Openstack private cloud, a shift in cloud strategy?
OpenStack is an open source platform that uses pooled virtual resources to build and manage private and public clouds. While i knew about it , but never really knew what is the use case for it with so many cloud providers around. Who would want private cloud, private cloud is dead per many cloud vendors. But the reality of cloud costing is hitting the enterprises hard, and i expect will hit even more harder if they continue to ignore it.
OpenStack is a combination of open source tools (also known as projects) that use pooled virtual resources to build and manage private, hybrid and public clouds, all of which can be highly customized per customer’s business needs. OpenStack is one of the leading open-source options for building the private cloud environment. Though enterprises lean towards cloud adoption, they are realizing that having a private cloud addresses many security concerns. As per an open stack survey, the deployment of openstack is going up year after year.
It seemed to be that openstack looked similar to virtualization. But its not quite same. OpenStack is an open source private cloud platform designed to manage distributed compute, network and storage resources in the data center. In principle, OpenStack aggregates physical resources into one big pool and allocates virtual resources out of this pool to users who can request them on-demand through a self-service portal or application programming interfaces (APIs). They use regular virtualization tools to enable cloud native capabilities.
One might think that OpenStack has the potential to do with the cloud market the same thing that Linux did to commercial Unix market, effectively eliminating players such as Sun, HP-UX, AIX. Unfortunately for OpenStack this analogy is only partially true. It does provide a free and open source software alternative for the commercial cloud. “Software only” is the key here. Yes, it runs on commodity hardware, but that’s not what makes cloud attractive. Getting rid of all the datacenter -management burden, pay for only what you use, the economy of scale which make public cloud attractive still hold true. Any strategy is business driven and this still holds true . So, while we may not see major impact on public cloud. We might see enterprises evaluating the dev and staging systems using Openstack as its cost effective over a long period of time and serves well from Capex and Opex perspective.
