After having travelled together in this wonderful OpenStack journey so far, we are now nearing the close. We have seen in the previous chapters how a private or a public cloud can be set up with OpenStack, and how we can choose to offer its flexibility beyond just the standard compute, storage, and networking aspects of an IaaS cloud by adding several other OpenStack components.
In this chapter, we will look at where OpenStack currently stands in the market and in the near future. We will also look at some of the major deployments and who is backing them. We will look at how OpenStack clouds will look in the future. We will conclude this book by looking at a more important question: What is in it for you?
To be specific, we will discuss the following major topics in this chapter:
- The different OpenStack distributions
- Seeing OpenStack in action via several use cases
In this book, we have installed the OpenStack components using the aptitude package manager after adding the Ubuntu repositories. We could have installed the components in several other ways, and there are several distributions available, which provide either the packages or scripts needed to install the system. We can, of course, install the components from the source by cloning the Git repository for the packages and using the install script, but several vendors have come up with their own distributions.
Devstack is a development distribution, as the name suggests, and it can install all the components either in a single box or multiple ones that can be chosen at installation. This is a good and quick way to test the features of the different components apart from developing them further and fixing bugs, if you choose to contribute. Devstack is available for installation on Ubuntu, Fedora, and RHEL currently, but can also be installed on the other distros as well.
The operating system distribution vendors are creating distributions of OpenStack, which can be easily installed on their respective operating systems by packaging and making the distributions available as repositories. In this very book, we have used an OS distribution of OpenStack (Ubuntu). Let's look at the major ones.
Ubuntu OpenStack is designed to run on the Long Term Support (LTS) editions of Ubuntu and has releases for Kilo, Juno, and Icehouse. It also has the support of most popular hypervisors right from ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, Qemu, and LxC (Linux Containers). You can also get a production-grade 24x7 support.
Several vendors offer their products and services along with OpenStack. These vendors range from Hypervisor vendors with tight integration to their platform to cloud providers providing public, private, or hybrid offerings. There are certain other offerings based on just a few components of the stack, but not the full stack, such as the storage service alone.
Since an exhaustive list will be pointless as new vendors are being added very often, the list will soon be obsolete. We will, therefore, look at some key and famous offerings.
At the time of writing the book, VMware-integrated OpenStack was the only distribution that came from a hypervisor vendor. You can get this for free, if you have an enterprise plus license from VMware. This is integrated nicely into the vSphere web client and deploys a production grade, highly available OpenStack in just a matter of a few clicks, and is tightly integrated with the ESXi Hypervisor. The latest available version is based on the Kilo release.
This is slowly but surely becoming quite popular among enterprises that have already made huge investments in terms of VMware licenses for hypervisors.
Rackspace needs a special mention in this book, not only because they run a famous public cloud based on OpenStack, but also because if it was not for them, we would not even have OpenStack, as Rackspace and NASA actually started this project in 2010. They are still, however, on Icehouse with the Xen hypervisor.
In the FOSS segment for cloud products, OpenStack and Eucalyptus were two products that were solving the same problems. HP acquired Eucalyptus and has added it to its Helion cloud offerings. However, what most people do not realize is that there are two offerings, and if someone wants AWS-like APIs they can choose HP Helion Eucalyptus, or if they prefer OpenStack, they can choose the OpenStack version of it.
Cisco has an OpenStack distribution running on its UCS chassis and provides mostly private cloud solutions for enterprises that enable an easy deployment of a supported OpenStack installation in their datacenters.
Mirantis OpenStack is one of the most flexible and at the same time, an open distribution of OpenStack and more importantly, you can purchase support here. In addition, the hypervisor support for this distribution ranges from Xen, Docker, Hyper-V, ESXi, LXC (Linux containers), QEMU, and KVM. Actually, this is an exhaustive list of what OpenStack supports (other than the bare metal provisioning that is code named Ironic). So if you want more supported choices in terms of hypervisors, look no further.
SwiftStack is an example of a partial OpenStack implementation. It only implements as the name implies, Swift, the object store service of OpenStack. Therefore, this forms a choice if you want to use an object store (AWS S3 equivalent). You can also connect this with your in-house Swift deployment of OpenStack.
There are several vendors (aside from the ones we previously discussed), whose public clouds are designed using OpenStack. Here are a few to name (in no particular order):
- Internap (www.internap.com)
- Anchor Cloud (www.anchor.com.au)
- Ultimum Cloud (ultimum.io)
- Dream compute (www.dreamhost.com)
- Kloud open (https://kionetworks.com)
- Elastx ops (elastx.com)
These are a few in a long list of service providers working with OpenStack. This list continues to change very frequently, and in order to see the most updated list, be sure to visit the OpenStack market place for the different distributions:
After having understood the services, the purposes of the services, and the architecture, here are a few things to keep in mind while choosing a distribution if you are looking to implement OpenStack for your company's private cloud:
- Service Level Agreements (SLA): You need to take a look at the kind of support and the SLAs that the different providers offer.
- Hypervisor support: Not all the distributions support all hypervisors, even if the underlying OpenStack does. You should choose the distribution that supports the ones you are using currently and intend to use in the future. Also, read the fine print as to what happens when you configure OpenStack with the hypervisors that the distribution does not support—it would work, but it might invalidate the entire support contract, or just the hypervisor that is not supported.
- Operating system support: Almost all the distributions support Windows and Linux, but say if you need Solaris support, you may have to get a distribution that does this.
- Update speed: We should also check the frequency at which a distribution is updated and how quickly it is updated after a release cycle of OpenStack, patches, and so on, especially if you are anxious to get the new features and like to be on the cutting-edge side of things.
- Lock in: Check whether the distribution locks into some proprietary technology, such as hardware or software. You may have to decide whether this is something your company can live with.
- Additional tools: Many of the distributions sometimes package additional tools that help to manage or administer OpenStack better. For example, Suse offers a Suse Studio, which makes it easy to manage templates and converts them from one format to the other.
In order to help with the choosing, let's look at the following table, which lists the hypervisor and operating system support for a few distributions normally used in the private cloud world.
|
Distribution name |
Hypervisor support |
OS support |
|---|---|---|
|
Ubuntu OpenStack |
Hyper-V, QEMU, KVM, ESXi, LXC |
Linux, Windows |
|
Red Hat OpenStack |
ESXi, KVM |
Linux, Windows |
|
VMWare Integrated OpenStack |
ESXi |
Linux, Windows |
|
Mirantis OpenStack |
Xen, Docker, Hyper-V, ESXi, LXC, QEMU, KVM |
Linux, Windows |
|
Oracle OpenStack for Solaris |
Solaris |
Solaris |
|
Oracle OpenStack |
Xen, KVM |
Linux, Windows, Solaris |
|
Cisco OpenStack |
QEMU, KVM |
Linux, Windows |
|
IBM Cloud Manager |
z/VM, PowerVM, ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM |
Linux, Windows |
|
Suse Cloud |
Xen, Hyper-V, ESXi, KVM |
Linux, Windows |
|
Dell Red Hat Cloud |
KVM |
Linux, Windows |
|
HP Helion OpenStack |
ESXi, KVM |
Linux, Windows |