OpenStack: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Given to the North Dallas Cloud Computing Group on May 21, 2014

1. OPENSTACK:
 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY GLEN CAMPBELL
 RACKSPACE HOSTING
 DEVELOPER RELATIONS
5. Are your servers pets?
6. OPENSTACK CONCEPTS • virtual infrastructure services • accessed via HTTP (RESTful) API • developed by an open-source community • highly configurable
7. OPENSTACK GOVERNANCE • Independent foundation • Board of Directors: some directors appointed by funding companies, others elected at-large • Technical Committee: elected by active members • Biannual releases and summit/workshops • Project Technical Leaders
8. OPENSTACK APIS • Native REST • EC2-compatible • Internal (python)
9. COMPUTE • Project “Nova” • Supports multiple hypervisors including KVM, Xen • Massively-scalable architecture • Working towards interoperable workloads
10. STORAGE • Project “Swift” • Elastic “blob” storage • Can scale to regional or even global deployments • Eventually consistent
11. NETWORKING • Project “Neutron” (formerly “Quantum”) • Dynamically create and manage L2/L3 networks • Works with plugins for virtual network devices (OpenVSwitch, others)
12. DASHBOARD • Project “Horizon” • Clean, simple user interface • Uses native API to communicate to services
13. SHARED SERVICES • Identity—“Keystone” • Image—“Glance” • Telemetry—“Ceilometer” • Orchestration—“Heat”
14. OTHER PROJECTS • OpenStack-SDKs • Savanna—Hadoop provisioning • Trove—Database • Bare metal—Ironic • Queue—Marconi
15. HOW TO INTERACT WITH OPENSTACK • Control panel • Command line client • cURL • SDK
16. FIRST Q&A
17. THE GOOD, 
 THE BAD, AND 
 THE UGLY
18. THE GOOD • Authentic competitor to Amazon, Google, Azure • Better than those for private clouds, not just public clouds • Stellar list of contributors and participants • Rigorous release schedule with rapid feature releases
19. MORE GOOD • True code compatibility between clouds • Tons of live production use examples • Superb documentation, including O’Reilly books • Security is above par for an open-source project • It’s free • You can run it anywhere, even on a relatively small PC
20. THE BAD • Project silos: sometimes inconsistent interfaces • No centralized product management: features still driven by developers, not by end-users • Very little cross-cloud workload compatibility (though that’s coming) • Features are not tied to releases but to code contribution • Rapid release schedule means it’s hard to stabilize
21. THE UGLY • Politics: companies are still competitors. “coopetition” • Dependency on key contributors • Personality conflicts sometimes show up in the code
22. WHAT’S NEW?
23. KEY HAPPENINGS IN ATLANTA • For the first time, an emphasis on end users • Stability: for the first time, no new major projects; defining OpenStack “core” • Many discussions on workload portability
24. FINAL Q&A
25. GLEN CAMPBELL GLEN.CAMPBELL@RACKSPACE.COM
 HTTP://GLENCAMPBELL.CO
 HTTP://DEVELOPER.RACKSPACE.COM
 @GLENC