Smash bubble talk about development, inventory OpenStack Business Eco-circle!

"Editor's note" OpenStack Paris summit just ended, some participants feel is: the manufacturers look at each other, not many users. Also some people are asking: OpenStack in the end rely on not reliable, have got the case of shot? In this article, Unitedstack founder and CEO Chenghui in the Paris summit, the OpenStack Ecological circle of commercial companies in the inventory. Chenghui said: "OpenStack has passed the peak of expectations, it is the most difficult time for startups to go through the bubble, and it's the best time to get rid of bubbles, we see more real markets, and the industry as a whole is about to usher in a new round of development. ”

The following is the original text:

As in the previous summit, I will be almost all of the vendors to visit, the sponsorship of nearly 90 manufacturers, these companies constitute the real openstack ecological circle, due to participate in all need a lot of exhibition fees, and you have to at least a little goods to exhibit, So basically are more sincere openstack players, if you want to analyze the entire global OpenStack industry, the list of companies have to see, compared to the foundation on the home page of the hundreds of supporters of the company to be more valuable.

Overview

In the face of nearly hundreds of exhibitors, not enough industry background, to participate in their exhibitions, just smoke and mirrors. In order to facilitate carding, I did the following categories:

Before delving into each of these categories, answer a question:

Why should I classify it?

As a start-up company, Unitedstack often answers a question: What does Unitedstack do? At this point, I hope that a sentence can make the other person understand, if the other side and my heart for cloud computing or OpenStack service model is very clear, I can say, "We are based on OpenStack provides the public cloud and managed Cloud (Consolidator Private Cloud) service", People immediately understand what's going on, so it's easy to communicate. But in reality in China, because the cloud computing service system is not mature enough, the relevant industrial chain is not fully formed, the mentality of many manufacturers is that, "anyway, the customer does not understand, I will be free to blow it."

To clean up the business, reduce the cost of communication and speed up the landing, I want to let my customers understand what kind of services we offer, what we can do, what we can't do, what benefits you can get, what difference you have with other types of business, and so on. To achieve this goal, classification is the first step, listing and classifying the entire ecological circle of commercial companies, through careful analysis and horizontal contrast, help us understand the nature of business and services.

Integrated IT giant

Basically, traditional it vendors, in the rise of cloud computing today, they are called Old Guard (conservative forces), often with the cloud services (cloud services) type of companies, and regardless of price, competitiveness and other angles than the emerging cloud services companies are much lower, so They have to choose also cloud Service Road, OpenStack from now seems to be their only one way out.

Interestingly, the IoE that we often mention are also on the list of sponsors, and OpenStack's Open-source software is often used as an important weapon to IoE, so there's a problem here and there, how do you see a business vendor supporting open source products that compete with their core business? Huawei/vmware, for example, supports OpenStack, and even takes the OpenStack architecture to replace its core product architecture.

Here, if you want to make a specific analysis may be very complex, beyond the scope of this article, but always a point is: the supremacy of benefits. Any choice of a commercial company would take into account the principle of supremacy of interests and the strategy based on that principle. Obviously, it is in the company's interest to embrace open source standards and use Open-source software.

Hardware manufacturer

Thanks to OpenStack's openness, in the OpenStack project community, almost all hardware vendors are trying to openstack add their own storage or network hardware support, for the server, OpenStack almost do not live, as long as the x86 architecture, can better support.

Public Cloud

OpenStack was once a lot of people at home and abroad think it is not suitable for public cloud, there are many reasons, such as technology is immature, large-scale operation is not very stable and so on.

Always disagree with this view, although your public cloud uses OpenStack technology, but the maturity of cloud services, stability or not, and OpenStack itself not too much relationship. OpenStack just provides a good technical framework that defines a set of good API standards and does most of the API backend standard (reference) implementations. In other words, OpenStack just provides a technical possibility that ultimately it is time to be able to structure and run a OpenStack public cloud.

For example, OpenStack defines a block storage service (Cinder) API and has a standard implementation of block storage functionality, built on a single mainframe disk as LVM, and consolidates more than 10 different open source or commercial storage system scenarios. For a service provider ready to provide public cloud, if the use of OpenStack and its standard storage implementation, because of its lack of reasonable lateral scalability, when the system pressure increases, there will inevitably be a variety of problems.

