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OpenStack briefing
Vish
Ishaya gave a talk on OpenStack this morning at LISA. He opened up with
a history of how OpenStack came to be, then moved into a summary of
each of the components.
OpenStack has experienced a very rapid growth from Big Idea to it’s current state. The OpenStack Compute
portion had its first line of code written in April of 2010, a bare 32
months ago. I has moved from a in-house project at NASA, to a LLC owned
by Rackspace, to it’s current parent organization in the OpenStack Foundation.
In that time it has attracted several very large hardware makers, who
are writing plugins to make networking and storage infrastructure more
manageable for OpenStack.
This
integration is central to the OpenStack vision. They envision, much
like Vint Cerf mentioned in his keynote, a world with a standard for
Cloud services which enables interoperability beyond anything we see
right now. It’s a bold vision, and one being pursued by other groups as
well.
They’re
focusing on a 6 month release cycle, with the next iteration due out in
April of 2013. They’ve only just reached the point where they’re
talking about how to handle end-of-life code. It’s a tricky problem.
There are a few parallels between OpenStack and the CloudStack centric training sessions earlier this week. Both projects view their GUIs to be syntactic sugar on top of the real
interface: their APIs. No one who is scaling beyond a few boxes will be
using the GUI for anything but the broadest of metrics, all the guts
will be handled through API calls.
Both
projects are fully embracing programmable networking. OpenStack has an
edge here since the major hardware vendors are involved with the
project, but the same concept is being pursued by CloudStack. Networking
as we know it is in for radical changes in the next few years, and
storage isn’t far behind.