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OpenStack is a platform for creating an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). So it's running on some physical machines, and manages your physical machines to sli

by yeukhon 10y ago

OpenStack is a platform for creating an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). So it's running on some physical machines, and manages your physical machines to slice into VMs. There you get to manage / create networks, storage, etc. Basically running a private cloud in your own datacenter/basement/office. Openstack has grown more than just compute. It has a supposedly compatible interface for S3 an object storage system, for example. New components are created after major cloud services like AWS, pretty much. To manage containers or manage applications, you can use CloudFoundry/Kubernetes, but to manage the "infrastructure as a platform" (I want more machines, I want some bucket, I want to run some Lambda function, I want to upload new OS images) you need something like OpenStack. So if you want to build AWS/Digital Ocean, OpenStack is required.

dc2447 10y ago
Absolutely. You get it. It's frustrating to read people comparing container technologies or worse container schedulers with OpenStack. Apples and oranges. If you are planning on running containers on premise you need something from managing the IAAS side of things. OpenStack is excellent at IAAS and is the foundation for running higher level abstractions and services on top.
- justinhensley 10y ago
  I said elsewhere in the thread. If there is a better IaaS solution than OpenStack, then I would love to know about it. I disagree with you that you need an IaaS solution to run containers on-prem, but realistically, yes you do need an IaaS solution
  - doublerebel 10y ago
    I would go with Joyent SDC/Triton, it has a much more mature container and VM platform. It's incredible it's so missed in these comments.
deleted 10y ago
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WorldMaker 10y ago
This seems to get back to an interesting discussion I had with someone early in the OpenStack efforts: as a developer OpenStack doesn't directly interest me because I don't care about infrastructure. Where OpenStack had a possibility to win was to provide options for infrastructure agnosticism: if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt). From that perspective, container solutions are delivering a better developer proposition than OpenStack has yet managed. There are ways now to build container clusters that you can ship in parallel to AWS and Azure with very little code difference. In that earlier discussion I was skeptical of OpenStack precisely because of its focus on infrastructure first. Without the buy in of being a clone for a specific cloud structure (AWS compatibility over anything else, for instance) or the backing of traditional datacenter/server vendors (IBM who eventually started into BlueMix; Microsoft whose "on premises Azure" is now firing on most cylinders but was announced as a plan early in OpenStack's history), OpenStack didn't seem to have an obvious niche in the infrastructure world. The closest to a niche it might have had in its early life was the promise of application portability between clouds and that never quite seemed to be delivered. I can tell it frustrates infrastructure folks to hear that containers have been eating OpenStack's lunch, but that is the very real case from the developer perspective. As a developer today, I go for containers and OpenStack is no longer relevant on my radar. Sure I can run containers on OpenStack, but containers abstract away more of the infrastructure and I have less and less care what cloud(s) is underneath the container cluster. When I asked OpenStack people what OpenStack might deliver to me that vision of application portability was tantalizing but never seemed quite finished; container technologies have actually delivered that.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  > if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt). OpenStack is at the same layer as AWS, GCP or Azure. It's not an abstraction over them -- that's a PaaS. I'm not sure OpenStack was ever seriously intended to work at that level. I work on a platform, Cloud Foundry, which provides the kind of portability you're talking about. Red Hat have OpenShift, which is another such platform. Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.

by yeukhon 10y ago

dc2447 10y ago

Absolutely. You get it. It's frustrating to read people comparing container technologies or worse container schedulers with OpenStack. Apples and oranges. If you are planning on running containers on premise you need something from managing the IAAS side of things. OpenStack is excellent at IAAS and is the foundation for running higher level abstractions and services on top.

justinhensley 10y ago
I said elsewhere in the thread. If there is a better IaaS solution than OpenStack, then I would love to know about it. I disagree with you that you need an IaaS solution to run containers on-prem, but realistically, yes you do need an IaaS solution
- doublerebel 10y ago
  I would go with Joyent SDC/Triton, it has a much more mature container and VM platform. It's incredible it's so missed in these comments.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

WorldMaker 10y ago

This seems to get back to an interesting discussion I had with someone early in the OpenStack efforts: as a developer OpenStack doesn't directly interest me because I don't care about infrastructure. Where OpenStack had a possibility to win was to provide options for infrastructure agnosticism: if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt). From that perspective, container solutions are delivering a better developer proposition than OpenStack has yet managed. There are ways now to build container clusters that you can ship in parallel to AWS and Azure with very little code difference. In that earlier discussion I was skeptical of OpenStack precisely because of its focus on infrastructure first. Without the buy in of being a clone for a specific cloud structure (AWS compatibility over anything else, for instance) or the backing of traditional datacenter/server vendors (IBM who eventually started into BlueMix; Microsoft whose "on premises Azure" is now firing on most cylinders but was announced as a plan early in OpenStack's history), OpenStack didn't seem to have an obvious niche in the infrastructure world. The closest to a niche it might have had in its early life was the promise of application portability between clouds and that never quite seemed to be delivered. I can tell it frustrates infrastructure folks to hear that containers have been eating OpenStack's lunch, but that is the very real case from the developer perspective. As a developer today, I go for containers and OpenStack is no longer relevant on my radar. Sure I can run containers on OpenStack, but containers abstract away more of the infrastructure and I have less and less care what cloud(s) is underneath the container cluster. When I asked OpenStack people what OpenStack might deliver to me that vision of application portability was tantalizing but never seemed quite finished; container technologies have actually delivered that.

jacques_chester 10y ago
> if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt). OpenStack is at the same layer as AWS, GCP or Azure. It's not an abstraction over them -- that's a PaaS. I'm not sure OpenStack was ever seriously intended to work at that level. I work on a platform, Cloud Foundry, which provides the kind of portability you're talking about. Red Hat have OpenShift, which is another such platform. Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.