Open source Cloud Platform surging OpenStack the future direction?

At this time last year, Rackspace announced the launch of the open source cloud computing platform OpenStack, once shook the industry. In October of 2010, Microsoft said it would promote the integration of Windows Server 2008 R2 and OpenStack, and in February this year Cisco also announced its accession to OpenStack, Focus on OpenStack network features and launch new Naas services (receptacle as a service).

Not only that, the heat of OpenStack was still not attenuated in 2011, at the end of July this year, Dell launched the first set of solutions to support OpenStack architecture, and developed a OpenStack installer crowbar for enterprises to use power Edge C Server to build a OpenStack environment. Then HP Cloud Services deputy general manager Emil Sayegh also announced in the official BBS to join the OpenStack program, in addition to providing sponsorship, the HP Cloud development team will also participate in the OpenStack program development.

According to incomplete statistics, after July 2010 Open source, more and more IT vendors also announced to join the OpenStack, more than 30 companies expressed interest in the open source platform project, while others have been actively involved in the project. These companies include AMD, Citrix, cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudswitch and NTT data.

A year after the release of OpenStack, competition between the parties competing to become the top open source cloud platform is increasingly white-hot. Coupled with the newly joined Dell and HP, the two big open platform architecture server giants are so Rockspace OpenStack, obviously not meaningless, what makes OpenStack so attractive?

What is OpenStack?

OpenStack is a free Open-source platform that helps service providers achieve infrastructure services similar to Amazon EC2 and S3. OpenStack has two major parts of--nova, initially developed for NASA computing services, and Swift, the storage services component developed by Rackspace. Rackspace says its goal is to drive the development of interoperability services, or to allow customers to migrate workloads between cloud service providers so they are not locked out.

Judging from the latest version of the current release, OpenStack provides three different components as system architectures and can be used independently of each other.

First, the most important component is the "OpenStack Computing", which enables users to quickly deploy applications on virtual machines and access virtual disk mirroring over the Internet. This component is a Web-based control interface that requires only a minute to install and deploy virtual machines under this interface.

With OpenStack, you can quickly build a fully virtualized environment that can be composed of multiple interconnected virtual servers, which gives users great convenience to handle redundancy and solve scale problems.

The second important component is the "OpenStack Storage", which allows users to create redundant, scalable object storage and store large amounts of data using a standardized server cluster. For users, if a node in the cluster fails, OpenStack can quickly handle the failover.

The third important component service is the "OpenStack Mirroring Service", which provides a mechanism to discover and record virtual disk mirroring, allowing its snap-in to add a new openstack environment, most significantly with different disk mirroring format support. In addition, if the user's virtual machine is already running, you can automatically add disk volumes, and within seconds, you can quickly process disk space requirements and partitions.

Obviously, flexibility is one of the biggest advantages of OpenStack, users can build their own infrastructure according to their own needs, and can easily increase the scale of their own clusters.

The OpenStack code, written primarily in Python, is fairly high quality and easy to follow, with a fully documented API that allows users to use the code of different components of JSON or XML message format, which is quite beneficial for the project to grow.

In addition, the code for the OpenStack project will be released under the extremely loose and free Apache 2 license, which means that any third party can redistribute the Code, develop proprietary software on its basis, and publish it in accordance with the new license.

More comprehensive than the cloud solutions offered by Amazon

RackSpace and Amazon are fiercely competitive in the US, and RackSpace CTO John Engates has said that RackSpace's advantages and features are more comprehensive solutions for cloud computing. Compared to Amazon, which only provides computing resources, Rackspace also provides hardware infrastructure such as servers, networks, and operations and security based on the open stack cloud platform.

Engates the development of OpenStack to Linux and MySQL, he said, "This is an important opportunity for an era." ”

"A total of 89 organizations and 1200 developers support OpenStack," Rackspace's Jim Curry wrote in OpenStack's website blog. The project team has released three versions and is now working on the fourth edition of development. Companies are officially starting to deploy OpenStack. Although it was not until April that Cactus,openstack was really ready for product deployment, quite a few companies have deployed the technology since the release of Cactus. ”

The future of Rackspace

However, the current development of Rackspace is not smooth sailing.

Curry also admits that Rackspace needs the help of NASA and a more active open source community to build more efficient cloud platforms.

"The market is missing an open platform dedicated to building and managing the cloud," Curry wrote. We have to structure our own solutions, so we know the rackspace of the situation. For five years, we've been looking for the technology available to drive our public cloud platform, but we can't find an acceptable solution. We have to develop our own patented technology, which is not what we want. ”

Rackspace's rival, Eucalpytus, is also open source and threatens to have 25,000 software-run clouds, Eucalpytus is the world's most widely deployed software platform for internal infrastructure, the service Cloud (IaaS).

In fact, Rockspace's OpenStack belongs to a good solution for highly dynamic scalability (HDS). The current HDS technology has been closed by Google and Amazone, which may hinder the development of cloud computing, just as UNIX became a high-end commercial operating system, HDS should become a public domain technology, although openstack not necessarily be the most successful technology, but undeniably, Quite a few Dell, HP users will choose it as their own private cloud architecture.

(Responsible editor: admin)