Therefore, my personal view is that it is not openstack suitable for the public cloud, but the team has the ability to operate a public cloud.

Here is a list of these exhibited OpenStack public cloud manufacturers: Rackspace,unitedstack,hp,internap,cloudwatt,dreamhost.

For these, there are several comments (statement: Because of the inclusion of their own company, the following comments may be biased):

Unitedstack and Cloudwatt respectively from China and Europe, others are mainly in the United States market, listed the six OpenStack public cloud manufacturers, only the top three, Rackspace, Unitedstack and HP are completely independent construction, the latter three are basically supported by the manufacturer; only Rackspace and Unitedstack for OpenStack platform to do the depth of optimization, including APIs, performance, experience, etc. have done a greater optimization. In particular, the control Panel, are from the business and the requirements of the design, while the other platform is basically the original OpenStack build.

It is generally believed that the public cloud service provider because of its strong Internet properties, its ability to innovate and sustainable development is very strong, so, by understanding the OpenStack public cloud service provider products and services of the status quo, you can see the development of the entire OpenStack.

Private Cloud

OpenStack Private Cloud is the focus of today's discussion. Private clouds are seen by the public as the most OpenStack market.
Let's briefly define the private cloud in my eyes:

The cloud platform is

in the customer's own data center or on a server of its own purchase, and the cloud platform is deployed on the service provider (not the customer's own) data center and server, but this cloud platform is exclusive to a particular customer.

are called private clouds. Simple to say, but how to get to the ground a private cloud is not easy. Private cloud has long been called a fertile market by the industry, but in OpenStack just set up that will, many manufacturers do not know how to chew the market, after a group of Wolves scuffle, now, the market gradually clear. Let's take a look at the classification of the private cloud in the Unitedstack eye:

System integrated distribution private software hosting cloud system integration

Support the building of your private cloud through training, onsite support, and selling the same way. including OpenStack training and technical support, listed here are Mirantis and Rackspace two. Mirantis better understanding, in OpenStack out before, in fact, is a traditional system integration company, do IT project outsourcing and support, and then the transformation of the overall OpenStack training and technical support, business made wind water, The most recently completed OpenStack or even open source software in the history of the largest financing: 100 million dollars. A system integration company can complete such a large amount of financing, can only explain one thing, the sales figures are too good.

Here also put Rackspace also put in, as the OpenStack Project founder Company, Rackspace in addition to public cloud business, there are also based on OpenStack private cloud business, and also has its own openstack distribution, Rackspace Private Cloud, but I didn't classify it as a private cloud distribution business, analyzing some of the customers of Rackspace, more providing offline consulting, architecture, and training, more like system integration business.

Release

Refers to the installation, deployment, and automation configuration issues that are closely tied to the operating system by packaging OpenStack's complex components.
At present, the main players are also several Linux vendors, through a relatively standard platform, plus service subscriptions, and other ways to obtain revenue.

Private Software

Refers to the open source of OpenStack for a variety of combinations and optimization, coupled with a number of private closed-source components, so that the entire OpenStack better use, easier to manage, its licensing mode and VMware approach, generally according to the socket charge license fees.

I've listed two companies in this field, piston and stratoscale. Piston was founded by several of the earliest authors of the OpenStack project and was the first start-up in the OpenStack field, and one of the few companies to provide closed-source OpenStack software. Stratoscale is strong enough, an Israeli company in less than a year to get the two rounds of $42m financing, from its booth learned that is also based on OpenStack in the construction of its so-called "hyper-fusion data center software", after understanding the details, found in fact with our UOS 1.0 the same structure, That is, computing, storage and network are highly integrated in the x86 server platform.

Managed Cloud

This is the private cloud domain A newer model, the English general with Consolidator private Cloud, more fashionable can say private Cloud as a Service, "the Trust cloud" This word is unitedstack for the first time in the Chinese environment, because before us, There are no companies in the Chinese market that can provide similar standardization services.

In layman's terms, a standardized cloud platform, such as Unitedstack's uos, is used to deploy a private cloud for customers and is also responsible for upgrades, management, and operations, all of which are done remotely, rather than door-to-door support.

Its important feature is that the standardized platform, rapid deployment, fast online, immediately into the production operation, customers do not have to worry about the cloud platform for subsequent upgrades and operations, which is similar to the first three kinds of private clouds the most essential difference.

