Can OpenStack Save Open Source from the Cloud?

OpenStack lowers the cloud entrance barrier for enterprises, saving them from large public cloud providers.

By: Jadon Naas, Product Development Lead

Over the last few years, there has been significant turbulence in the open source community. Several major open source projects have been threatened by large public cloud providers offering project software as their own hosted cloud service, oftentimes duplicating the open source projects and offering them to public cloud customers in place of the original open source projects. This trend threatens open source revenue models and damages the integrity and growth of the projects.

By offering open source projects as or with their own services, larger providers have enjoyed significant commercial gain from open source software without contributing back to the open source community. The community has attempted to foreclose access and participation from large public providers with mixed success. For example, MongoDB tried changing their license to forbid running the open source software in an as-a-service capacity but ran into trouble as such restrictions strip the “open source” character from the license.

Because of the tension between large public cloud providers and the open source community, the relationship between the two groups is affecting the progression and innovation of open source projects. However, for organizations in the market looking to support the open source community, there is a competitive alternative to major public cloud providers.

What is OpenStack?

OpenStack is an open source enterprise-grade private cloud project that enables the creation of highly available, scalable and durable cloud environments for infrastructure-as-a-service.

OpenStack started as a collaboration between Rackspace and NASA to solve the problem of effectively harnessing the resources of thousands of individual server nodes. From its creation to now, OpenStack has grown worldwide with countless enterprises adopting the software to manage everything from small development clusters to huge data centers.

The OpenStack project is actually a collection of smaller software projects that turn bare metal hardware into a fully virtualized cloud hosting environment. Each project supplies different pieces of cloud functionality, APIs for programmatically accessing functionality, and provides integration points for other OpenStack services to further enhance the overall utility of the OpenStack cluster. A minimal OpenStack deployment consists of services for a compute hypervisor, networking, disk image storage, authentication, and user management. Many minimal deployments also include the web interface and block storage management services.

OpenStack provides features and functionality for provisioning virtual machines, called instances, and managing the storage volumes, networking, and security for the instances. It has projects for adding features including, but not limited to, cloud storage, S3-style object storage, container orchestration, DNS-as-a-service, load balancers-as-a-service, and bare metal hardware management and provisioning.

OpenStack Vs. Large Cloud Providers

OpenStack provides many of the same features that can be found with large public cloud providers. It possesses APIs and integrations for automating provisioning infrastructure by using popular tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Puppet. It provides rich user management and controls for large organizations looking for better control over their internal team resources and assets, while also providing a fully self-service platform for safely and securely provisioning server assets.

OpenStack instances can be highly available and resilient to data loss through using Ceph, the popular enterprise cloud-storage service, as a storage backend for OpenStack. The OpenStack services themselves, when properly configured and deployed, can also be run in a highly available fashion, guaranteeing uptime and reliability for the customers of the OpenStack infrastructure.

OpenStack is open source and runs on hardware the user controls. It provides enterprises with the freedom and control they need to successfully manage their infrastructure without the restrictions and costs of using a large public cloud provider.

Running OpenStack in a private cloud configuration also ensures users are not affected or bound by the actions or requirements of neighboring users, as would be the case with shared public cloud environments.

OpenStack in Action

OpenStack is a great enterprise-level alternative for organizations in the market for highly scalable cloud infrastructure, but deploying OpenStack into production is an extremely large undertaking requiring advanced knowledge across all aspects of data center and infrastructure management.

A team must be able to develop a solid network architecture, ideally optimized for east-west traffic, that secures traffic within the OpenStack cloud and maintains high availability and throughput. Hardware for providing compute and storage resources must be researched, tested, purchased, assembled, tested again, racked, powered, networked, and tested once again. Each OpenStack service requires a certain level of mastery to develop secure, stable, and well-performing configuration. Outside of OpenStack itself, there are a variety of tools and techniques for deploying OpenStack and managing day-2 operations for an OpenStack private cloud. IP addresses must be purchased, data center space must be arranged, and numerous other important tasks must be completed to have a production-ready OpenStack cluster.

A team looking to build and run their own OpenStack infrastructure from the ground up must consider these and other factors before exploring how well OpenStack can fit their needs. For all of OpenStack’s features and value, there is a long road to go from zero to OpenStack.

However, Flex Metal Private Cloud allows enterprises to enjoy the benefits and power of utilizing OpenStack without the cost and labor of setting up and maintaining OpenStack. With Flex Metal Cloud, enterprises can spin up a microcloud to test OpenStack in 15 minutes for a fraction of the cost compared to designing and building their own OpenStack platform.

InMotion’s Flex Metal Private Cloud is a combination of highly automated dedicated server deployments and OpenStack with Ceph. Often, OpenStack private clouds use shared control plans, limiting your access and control. However, with Flex Metal Private Cloud your OpenStack cloud is HyperConverged, giving you full access to the Control Plane, Monitoring Suite, Compute, and Storage. Flex Metal Private Cloud is currently in beta. You can chat with an InMotion Hosting Sales Engineer to learn more about applying for the beta program.

Future of OpenStack

OpenStack holds a great deal of promise as a competitive alternative to public cloud hosting. Through evolution and products like Flex Metal Cloud, OpenStack will continue to lower the barriers to adoption and become a strong alternative for enterprises. This will be ever more important as the shift to the cloud continues, giving hesitant or resource-limited enterprises a vehicle into the cloud. It also provides a viable alternative for enterprises using a cloud provider who is also their competition in another market. For example, Netflix is a customer of AWS but Netflix is also competition for Amazon’s streaming service.

OpenStack will be one of the most exciting spaces in cloud infrastructure, restoring the enthusiasm and innovation of the open source community and providing an option to large cloud providers. Its future growth ensures freedom and security for enterprises’ competitive expansion.