OpenStack which is of Red Hat's distribution raises concerns

There is a growing group of OpenStack distribution providers and some industry watchers who believe fragmentation of the cloud standard could negatively impact cloud software providers and customers.

Red Hat Inc. launched its own distribution of OpenStack this week. Rackspace launched public cloud services based on the open source cloud software stack earlier this month, and other companies with OpenStack offerings on the market include Hewlett-Packard Co., Canonical's Ubuntu, Dell Inc., Piston Cloud Computing and Nebula.

OpenStack isn't just a package like other open source tools, said Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn. It's an entire framework, which means it will be more difficult to keep the different components in lockstep with one another. Also, any given OpenStack product could theoretically contain whatever combination of those components its creator feels like including, along with proprietary extensions.

Red Hat said any changes it makes to the OpenStack standard will be fed back into the community, but according to Leong, "If your distro doesn't have a lot of changes, then it doesn't have a whole lot of differentiation. But if it does have changes, then you have fragmentation."

Fragmentation makes supporting OpenStack difficult for users and for the management tools ecosystem, Leong said.

For other experts, the growing number of distributions is not a sign of fragmentation, but of growing maturity in the OpenStack market -- especially now that there is a Red Hat version.

"Generally speaking, all these multivendor foundations need one or more distros because there are a class of customers who won't take the product without support," said Mike Norman, analyst with The Virtualization Practice LLC, a virtualization and cloud consultancy based in Wrentham, Mass. "It's a sign of maturity that Red Hat is picking up OpenStack, producing a distro and committing to proper enterprise support and product lifetime."

"The important part is that everyone's sticking to the same [application programming interfaces]," said Chris Perry, cloud architect for DreamHost, a hosting provider based in Brea, Calif. "Even if people implement it in a slightly different way on the back end, the APIs are the same pretty much across the board."

Norman is also encouraged by the changes he's seen in the governance of OpenStack over the last year. Previously, OpenStack was too much under Rackspace's thumb for Norman's liking, but with the establishment of the OpenStack Foundation in April, it has become more of an independent organization, he said.

The Foundation will hold its first election next week as part of "the final critical steps toward giving [OpenStack] a final independent home," said Jonathan Bryce, president of the OpenStack Project Policy Board.

The release, dubbed Folsom, will be released in October.

Right now the open source community is on OpenStack's side, but it's important for the Foundation's participants to start seeing revenue soon, said James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research.

"If OpenStack fails by the fall of this year or the first quarter next year to really start driving revenue, there are a lot of companies that are participating in the OpenStack community in an oftentimes passive way who really need revenue from this, [who] could jump ship," he said. "They have a ticking clock [and] they've really got to move fast."

Red Hat to release enterprise-ready OpenStack package

OpenStack will run on the company's flagship Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat plans to release an enterprise-grade version of the OpenStack open source software for hosting IaaS deployments. The company has posted an unsupported preview edition of the package, ahead of its full commercial release expected in early 2013.

"From the Red Hat perspective, we feel the next release of OpenStack will be the right one to begin offering enterprise-grade services," said Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. "With the preview release, customers can get experience in operationalizing and deploying [OpenStack] and, most importantly, get their voices heard before our product is done."

Red Hat's release of OpenStack will run on the company's flagship Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version has been tested to work on RHEL 6.3 and requires Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) to operate. The company has already started working with a select group of customers that are trying the software.

The first commercial release will be based on the upcoming Folsom release of the OpenStack, due in September. The preview edition, in addition to OpenStack, will also include a number of Puppet modules to ease configuration. The commercial release will also come with an installer and greater integration with Red Hat's CloudForms hybrid cloud management software as well.

Begun two years ago by NASA and Rackspace, the OpenStack project is an effort to create a stack of open source software that can be used to provide IaaS cloud services. A modular software stack, OpenStack consists of separate programs to provide compute, object storage, image management, and other needed services for running cloud operations. The project rapidly gained popularity, attracting at last count the development efforts of over 3,300 programmers and 185 companies.

Red Hat has been devoting increasing amounts of its engineering efforts to open source cloud software projects. In April, Red Hat joined the OpenStack Foundation, which will shortly take reins as the governing body for maintaining the OpenStack project. Currently it is being managed by cofounder Rackspace, which wants to move the project to a more vendor-neutral party. In April, the project leaders released a survey that found that Red Hat was the third largest contributor to the project, after Nebula and Rackspace.

