This is the first in some configuration and deployment guides for OpenStack Essex. This clearly has potential well beyond hyper-scale cloud and content providers. If VMware execs are not concerned about enterprise market share today, I expect they will be sooner, rather than later. It represents consumerism driving the market. ‘Ecosystem’, is the new, fun buzzword in the cloudy, smokey industry today. That is nothing new. We have always looked for more comprehensive forms of orchestration and typically that equates to yet another layer of abstraction. That is not a bad thing. That rise up the stack typically reduces operational cost and boosts productivity.
OpenStack today is a few core components couple together with a scheduler, sounds familiar, something along the lines of vCloud. As this matures over the next couple software life cycles (Ubuntu model of every 6 months), this has a very good chance, of likely becoming the kingpin Open Source alternative and possibly the gold standard of cloud efficiency.
That said it is raw and a beast in its current fashion. I have relied on scouring random anonymous posts from user ‘anonoymous529’ and friends to help debug issues and code that come up, along the all night battles in a build with so many moving parts such as this. This will develop over time, into a single, distributable package that is like everything else, abstracted to hide the underpinning pieces and parts that create the ecosystem. Leaders and executives with vision, which I am fortunately exposed to, (that really sounded like a suck up but hey, its true) will early adopt, with not too much risk. The reasons why are fairly apparent, it has very good parents, loads of industry heavy weights keeping it upright and very high priced, proprietary and closed alternatives.
Starting the series with an overview of what can be done with this code, which can orchestrate fantastics projects, like KVM, Nagios, OpenvSwitch to name a few, by providing a layer of abstraction. The next parts will be installation casts to hopefully save someone the many nights of being a zombie, grinding out a deployment in its current state. It is going to be a fun next few years.
Figure 1. Topology for this demo
Deployment guide and cast later this week!
