Stack contention for three open source cloud platforms

OpenStack has a very high popularity, Cloudstack has plenty of money, Eucalyptus and Amazon established a close relationship.

OpenStack, created jointly by Rackspace and NASA in 2010, is undoubtedly highly popular. Now it has established partnerships with giants such as At&t, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who are committed to OpenStack as the basis for their private cloud solutions.

Another Open-source cloud platform, Cloudstack, claims that Since Jie the code in April 2012 (note: Jie bought the cloud.com company in 2011 with 200 million dollars and acquired the technology) to the open source Apache Software Foundation, a 1 billion-dollar business transaction has been traded through their cloud platforms each year.

Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus) is the oldest of the three open source projects. Currently Eucalyptus has established a close technical partnership with Amazon Web Services, AWS, to ensure that companies can use mixed routes to run their private cloud on the eucalyptus stack and seamlessly switch to the Amazon public cloud when needed.

The fuse of the war was that all three projects were expected to enter the private cloud of the enterprise under construction as the mainstream source IaaS (infrastructure services). According to Campos Research & Analysis of the market research firm, a study of the data Center expansion plan, and orders from the data center Solution Provider Digital Realty Trust, three-fifths of respondents said Creating a private cloud is a major driver of its future data center expansion plan (a study that surveyed 300 it decision makers in large North American regions).

Global spending on private cloud hosting services will grow to $ more than 24 billion trillion by 2016, according to a new forecast by market research firm IDC. Most of the independent sources interviewed in this article illustrate their definition of private cloud and the deployment and use of private cloud in the enterprise. Although they thought OpenStack might gain a competitive advantage, they refused to point out who would be the ultimate winner.

Aneel Lakhani, director of virtualization and cloud computing research at Gartner, said: "All I can say is, among the three open source stacks, who has gained a competitive advantage at the outset, who is likely to be widely deployed in the enterprise in the future." "As with Linux, the tempting thing about open source cloud platforms is the low cost of entry and the good portability of applications."

The main difference between the three big open source stacks

There are some technical differences between the three open source stacks. At the JavaOne conference in the second half of 2012, Daniel Kranowski, an independent cloud application research and development consultant at Business algorithm, made a comprehensive and in-depth comparison of these stacks based on architecture, equipment, management capabilities, security, and availability.

Kranowski points out that Cloudstack has a holistic architecture that requires medium-scale time and expertise, a powerful GUI (graphical user interface) and a command-line interface similar to Amazon EC2 provide some basic security protection and load balancing capabilities.

For Eucalyptus,kranowski, the Eucalyptus architecture is made up of five parts, similar to AWS, with a moderate installation difficulty and limited GUI management capabilities that require a large amount of help from the appropriate command line. In addition, Eucalyptus has a key management security model. In this mode, five schema components need to be registered with each other.

Kranowski calls OpenStack a fragmented, distributed structure that is difficult to install. He points out that OpenStack is supported by multiple CLI (command-line interfaces), has a strong, token-based security system, and is able to make Swift (OpenStack massively extended redundant storage systems) a key fulcrum for high availability.

However, these technical differences do not cause much attention in the process of trying to prove why they are best suited to the corporate private cloud business. For example, the OpenStack camp said that the OpenStack semi-annual summit in mid-April attracted 3,000 participants and 500 code contributors, with the latest code version attracting 8,500 downloads in three weeks.

OpenStack's competitors say that in three stacks, OpenStack is the most difficult to integrate. "OpenStack is really just a technology, not a product," said Peder Ulander, vice president for Cloud Platform product marketing, Jie. ”

JC Martin is an ebay cloud architect. He is currently in charge of moving 50% of ebay's web sites to private cloud operations. Martin explained that the current OpenStack cloud is the company's second generation of products, the first generation of products based on the production platform. He said his team, in 2012, wanted to move to an open-source platform and, after extensive evaluations, eventually opted for OpenStack. Martin said: "You need a good team of developers." They have extensive experience in day-to-day system management, know how to write service automation software, and know how to write code to make services available to IT staff and business end users. ”

Forrester is in charge of the private IaaS (infrastructure, services) cloud, Lauren Nelson agrees with Ulander. He also argues that companies prefer to consume openstack through providers rather than download the release, and then create their own private cloud internally. "As far as I know, few companies are willing to take their top-tier deployments away from projects that are productive and allow them to do the job of creating IaaS internally." "said Nelson.

However, there are already dozens of companies that are either being created or have announced a OpenStack IaaS product plan. These companies must fully demonstrate the strategic advantages of their products to their customers.

Portability concerns

Some analysts have questioned whether some of the strategic features will become proprietary over time, reducing the significance of the open source stack. A strategic function is to avoid vendor lock-in problems by writing a cloud application that conforms to open source standards and considers the availability of some mobility options.

Torsten Volk, an analyst at the EMA (Enterprise Management Association), said: "The competition is almost over now, unless the private cloud makers that are creating OpenStack are deciding to provide some proprietary features that will get their attention in the marketplace, But doing so may lead to some openstack interoperability problems. ”

Lakhani of Gartner says mobility is the goal most companies today seek to create a private cloud. He thinks they will run for at least 12-18 months before private cloud users really need to run applications across OpenStack platforms. Volk points out that the OpenStack Foundation is currently trying to modify the platform authentication rules to help eliminate any problems that cause users to be locked on a openstack platform because of reliance on applications.

Industry watchers say Eucalyptus's strengths and weaknesses lie in their relationship with Amazon. The company, which claims to be compatible with Amazon's cloud software, has been downloaded tens of thousands of times, with 55.5 million of billions of dollars in venture capital (including $30 million trillion in 2012) saying that the APIs they provide can be associated with EC2, S3, EBS, IAM, autoscaling Elb Match 90% of AWS Popular services such as Cloudwatch. Therefore, applications that run on the Eucalyptus Private cloud, using AWS compliant services, can be transferred to the Amazon Cloud and continue to use the same services. Eucalyptus's CEO, Marten Mickos, said: "When users join our cloud services, they will become part of the Amazon ecosystem." ”

Forrester's Nelson believes that Eucalyptus is a complete technology solution that is easier for users to accept than OpenStack. At present, many enterprises are considering the development of eucalyptus into a powerful hybrid cloud platform. On the other hand, however, Amazon is not paying attention to the need for private cloud. This may not bode well for the Eucalyptus plan. "he said.

The Apache Cloudstack solution is also closely linked to the Amazon public cloud. The former provides an API translator, so applications written for Cloudstack can also be run on AWS. Jie's Ulander said: "The success of large-scale deployments shows that our stack is no longer a pilot project and a development/test deployment." They can provide support for the application that generates revenue. "(Receptacle World", Gundy compiled)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)