Morphlabs Delivers Compact OpenStack Infrastructure, Works with Dell

The OpenStack open source cloud platform that, along with CloudStack and Eucalyptus, has lit a fire under those interested in flexible, new cloud solutions, has just celebrated its second anniversary. In July of 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA launched the OpenStack initiative, and since then it has been appearing in new distributions, including Rackspace's own one. Now Morphlabs is offering its OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure, dubbed mCloud Helix.

"This Morphlabs solution is valuable to customers interested in a simple deployment for a compact private cloud," said John Igoe, executive director of Cloud and Big Data Solutions at Dell, in conjunction with the announcement. "The combination of Dell PowerEdge C servers and Morphlabs' software enables customers with a streamlined, efficient approach to private cloud infrastructure."

The mCloud Helix solution is purportedly designed to be very scalable, letting users add mCloud Helix units as compute and storage needs increase. The announcement also points to some interesting partnerships, including one with CoreSite, a national provider of powerful, network-rich data centers, which has optimized its infrastructure for customers to deploy their own mCloud Helix units.

As we've said before, the key with all these new cloud platforms will be top-quality support. Through partners such as Dell, it sounds like Morphlabs will be distributing support efforts across hardware and software implementations and vendors.

"The mCloud Helix empowers customers to take home and immediately deploy private clouds using best-of-breed open source software and hardware without requiring a massive CapEx investment," said Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo, in the announcement. "Working closely with Dell, we have packed the high performance benefits of mCloud into a remarkably small footprint, making it possible for small and medium businesses to grow industry standard private clouds to match workloads without investing in massive, complex build-outs."

Open Source, the Fuel for Cloud Disruption

Open source has proven to be a good option for building, managing, and delivering scalable infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) clouds. Typically, most open source cloud platforms support multiple virtualization technologies, giving enterprises a range of choices from multiple vendors of closed as well as open source technologies. Some examples are Eucalyptus, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, OpenNebula, Red Hat OpenShift, Xen Cloud Platform Project (XCP), and the newest kid on the block, Citrix Cloudstack 3. While some apprehension still exists around open source use, there is a shift in attitude as enterprises look to capitalize on efficiency and technologies like virtualization and cloud computing as these become highly essential components in IT architecture.

OpenStack is a massively scalable cloud operating system that helps in the delivery and management of infrastructure. OpenStack is initiated by Rackspace and NASA, and is supported by almost 180 organizations, including Intel, Dell, Canonical, AMD, Cisco, HP, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, and IBM. It is a collaborative effort by thousands of developers and technologists globally aimed at helping SMBs, service providers, data centers, corporations and researchers roll out and leverage industry-grade public and private clouds.

Cloud Foundry is an open PaaS initiated by VMware enabling users to choose from multiple deployment clouds, development frameworks, and application services. Eucalyptus has been in the space for more than three years and it helps with implementing IaaS clouds. It also provides a great hybrid cloud deployment option since it supports Amazon AWS application programming interfaces to build and deliver applications atop. Red Hat's OpenShift, an auto-scaling PaaS, is also getting traction and support from many organizations. XCP helps with server virtualization and building cloud platforms for enterprises using Xen hypervisor. OpenNebula is another open source standard for data center virtualization. It offers customizable solutions for the management of virtualized data centers based on Xen, VMware, and KVM. Citrix CloudStack on the other hand is supported by almost 50 organizations including software and service providers like RightScale, Engine Yard, Opscode, CumuLogic, Puppet Labs, Hortonworks, Equinix, Juniper Networks, and ScaleXtreme.

Today, the above referenced open source platforms and technologies are being adopted and leveraged by small to large organizations for different reasons and for different capacity. Some are being used to create and deliver internal infrastructure, applications or workloads; while others are being leveraged to build public cloud services. Similarly, the open source virtualization platforms like Xen and KVM are already a critical piece of many cloud solutions today. One such example is Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. AWS IaaS cloud is perhaps the most popular public cloud - estimated to be a $1 billion cloud business.

Amazon's core cloud service EC2 (compute service) is powered by Xen. This alone should provide some reassurance to people who are still skeptical, but despite all the advancements in open source cloud platforms, CIOs have been apprehensive about open source software because of the absence of a formal support infrastructure. Some other concerns include security, lack of proper roadmaps, complexities tagged with IP rights, and capabilities to evaluate and assert endorsements to open source projects. But it's not all negative - open source innovations are acting as a catalyst to cause positive shifts in computing paradigm; ultimately helping CIOs, and we continue to see the market size of open source cloud software get bigger day by day.

