OpenStack help push open source cloud development

The OpenStack project itself has a history of more than three years, but as technology matures, more and more participants, coupled with the establishment of the OpenStack Fund last year, OpenStack has been enough to attract the attention of large service providers and enterprise-level users, including telecoms, retail and research companies.

As early as the summer of 2010, the OpenStack Open-source Cloud project became a compelling theme. Now, with the increase in technology, support and OpenStack users, skepticism has been replaced by service providers and business use cases.

OpenStack is relatively immature, it still needs a lot of technology to supplement, but the number of suppliers and users in its community continues to climb, and both groups focus on how to simplify the deployment, management and expansion of software.

Chance coincidence

Large manufacturers such as Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and rackspace--are also using OpenStack in their internal and new cloud offerings. And a large number of new ventures and small companies to promote the OpenStack is also not. including Cloudscaling,enovance,mirantis,morphlabs,nebula and piston Cloud Computing.

Large manufacturers have also acquired the main OpenStack manufacturers, such as Red Hat in October 2011 to 136 million U.S. dollars to acquire a storage vendor gluster; VMware acquired the Open-source network maker Nicira in July 2012 with 1.026 billion dollars, and Oracle acquired Cloud management maker Nimbula in March 2013.

There is no doubt that as OpenStack technology and markets grow, more acquisitions will emerge.

In fact, when OpenStack was created, the market already had the option of open source cloud computing. As a result, we can see that it has contributed to the discussion of open source software, open source standards, and open source cloud.

OpenStack and other open source cloud options, such as Cloudstack,eucalyptus,joyent and opennebula--, are likely to be in the market at the same time, benefiting from their credibility for open source cloud computing. Because various Linux distributions and various open source hypervisor are distributed in the industry in a way that helps each other, open clouds are likely to be the same way.

Component Mature

In addition to the increase in vendor supporters and users, OpenStack's traction is also increasing as the technology of open source projects matures. The OpenStack main components for computing (Nova), Network (Quantum), and Storage (Swift) are more reliable.

And OpenStack's biggest differences--such as the operator panel UI, identity services, choreography or metering--and more components and subprojects are emerging.

OpenStack needs good technology deployments, but the OpenStack community seems to be doing the right medicine for the vast majority of businesses and service providers.

Although OpenStack technology may lack specific features and functionality, OpenStack users are happy to be part of the community and enjoy solving problems and controlling their own IT technology development.

The driving factor of OpenStack

OpenStack's impetus comes mainly from the increase in the number of vendors and service providers, who want to push their products clouds. Many companies are looking for the scalability and resilience of public clouds, but they need more control.

They want to create a private cloud, which is where OpenStack is supported. This is especially true for continuous consolidation and continuous deployment (or DEVOP and deployment) that combine application deployment with IT operations in a more efficient and rapid manner.

There is a way to adopt DEVOP: A more proactive, speed and iterative approach, and a more interactive, focus on providing IT resources to programmers, capacity, and business units to ensure that they do not have to look outside the enterprise for public cloud services, a free or low-cost option, also known as "shadow it."

Other OpenStack drivers are comparable to the advantages of open source software: cost savings, flexibility, and the avoidance of vendor lock-in. It facilitates the access of many OpenStack users to source code and source code customizations, enabling them to consolidate existing architectures and systems. Some OpenStack have also found that their programmers and engineers prefer to use open source tools and architectures because they are more flexible to use.

Obstacles to OpenStack

Despite OpenStack's many supporters, open source cloud computing software still poses a big technical challenge for many enterprises. Basic features and functions, such as metering and billing, are not yet finalized. While these problems are expected to be resolved soon, the software is not immediately available.

Another impediment to the project is the lack of openstack talent. This is the biggest test of deploying OpenStack. Users may seek third-party help to deploy, but their choices are narrow.

This situation is expected to improve rapidly as training and certification are carried out, as well as the release of new OpenStack operations guidance last month.