OpenStack,
which recently turned five years old, has quickly emerged as one of the
leading cloud platforms. However, despite its popularity, it's still
widely known for being hard to install and deploy.
But, installations and deployments don't often fail as a result of
OpenStack itself; more often, it's due to the amount of time and
resources it takes to get it up and running. And, aside from tech-savvy
early adopters, most operators with minimal cloud configuration
experience find deploying, scaling and operating OpenStack
overwhelming.
So,
for smaller teams with limited resources looking to deploy OpenStack,
what is the secret sauce to success? To learn more, I spoke with Mark Baker, Ubuntu Server and Cloud Product Manager at Canonical.
VMblog: Why is OpenStack getting so much traction?Mark Baker: Organizations
are starting to understand the need for flexible open source
infrastructure as a service platforms. OpenStack is the leading open
source cloud platform
with the backing of many leading technology vendors such as Intel, IBM,
HP, Oracle, Canonical and many more. Enterprises and carriers see
OpenStack as a way to deliver scale out on premise cloud based
applications whilst minimizing the risk of locking to a
particular vendor. The rapid pace of development ensures that OpenStack
will remain one of the most feature rich cloud platforms that end users
can take advantage of.
VMblog: What are the main advantages of building an OpenStack cloud on Ubuntu?
Baker: Ubuntu
has been the development operating system for OpenStack since the very
beginning of the OpenStack project. The release cycles of OpenStack and
Ubuntu are
aligned, both releasing new versions in April and October. The majority
of OpenStack deployments are on Ubuntu which creates a network effect
of community around OpenStack with Ubuntu. Canonical provides commercial
enterprise class support to 100s of OpenStack
customers giving us valuable insight into the needs of an operating
system to power OpenStack. Ubuntu OpenStack, the packaged OpenStack
Distribution from Canonical tracks upstream OpenStack closely and is
delivered with value added open source tools MAAS to
automate bare metal provisioning and Juju for service modelling and
orchestration.
VMblog: How does Ubuntu help businesses reduce complexity in their cloud environments and with OpenStack deployments?
Baker: Canonical
has developed the OpenStack Autopilot, a deployment and management tool
for Ubuntu OpenStack. Autopilot uses sophisticated tooling to deploy
OpenStack
in a reference architecture developed from Canonical's experience
supporting OpenStack end users in production. The Autopilot manages the
ongoing running of the cloud such as adding capacity or upgrading to a
new release of OpenStack. Canonical also offers
BootStack, a fully managed OpenStack cloud deployment on customer
premises or at a hosting partner of their choice. For a fixed fee per
server per day BootStack customers are able to consume OpenStack as a
utility service abstracted from the operational running
of the cloud.
VMblog: For a smaller team with limited resources looking to deploy OpenStack, what is critical to their success?
Baker: Critical
for success with deployments at smaller organizations is the right
tooling to ensure that the team is able to scale the cloud efficiently
without having
to take on additional staff or become experts in OpenStack Operations.
Tools such as OpenStack Autopilot from Canonical can address these
needs.
VMblog: Could you provide an example of a company successfully deploying on OpenStack using Ubuntu?
Baker: Deutsche Telekom, Yahoo Japan, Time Warner Cable, Sky
VMblog: How do you see Ubuntu fitting into the future of OpenStack?
Baker:
Ubuntu
will remain the most popular platform for OpenStack and scale out
compute workloads. Autopilot will continue focus on simplification of
OpenStack management
and become a popular way to deliver OpenStack with the right economics,
robustness and efficiency of operations.
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Once again, thank you to Mark Baker of Canonical for speaking to VMblog.com and answering a few questions about OpenStack and Ubuntu.