Open source is also driving another interesting change. When it comes to contributing to open source initiatives, it's all about co-creation. Today, CIOs or service providers are all expected to "do more with less," which results in tight constraints on budgets. Timelines foster the culture of co-creation through collaborative efforts rather than competition. A good thing is that now organizations are getting multiple open source options to solve problems and they are able to choose the specific one that will best help meet their requirements. We've reached a point where it's important for organizations to create a strategy around open source platforms, and target the ones that align with business propositions that help meet strategic goals rather than focusing on tactical goals only. In the context of cloud computing, experts believe that open source is promising to make the technologies behind the cloud a commodity.

Sometimes people tend to misunderstand the cost model associated with open source and hence fail to account for the inevitable costs as well. There seems to be confusion between a no-cost vs. low-cost option. Although open source software doesn't incur any cost for acquisition since there is no license fees or annual charges, organizations still need to account for administration and support costs. In any case compared with commercial software platforms, total cost of ownership will be significantly lower.

Security has always been a talked-about issue with open source and it's a very valid concern. In the new era of open source innovations, the fact that communities and participations sponsored by technology organizations are not only getting stronger, but also fueling the advancement through co-innovation patterns, has changed the perspective on open source security as well. Open source software is available to anyone and everyone to use and work with. This means a large community of developers globally contribute to the code; they inspect it, review it, test it for various scenarios, and analyze the code for vulnerabilities. This process makes the open source software more secure, delivering the quality software back, to test and inspect it again and again. It keeps evolving all the time, while intelligence is added by many brains. In the context of a commercial software product, the vendor organization helps you solve the problem; and in the open source scenario, perhaps the whole technology world conspires toward your success.

There are other advantages of open source in cloud as well as virtualization - affordability (lower TCO), flexibility to customize, transparency in the stack, no vendor lock-in, better interoperability, and commitment toward portability when it comes to migrating workload. Having a choice of selecting technologies, frameworks and tools to build applications and peripherals proves to be another advantage. The value of community participation and support from a vast base of developers across geographies brings more firepower and extra leeway.

No doubt closed source projects will continue to have markets; however, they will be put under constant pressure due to the impact and penetration open source platforms are creating and are capable of advancing. Open source is very much happening and cutting across all the layers of cloud architecture. This means organizations today can't afford to ignore open source and will need to either do talent investment, experimentation or lay out a full-blown strategy when thinking about cloud as an enabler. The future may belong to businesses that take on new technology bets - try different computing and delivery approaches, experiment with constantly evolving technologies that are more open and collaborative.

Single application blueprint self-service open hybrid cloud Nirvana

With its fingers in the OpenStack open source cloud platform pie and its personal interest in advancing its own (still OpenStack-compliant) cloud management platform, Red Hat has this week announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms calling it an "open hybrid cloud management platform" to act as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer offering.

Originally slated to be a standard cloud IaaS, CloudForms now "open hybrid" status aims to go some way to addressing the "issue of the moment" that may be holding back some cloud computing deployments i.e. who controls what?

The cloud challenge

As 451 Research analyst Rachel Chalmers put it, the IT department still needs to centralise "deployment, management and integration" when it comes to cloud-based compute resources.

"A platform like CloudForms makes it possible for organisations to build clouds that span their in-place infrastructure and expose it to a new generation of developers and end users, all without relinquishing control," said Chalmers.

Red Hat chief technology officer Brian Stevens has positioned CloudForms as a "comprehensive platform" in its own right, but one that is open to "encompassing" a wide variety of infrastructures, of many types, and from many vendors, but with no single vendor lock in.

"With CloudForms, enterprises can build and manage an open enterprise hybrid cloud, providing infrastructure choice spanning across multiple virtualisation platforms and extending to public cloud resources, and can build and manage applications in their cloud, enabling enterprises to use their cloud for their workloads," said the company, in a press statement.

Self-service, no waiting

Red Hat puts a lot of effort into talking up the so called "self-service capabilities" of its cloud offering -- and this is a term that you are going to hear more and more when company's try to describe how their cloud offering satisfies IT administrators' needs for control and governance.

We'll also now most likely hear about the kind of wider interoperability that Red Hat is trying to fuel interest in. So look for the companies talking about a single application blueprint across multiple virtualisation technologies.

"We recognise that for a complete open hybrid cloud, enterprises need more than just the management layer -- they also need openness and portability across compute, data/services, programming models and applications," said Red Hat's Stevens.

