Open Cloud: Just a popular word or a sign of the future of infrastructure

"Openness" is also a new term in the field of technology. It may sound like "open" or "closed", but some technical experts believe that openness is simply a popular word, and that there is not much real value to customers. In this article, we will explore the differences between marketing terminology and reality in the open cloud domain. To arrive at a precise conclusion, we first need to define the term exactly.

We first need to understand the meaning of "open". Open Cloud is not the same thing as open source cloud. Open source refers to a software licensing model. In fact, the free nature of open source software is not a customer's biggest concern – by contrast, an active community support system is the source of its core appeal. On the other hand, the focus of openness is not the use of cost or the way code is written.

The choice of openness means accepting the technical decisions made by the enterprise and giving it the freedom to roam freely between different technologies, patterns, and cloud providers. The value of openness lies in the excellent flexibility it brings to customers. Openness is not a licensing model or a technology alliance, it is an idea designed to encourage customers to work with us in a proactive rather than passive manner.

Accepting an open cloud means there is no longer a technology lock, contract lockout, or service lockout. The admission of open cloud also means that suppliers will not force the designation of proprietary technology and welcome competition. But what does all this mean for a real-world cloud service provider?

For customers who create cloud-recognition applications-those customers who take advantage of the Cloud application programming interface (API) to dynamically control infrastructure and configuration resources-the promise of open technology to help them get out of the lock is no doubt compelling. Without open support, customers who develop applications using proprietary APIs from cloud service providers may encounter many problems when they change vendors in the future, because the original application is too large and the mechanism too complex to complete the migration. Such customers often find that changing suppliers not only require them to change the API invocation mechanism, but also rethink and even refactor the application completely-often with very high costs and even unrealistic expectations.

It is important to recognize that the API itself is not just an application interface: it represents a set of abstract underlying models and technology choices made by cloud vendors. Creating a specific API means continuing to follow the creation style, best practices, rules, and design ideas that match them in subsequent work. This is the "lock" we mentioned earlier.

OpenStack to achieve portability, cloudy environment deployment and joint

12-18 months ago, the technology industry was skeptical of OpenStack's future, but today the industry is aware that OpenStack has become an extremely important open option in the cloud. Companies adopting this open mindset want to avoid locking and enjoy the convenience of portability, multiple-solution syndication, and a cloudy environment deployment.

Open Cloud and open source cloud are not the same.

Providing portability represents a customer's desire to migrate workloads frequently among different vendors. I can't imagine a customer planning to run their own ERP system in a vendor's business environment and switch to another in the short term. The value of cloud Federation lies in the flexible sharing of similar architectures, interfaces (i.e. APIs), and management tools, as well as the ease of workload migration as necessary. The whole process does not have to be magical or to introduce an automated mechanism-as long as it's simple.

Similar examples can refer to Java EE applications, which make it easier to migrate between different application servers. Java's previously advertised "once development, everywhere available" slogan is literally inaccurate, but it does create applications that support more than one architecture, or migrate applications to different Java EE technology environments.

OpenStack portability may be more likely to exist as an insurance mechanism in the future. Although there are still some differences between the various OpenStack cloud systems, customers have been able to use the OpenStack API to build generic applications and allocate resources to different cloud vendors, OpenStack private clouds, wherever they are hosted, or even proprietary infrastructures. As a result, customers can migrate applications between different open cloud systems, and more importantly, resource allocations within different cloud systems can be done simultaneously.

Cloudy environment deployment and cloud joint in OpenStack to bring considerable immediate benefits to enterprises. With the help of generic APIs, cloudy technology involves only the same set of code libraries. Any user who understands the value of a private cloud, is flexible, and is interested in docking it with the public cloud will clearly appreciate the advantage of coding with a single API. More importantly, however, enterprise users are now able to share APIs and share the same federated architecture in different cloud environments under the same technical requirements.

Another big advantage of embracing open technology is that the industry's innovation rate is staggering, the talent pool is plentiful and it's getting rid of the passive situation of choosing a single supplier or cloud vendor. In most proprietary technology areas, all innovation activities are concentrated within the same department or location. It is hard to imagine that a single team is responsible for the creative tasks of the industry. The open industry sets the wisdom of the people and frees the future of technology from a single supplier, service provider, individual or organization, and hands them over to every hardworking and courageous participant.

Finally, it should be emphasized that the open and proprietary models have their own living space. Many professionals are quite adaptable to the long-term choice of the same specific model and supplier, and have successfully made their own achievements. But there are many users who believe in the power of open innovation, who have long aspired to an ideal platform for flexible use of cloud services in the way they want. In this case, openness is the best way to solve the problem.