OpenStack has a flexible, controllable character, based on industrial standards, while a large community can provide strong support, the most important thing is to better control the cost. Archie based on the elastic hybrid cloud built by OpenStack, it can increase and decrease computing resources and storage resources, and can manage all resources in a unified and flexible manner.

Qihoo 360 now uses a lot of software that is open source. According to Qihoo 360 's technical experts, on the OpenStack platform, they can complete an application in a few hours, many of the development and testing on the OpenStack platform to achieve. can be autonomous control, can realize customization, is Qihoo 360 choose OpenStack an important reason. At present, Qihoo 360 only has a small technical team in charge of OpenStack Private cloud architecture maintenance, of which only two full-time technical engineers.

OpenStack's agility, scalability, and extremely fast response speed have made Qihoo 360 taste. Next, Qihoo 360 will also migrate to the latest version of the OpenStack Havana to achieve storage sharing. In addition, Qihoo 360 also plans to strengthen its interaction with the OpenStack community to make better use of OpenStack's latest achievements.

"Which city in the world now has the most OpenStack developers?" OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathanbryce asked the attendees, the crowd looked at each other. Beijing。 "Someone started clapping and cheering," Jonathanbryce added, "Beijing is the city with the largest number of OpenStack developers, and Shanghai can also be listed as the top ten OpenStack developers." "Many people speculate that the OpenStack summit, which was first held outside the United States, chose Hong Kong, China, to invest heavily in and expand the Asia-Pacific market, represented by China," he said.

A few days before the OpenStack Summit, the chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, Alanclark, had purposely stayed in Beijing before attending the summit in Hong Kong, not only with reporters, but also in a series of events, including talks with government leaders and participation in the OpenStack China group. , go to Beijing University to exchange and so on.

"At present, China is the world's most active OpenStack market outside the United States," Alanclark said in response to a question from our correspondent. The summit was held in Hong Kong to attract OpenStack developers from many Asian and Pacific countries, including Australia and India. ”

Some Chinese manufacturers, including Huawei and OpenStack, are concerned about the development of open source projects. Huawei It product line elasticity Calculation Cloud Marketing Engineering Minister Zhangxiaosong told reporters that Huawei began to focus on the 2011 openstack,2012 year October 23 officially joined the OpenStack Foundation, 2013 This summit was just elected OpenStack Gold members, is a big step in a year. In the grizzly version, Huawei Storage products are beginning to support OpenStack. Currently in the storage sector, Huawei has more than 10 Openstackcore open source developers, and Baiyu OpenStack solutions developers to contribute to OpenStack wisdom.

"With an open and integrated approach, Huawei enriches the variety of OpenStack storage products and provides users with more and better choices." "Huawei Storage has contributed tens of thousands of lines of code to OpenStack and achieved phased results," said Fan, president of Huawei's storage product line. Huawei's full range of storage offerings, for example, provides a rich choice for OpenStack users, and its storage snapshot technology facilitates openstack efficiency, and its storage software smart is tightly integrated with OpenStack to dynamically and rationally allocate storage resource processing capabilities, Ensure the quality of storage services at different levels of business. ”

At this summit, Huawei and OpenStack well-known manufacturers Mirantis jointly demonstrated the integration of OpenStack based integrated architecture, based on this one, customers can quickly and a single station to complete the application based on OpenStack deployment, The process of commercialization of OpenStack is further accelerated.

June 2013, Hua Sheng Tiancheng announced the establishment of China's first OpenStack service center. In this summit, Huasheng Tiancheng announced that in just a few months time, there have been 37 customers to inquire about the implementation of OpenStack issues, and one of the telecommunications industry customers OpenStack system has been online operation.

In China, the ecological environment of OpenStack is gradually established and perfected. August 9, 2012, Intel Asia Pacific Research and Development Co., Ltd., Sina, the winning software, Shanghai Jiaotong University jointly set up the China Open Source Cloud Alliance (COSCL), is committed to integrating enterprise users of the cloud computing infrastructure platform, based on OpenStack and other open source framework collaborative research and development and accelerate the improvement, Thus promoting the development of China's cloud computing industry. Today, Red Hat, Huasheng and many Chinese Internet companies are members of the alliance. According to Zheng, a senior technical manager at Huasheng, the members of the Alliance will convene a conference every two weeks to share the practical experience of open source and OpenStack.

In addition, COSCL has established a OpenStack laboratory Stacklab with the China OpenStack user group. This is a free OpenStack experience, testing and development platform, it provides the original eco-OpenStack experience Platform, no threshold, no invitation code, anyone can register and experience free, and unlimited number of times.

Around the OpenStack community, a group of startups were born, and entrepreneurs from China had great expectations for OpenStack. Chenghui, as the chief Community Administrator of the China OpenStack user group, has been actively promoting the development of OpenStack in China. Chenghui himself also founded the Unitedstack company in Silicon Valley in February 2013 and has a research and Operation Center in Beijing, and is currently promoting its OpenStack based cloud operating system--unitedstackos in China and the Asia-Pacific market. The cloud operating system is used to unify the management of the data Center server cluster, to transform the common x86 server cluster into a unified computing, network and storage pool to build the software-defined data center. Unitedstack at this summit officially released the UnitedStackOS1.0 version, its user interface is very simple, creating applications very quickly.

Reporters at the summit also met another OpenStack start-up company Stackinsider, which provides a free online service platform for OpenStack test and deployment. If a user is ready to deploy a OpenStack solution, Stackinsider can also deliver a range of deployment services online and reap the benefits. Many Chinese enterprises are actively exploring the business model based on OpenStack, Unitedstack, Stackinsider, Yi Yun and so on have made a beneficial attempt.

OpenStack needs to be perfected

After all, OpenStack launched only three years, although every six months will launch a new version of the software, and it also has a computing, storage, network, security and management, and other core functions, but with some mature commercial cloud platform compared to a number of technical details and functions need to be further improved. At the summit, OpenStack released a technical roadmap for 2014 and beyond, including application development, data processing, shared file systems, database services, etc. However, Jonathanbryce said that many users now use OpenStack and have achieved fruitful results, indicating that the user has recognized OpenStack. Dell Enterprise Solutions Cloud Solution Architect He Min also said that, starting with the previous version of Grizzly, OpenStack's basic framework and functionality have been finalized, so users can use either the Grizzly version or the latest Havana version, and their core framework is not much changed, It's just a rich feature.

Alanclark said: "The latest release of the Havana version includes 9 components, new features nearly 400, is in the research and development of 19 projects." Now if cloud computing is not open source, it will be hard to be competitive. ”

Markcollier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, admits that OpenStack is also "fragile" and that the entire community and its developers need more courage to continue to move forward, enriching existing ecosystems, making them more diverse, more compatible and more competitive; On the other hand, we should clearly define the core tasks of OpenStack, listen to the feedback from the developers and make the OpenStack open source community blossom.

Jonathanbryce that the biggest challenge OpenStack currently faces is the lack of professional openstack talent, so the OpenStack Foundation will step up training and certification of technicians. "We hope to unite the openstack talents of more countries and enhance the exchange and sharing among them." "From a technical point of view, we will identify the technical core of OpenStack open source cloud and enhance interoperability between different clouds," Jonathanbryce said. ”

For Chinese developers or enterprises in OpenStack development projects in the role of the problem, Jonathanbryce gave a suggestion: Chinese enterprises can start from a number of relatively hard work, such as software testing, file preparation, and so on, first in these areas to make achievements, establish their position, Then step into the core of the development project; If you want to play a more important role in the OpenStack community, Chinese developers and businesses must be actively involved in community interaction and contribute more to the community.