New Wakanda Beta released by 4D

Unique Stack of Integrated Technologies Programmable With JavaScript Provides Simplified Development for Web and Mobile App Developers

O'Reilly Fluent Conference -- 4D, a leading provider of open source integrated application development solutions, today announced Wakanda Beta 2, the newest beta version of its popular Wakanda JavaScript development platform. With Wakanda, developers have a first-ever full stack JavaScript development platform for Web and mobile business applications. The new Wakanda foundation relies on best-of-breed technology -- Web and mobile applications, a development studio, client framework, NoSQL database, server and model-driven architecture. The company will offer both an Open Source community and commercial version of Wakanda. Web applications developed with Wakanda are easily deployed on the Cloud.

Developers can use Wakanda to program the entire application stack with JavaScript and its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) assures high levels of re-use and decreases in maintenance costs. Both the user interface (UI) and the data model of the application are designed with a powerful WYSIWYG designer from Wakanda Studio, and the Wakanda client framework and GUI designer leverage the full power of HTML5 and CSS3. The NoSQL object datastore natively speaks REST/HTTP and server-side JavaScript (SSJS). Unlike with SQL databases, there is no need to use an ORM layer. There is no hidden SQL generation. Wakanda natively understands the business logic.

Built on 25 years of business application experience and with the support of an active developer community, Wakanda's new development environment can be extended with third-party widgets, libraries and server modules. In addition, Wakanda's open source environment supports developers in adding connectors to their preferred databases. The entire Wakanda solution supports full industry standard compliance, including JSON, REST/HTTP, W3C, and CommonJS.

"With this newest version of Wakanda we are providing one open, complete solution for all Web and mobile business application development," said Laurent Ribardiere, Wakanda CTO and creator. "Developers no longer need to learn, integrate and maintain different technologies in different languages -- Wakanda delivers a cohesive JavaScript stack instead of disparate technologies. With Wakanda, developers can program their entire application with JavaScript from end-to-end."

Wakanda Offers Powerful JavaScript Programming Features In addition to providing end-to-end JavaScript programming, Wakanda leverages existing libraries and third party solutions on both client and server, and is cloud-ready. A complete list of individual features of Wakanda Studio, Wakanda Server and Wakanda Framework grouped by functional areas of the platform can be found at http://www.wakanda.org/features/ and includes touch for mobile development, pure multi-threaded JavaScript, NoSQL Object Datastore and many other new features.

In an IDC White Paper, Al Hilwa, Program Director, Application Development Software for IDC found, "Wakanda is a well-designed end-to-end application platform that comes complete with a graphical development environment catering to modern developer requirements... The application development approach supported by Wakanda abstracts much of the complexity in developing enterprise applications rapidly and productively." (IDC White Paper, sponsored by 4D, Inc., Wakanda: Blending Traditional Developer Productivity with Modern Web Architecture and Standards, October 2011)

Availability and Pricing Wakanda production release will be available in June in both community and commercial versions. The community version of Wakanda will be free. Monthly subscriptions for commercial licenses and developer support will start at $35 per month for one developer and will include a royalty-free unlimited deployment right.

Three different Cloud Services for Public Beta lauched by HP

HP has released three cloud services, HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage, and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network, for public beta testing.

HP Cloud Services, created with OpenStack technology, is an open-source development architecture that provides storage in the cloud for developers and organizations developing Web applications. It includes a management console, which provides analytics into demand patterns, operational performance, and resource use. OpenStack, founded by NASA and Rackspace Hosting, is a free cloud computing platform created by developers and cloud-computing technologists.

HP Cloud Compute provides customizable, scalable virtual servers accessible from any device with Web access. It includes software, control panels, and RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs) to let users run instances and manage the cloud according to their organization's needs. Appropriate Cloud Compute applications include large-scale data processing, basic Web applications, and multi-tier deployments.

HP Cloud Object Storage provides unlimited scalable data storage in the cloud for any file types, including video and audio. It allows organizations to add or remove any amount of storage capacity for backup and archiving on demand using GET, PUT, and other object requests. Data is accessible anywhere there is Internet access via REST-based APIs. Cloud Object Storage can also serve static content for Web applications.

HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) is powered by Akamai, and data is cached and distributed using a global network of edge servers. It provides a variety of ways to access data, such as through CLI bindings, jclouds, Ruby Fog, and RESTful APIs. CDN works together with HP Cloud Object Storage to provide data access, compresses files for faster delivery, and uses secure sockets layer for encryption.

For all three services, HP provides data protection using secure data centers, as well as intrusion prevention, role-based access, automated and manual code audits, nose hardening, and application threat analysis. In addition, objects are duplicated and available in multiple zones.

