OpenSource Cloud Management - VirtualizedGeek Tech Talks Episode 9
Transcript
today is hi today is April 15th Monday 2013 you're listening to episode nine of virtualized Geeks Tech talks you know what uh I just have to uh have to listening to a old podcast talking about Cloud management and they got me to actually thinking about one of my older blog post on if should really even care about open- Source Cloud management software just a recap of what cloud management software is you know you think of uh traditional data center automation tools uh newer tools or I'm
not sure actually how new pup it is but tools that help you automate tasks within the data center whether it's provisioning storage uh bringing on new servers automating bringing servers online when you think about how do you do that in cloud computing which is creating an interface for your users to access to provision new servers or C creating a set of apis for programmers to program against that uh underlying software is cloud management software I actually wrote a blog post last week that compared vcloud to
uh openstack and one of the aspects that I really didn't discuss was open source versus closed Source if you've ever actually looked into Cloud management software again I have a couple of blog posts uh historically on virtualize geek and one of the if you're listening to this from my YouTube channel the one if you scroll down there there's a introduction to the cloud management software one of the ch Alles with Cloud management is that it is it's an extremely large problem and a extremely complicated problem
to solve from a software development perspective you're talking about automating storage which storage by itself you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on storage software so when you talk about automating storage software against multiple storage platforms likes to call it software defined storage or software defined X in general uh when you talking about working with multiple hypervisors such as vpar KVM hyperv Zen uh throw your uh any other hypervisor out there that might come on the market and then we talk about uh working with
different network platforms and the level of automation that needs to happen happen when it comes to provisioning networks creating private vlans uh creating um virtualized containers add multi- tennessy to it there's a awful lot that goes into designing uh Cloud management software there's a lot into if you're in an Enterprise there's an awful lot into selecting the requirements around your Cloud management Suite so the question comes kind of B next offer you know what's available out there on the market when it comes to Cloud management
you know I I I really dummy down the post from last week and only looked at two solutions vcloud and open stack but you have eucalyptus you have uh abiquo you have net app uh you have Dale has orchestration uh traditional orchestration software that they're now packaged as Cloud management software obviously uh each vendor has its own flavor of open stack and the bottom line got to if you're an Enterprise would you be willing to invest the time into customizing a open source solution so you
know you look at kind of the big open source Solutions out there uh probably the two that probably or we'll say three we'll say eucalyptus open stack and Cloud the cloud stack from Citrix if you look at the amount of effort needed to customize those applications for your environment not only customize those applications for your environment but also the talent that's needed to actually develop the extensions and customizations and hooks into your environment it makes you really wonder if traditional Enterprises have kind of the chops
for taking on those types of challenges you know you look at PayPal uh Netflix zingga internet companies you know those developers already thinking those terms that's required to either program for the cloud and manage infrastructures for the cloud so those are challenges I think those companies are most definitely willing to undertake but then when you think about the traditional Enterprise is the traditional Enterprise Willing to undertake those challenges in managing such complex software projects on their own obviously there's a market that's sprung up around uh
especially open big open source Pro projects like openstack that uh I think mantis is one of the companies that obviously gives the weight and the tool and development uh Personnel needed to customize those applications but even still managing those projects are uh not very simple I guess the argument can be made uh you know when you deploy vcloud uh when you deploy um what was noil's Cloud manager when you deploy avaco eucalyptus uh the commercial version I don't know how much easier those applications are to
deploy over a completely open- Source solution such as openstack but at least there is already vendors thinking about uh having a finished product that has kind of as close a shrink wrap solution as possible you know you look at just you know the complexity of of cloud requirements from the data center uh provider all the way down to the typical Enterprise customer they vary so widely that it's extremely difficult to wrap your arms around uh a solution that's why I'm pretty impressed kind of with the
open stack movement at least from the data center provider and the provider scope of it there's been a lot of uh movement there's been a lot of uh development and and progress over the past actually the past few months Rackspace actually has a installable package the so you know if you are a traditional vcloud type administrator that's used to getting package software and installing and configuring package software as opposed to breaking out your Linux and downloading the source code and then compile ing the source code
to have it installed in the system Rackspace has made it a little bit more simpler for you to deploy and at least test open stack out on uh parts of your development infrastructure but again you know that just getting the product installed is only just I wouldn't even say it's half of the battle a lot of it is really into the uh designing the orchestration designing the the the interaction with the appliances with the storage with the networking with the uh uh costing or uh performance
measuring uh uh products within your environment there's awful lot of plugs that need to be designed uh for open source software as well as if uh you know I'm this is not a slant towards one or another you know if you have vcloud and vcloud doesn't support your uh brand of Erp software that you use to measure uh Computing uh time and resources between departments what do you do do you uh hire a developer to develop that do you pressure if you're are you large enough
enough to pressure VMware to uh provide the hooks needed for you to create the business rules around uh consumption that you need for your Cloud for your vcloud implementation if you're a large uh contractor and you're deploying a community cloud and you have very specific security needs will vcloud be flexible enough for you to create the type of multi-tenancy security needs that you uh or tools that you need to manage your environment uh or would you have had to meet the investment and might as well
go with a open stack because then there there's not much more development effort associated with that type of implementation but back to the traditional Enterprise again uh just the thought around an Enterprise tackling those types of um challenges you know got me to thinking about where opack will fall in the hierarchy when it comes to managing private clouds and then moving from managing private clouds to managing hybrid clouds whereas the development effort what does that put kind of if not the reality the perception of Open
Source Solutions like open stack eukalyptus Abaco uh Cloud stack take your pick the challenge I think is pretty equal throughout the the industry the open source industry uh like to get your feedbacks on on this I'll continue to uh do these podcasts even if I only get one or two listeners a week I think it's helpful I just listened to a podcast that was back from February and it again it was very helpful so you know if you're listening to this uh in 2014 in Fe
and February the 15 or April the 15th I I appreciate you guys downloading the podcast and keep the comments coming thanks
