OpenStack is the upcoming revolution in the cloud
domain. It has already shaken the tech savvy world with its publicly available
source code. Yes! You heard it right. Open stack is fully open source and the
code is readily available over the internet. Most people ask me that you are an
evangelist of Big Data technology why you are diving into Openstack cloud
infrastructure. Well, let me pen down my thoughts on why I am beating my brain
out on this technology.
OpenStack was founded by the collaboration team of
RackSpace and NASA. They wanted to create a platform for cloud domain which
will be open sourced and having support for BigData and cloud based
applications.
The first question when I heard about this technology was
Why
OpenStack is needed?
Traditional
IaaS
|
OpenStack
|
Apps were having less knowledge of the
Infrastructure.
|
Not designed for legacy application, designed for new
technologies like big data and cloud.
|
Whether it is VMware, or Microsoft the
technology tend to be closed source
|
Completely
open source and community based, readily source code available.
|
Few Intelligent logic related
to the application’s knowledge on how to scale up or down
|
Dynamic scaling supported, Application has the
knowledge how to scale up and scale down.
|
Storage is file based or block storage based
|
Storage
will be object based, http based put and get request
|
Keeping my statement concise and clear, I want to give a
high level picture of the importance of OpenStack versus the traditional IaaS
through the above mentioned table.
Currently there are 160 companies which have signed for
OpenStack. The another question that popped in my mind was
Is
it a gamble to support OpenStack?
The answer
will be “Apparently not”. Currently if I want to name major cloud providers
they will be – Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine etc. It can be
personified as big countries like US, China, India, UK etc. To have a mutual
understanding and have a balance in economy all these major 20 players have to
follow some open standards which are defined in G20 summit. Unless there is a
common platform and some rules to abide it will be very difficult to balance
the economy. Likewise in the cloud domain considering the major players in
business there is still no standards which can be followed to have a mutual
understanding. Challenges like security and privacy of data sharing between 2
major cloud providers are still not addressed properly. Such standards cannot
be written on basis of proprietary clouds.
OpenStack is a platform that is
making those standards possible. It is a great platform, where companies like
Microsoft, Citrix, Hp, Dell etc. are contributing mutually to bring forth a
potent platform that will help cloud providers follow some set of guidelines
and standards.
Every cloud
has a pro and a con. My next question was it is not possible to have a fully
equipped cloud, then
What
are the cons of OpenStack?
In comparison
to the high availability of traditional Iaas, OpenStack currently has less
availability. It cannot guarantee a 99% uptime SLA aas in case of Microsoft
Azure. As it supports cloud and big data technologies, the network layer has to
be built intelligent logic, which is prone to failure, considering the nascent
stage of the platform.
But such
failures are hardly bothering the organizations to think a lot about OpenStack.
As it is readily available supported by open source technologies it is turning
out to be a wonderful platform to learn and gain experience of creating a
private or commercial cloud. With the advent of OpenStack mid size companies
are now jumping into the cloud infrastructure horizon and contributing to the
open community which ideally should be the essence of our technology.
Thus I felt
to eat the sweet fruit from the tree it is necessary to sow a productive seed.
Let me describe OpenStack a little bit more in my next blog. As of now I will
content myself with this introductory view.
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