Standing Cloud Extends Capabilities with Support for HP Cloud Services

"Standing Cloud powered by HP Cloud Services" simplifies cloud application deployment and management for HP Cloud Services customers

Standing Cloud (www.standingcloud.com), a leading provider of cloud application management solutions, today announced support for the newly launched HP Cloud Services (http://hpcloud.com), providing HP Cloud Services customers with a vastly simplified way to deploy, manage and distribute applications in the cloud.

The new offering, Standing Cloud powered by HP Cloud Services, leverages HP Cloud Services' infrastructure capabilities and elements of the Standing Cloud Marketplace to provide developers, enterprise users and ISVs with one-stop application hosting, installation and management via scalable virtual servers on demand. It integrates directly with HP Cloud Services and the OpenStack® API.

"We believe that Standing Cloud and HP Cloud Services share a common vision of the infrastructure cloud - one that is intuitive, interoperable, open source-based and user-focused, with a minimum of system administration overhead." said David Jilk, CEO of Standing Cloud. "This collaboration builds on that promise, and we're pleased to be working with them."

The Standing Cloud Marketplace is a comprehensive solution to the challenges faced by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers in moving up to the application layer.

Its intuitive user interface, broad catalog of open-source applications and development platforms, and automated deployment and lifecycle management features help cloud providers meet the application needs of their customers, while its extensive white label configurability meets the branding and integration needs of the provider.

Available application lifecycle management features include automated application monitoring, backups, single-click version upgrades, application cloning, status logs, a browser-based terminal window, and a range of resource scaling options.

The availability of Standing Cloud powered by HP Cloud Services coincides with today's public beta launch of HP Cloud Services.

OpenStack gains momentum in Open Source Cloud Platform

Rackspace, in partnership with NASA, began its efforts to create an open source platform for the cloud back in 2010. Unlike other standards efforts that were already underway, OpenStack provided actual software providers with the ability to create their own cloud products. Since that time, dozens of companies, like Dell, IBM, and Cisco, have joined the effort to create a common cloud infrastructure. Although Rackspace has been a vocal proponent of the platform, until now the company leveraged the proprietary SliceHost technology it acquired a four years ago as the basis of its product cloud portfolio.

As noted on Midsize Insider, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced the launch of its OpenStack-based cloud product family weeks before Rackspace. However, Rackspace's move is likely to garner more industry attention. Not only is Rackspace one of the first contributors to OpenStack, it is also the biggest cloud infrastructure provider after Amazon Web Services (AWS). Any missteps by Rackspace could have a tremendous impact on industry adoption of the open source cloud operating system, which is why the company is being cautious in its deployment strategy.

According to CMSWire, Rackspace is allowing registration for Cloud Servers, the company's core offering, and will begin providing access on May 1, 2012. Rackspace has not provided firm dates for other products in the portfolio. The cloud-based MySQL offering, Cloud Databases, and monitoring solution, Cloud Monitoring, are in early access, which signifies that the products are "production workload ready but have limited support available, no service commitments and no billing."

The remaining products, Cloud Control Panel, Cloud Block Storage, and Cloud Networks, are available in preview. Nobody is surprised that Rackspace is transitioning its cloud products to OpenStack; however, most industry insiders did not expect the company to move so quickly. Rackspace might have felt pressure to move forward after Citrix abandoned OpenStack in favor CloudStack, another open source cloud standardization effort.

All of the activity around OpenStack and other cloud standardization efforts isn't just a clever marketing exercise or a petty feud among technology companies. Cloud use has increased rapidly, but cloud standards are still in an embryonic state. In fact, it was only last year that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) approved a common definition of cloud computing. Programming interfaces, architecture, storage strategy, and almost every other aspect of cloud services can vary among vendors. This lack of mature standards can make it extremely difficult and expensive for organizations to move between cloud providers if they are unsatisfied with a vendor or their needs change.

Until standards are defined and widely accepted, businesses using the cloud are at a relatively high risk for vendor, data and solution lock-in. These risks are common with new and emerging technology. However, the cloud can amplify these challenges because of how broadly and deeply the technology can be integrated. The risk only grows as organizations store more data and build more solutions in the cloud. The impact of these issues goes beyond technology teams. Challenges moving between cloud vendors or services can also reduce business agility and competiveness by increasing the time, effort, and investment required to modify solutions and processes.

IBM & Red Hat Will Reportedly Join OpenStack

IBM and Red Hat are supposed to step out of the background and officially join the OpenStack movement.

According to GigaOm, they could sign up this week or next week at the OpenStack Spring Conference.

IBM was on a list of contributors to the open source cloud project in February. Red Hat reportedly did a lot of the packaging for the new Essex release of OpenStack that should make it easier to bundle in Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu.