Why openstack matters

Red Hat gives customers this ability by providing a consistent platform across different deployment targets. The upside is that this is what customers using the public cloud have so far wanted. The downside is that this cedes control to Amazon. More worryingly, with each new OpenStack release, this interoperability is becoming harder and harder to achieve. Being API-compatible requires both syntactical and semantic similarity, and the latter is the more difficult part.

It will take years, and it may not be possible any longer. Red Hat is betting that on-premise enterprise datacenter deployments will continue to provide it with a good business. To claim this evolving space they focus on OpenStack and OpenShift. Making OpenStack Pay How will this conundrum be resolved?

Matt Asay. Related Posts. How Imaging Informatics is Transforming Healthc Customers develop docker container based applications and let Kubernetes handle the placement and workload management I blogged about a month or so ago about OpenStack use cases and the fact that OpenStack could potentially be used as primarily a container based workload provisioning technology.

With this move by Google, we are closer than ever to organizations running container based clouds. Expect to see organizations building out full scale vertical clouds that are only container based and OpenStack controlled The Kubernetes framework will be certified to work on OpenStack.

Kubernetes can manage container deployments as a whole, which makes it a huge win for anyone running real world applications that can span multiple containera and complex datacenter deployments. These containers are running on instances provisioned by Nova VM or baremetal. The last two holdouts being Amazon and Microsoft. And that is not a ding against these two behemoths. Amazon is an amazingly innovative business and constantly morphs from one avatar to the next.

Microsoft has not only managed to stay relevant but is also leading the move to the public cloud with a panoply of exciting offerings. All said and done, enterprise IT now has some amazing choices to architect workloads that their business leaders and stakeholders demand.

Like this: Like Loading Whitehurst makes the case that many advances we see in computer technology come not from performance advances, but from increasing openness and common standards. As more and more technology moves to the cloud, the importance of openness and compatibility is just as important, to ensure that computing in the cloud remains a rich environment for rapid innovation.

The openness of the infrastructure underlying the cloud may be one step further removed from the end user, but it is still of great importance. But why does open source matter when we're building the infrastructure of the cloud? Let's be honest. To most people, even to most developers, infrastructure isn't sexy. We rely on it every day, but honestly, all most of us care is that the infrastructure doesn't break. In the real world, though, infrastructure does break.

But those breaks aren't always technical glitches. Building your business around infrastructure you don't control means that you are dependent on the companies running that infrastructure. If something changed that required you to move your infrastructure to a new company, would you be ready? How much time, energy, and expense would go into preparing for the move?

I have no beef with any particular company offering infrastructure as a service IaaS , so I won't pick on one. But let's instead look at the notorious "Company X," who is is running my hypothetical cloud. I am hosting several mission-critical application, running on virtual machines which my support engineers have spent countless hours tweaking all the way to the operating system level to meet my needs.

My websites, my applications, and my data all live on Company X's infrastructure and are managed on their proprietary interface. If my infrastructure is managed with proprietary software, I'm going to be in for a world of hurt if I try to move. Portability matters. And openness matters. This is why infrastructure projects like OpenStack matter, particularly to the little guy.