The main list of two companies, Metacloud and Unitedstack,unitedstack in China is the first public launch of the OpenStack hosting cloud services, in the United States, Metacloud is also the first to put forward hosting private cloud OpenStack company.

It describes four types of private cloud features and services, and then summarizes the most essential differences between system integration, distribution, cloud software, and managed cloud.

Delivery in different ways: from system integration to the hosting cloud, more and more automation, unit production cost of labor is decreasing.

For example, system integration, the distribution is mainly human services, consulting, design and customization, cloud software focus on the overall high integration to reduce customization and consulting work, while the managed cloud is a more thorough service outsourcing, customers have little concern about any low-level trouble, rely on standardized services and processes, End users have a good experience of the terminal can be, manufacturers almost do not consider consulting and custom work.

Lost integrated Machine

It is noteworthy that there is another type of private cloud is not listed, OpenStack, refers to the OpenStack software cloud platform built into the server hardware, to the advantages of open box.

I've listed two of them here: Nebula and Morphlabs, but the Paris summit did not see them, and they were very active in the early OpenStack Summit. In particular, Nebula, released a OpenStack software and hardware in one machine, never released a new product, the product is very cool, early convergence to include OpenStack founder of many star talent, and got the investment of Google Capital. was one of the 8 highest-level sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation, but it was heard by friends of the foundation that Nebula could be expelled because he couldn't afford the sponsorship.

See here, there is no one machine this mode, because this kind of private cloud has few market success stories, but also did not experience market validation. Many domestic peers on the integration of software and hardware is very enthusiastic, probably because China's it has always been heavy hardware light software tradition.

Why one way to do openstack private cloud can not be successful, as a topic, take time to come to the detailed talk.

OpenStack Vertical Component

OpenStack as a cloud platform, its perfect plug-in mechanism allows each manufacturer to OpenStack to submit their own implementation, or integrate their own services, in OpenStack almost every important component has a number of professional companies to provide relevant software or services.

Because OpenStack is so large that very few teams can fully hold, customers need to have a complete ecosystem of cloud services to support OpenStack landing. Some of the categories listed here, such as databases, billing, distributed storage, and so on, all have a corresponding start-up company to do this in full time, they become the most important part of the OpenStack biosphere.

The most difficult thing to do in each vertical field is the network, because the cost of integration is greater. Unitedstack in the past two years almost with each of the professional SDN of the exchange, and finally found that the real when the SDN of a commercial manufacturer to integrate into their own cloud platform, the problem is still a lot. For example, although OpenStack Neutron defines the standard abstract concepts and APIs, each vendor is ostensibly following the neutron API, but in essence it is not very compatible because of the difference between the implementations. Finally, we decided to build our SDN network service entirely based on Neutron plus OvS.

This list of companies more, it is not introduced.

Who is the most profitable company in OpenStack ecological circle?

Optical analysis mode is not, income is kingly. Which mode is the most profitable? Since we do not have the revenue data for each company in the OpenStack field, this is only based on the information gathered within the circle.

Unfortunately, not all of the companies listed here, the most I know at the moment, is the--openstack Foundation, the most lucrative company in the OpenStack ecosystem, which is said to have a revenue of 70 million dollars a year on sponsorship fees.

The second may be Rackspace or mirantis, the most lucrative part of the system integration in the private cloud, the field that is the most competitive, and the market stage where OpenStack is now.

regrets

OpenStack Open Source Project since its inception in July 2010 has been more than four years, in the Paris summit met many old friends, from early on to participate in the OpenStack community, each summit will meet, just at the beginning, for OpenStack, everyone is full of expectations, More talk about technology and implementation, and now, when we meet again, people are more concerned about your business model, how business is doing.

There are some people, after a variety of attempts, always feel no idea (way out), then began to sigh, OpenStack this matter in the end?

As with many new technologies, the entire development of OpenStack follows the inherent rules of the technical maturity curve (the Hype Cycle), as shown in the following illustration:

What is the current stage of OpenStack? As the arrow shows, I think OpenStack has already passed the high expected peak (Peak of inflated expectations), is experiencing a bubble in the bottom of the valley (trough of disillusionment), for startups, This is the hardest time, this is the best time, because the bubble, we see the more real market, the entire industry, is also about to usher in a new round of development.

original link: OpenStack Commercial ecological Circle Analysis (Zebian: Zhou Xiaolu)

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