I’ve started to hear more and more about Open Stack. It was originally developed by Rackspace and then pushed into a standard at Openstack.org. From CRN we see that IBM is launching into support for OpenStack
IBM (NYSE:IBM) embraces OpenStack, the open-source standard used for building cloud-computing stacks, but believes a key piece of its cloud strategy is offering products and services on top of the platform.
“We believe open standards are critical for the industry, and we have a lot of synchronization with OpenStack,” Lauren C. States, vice president and CTO for cloud computing and growth initiatives for IBM Corporate Strategy, said Wednesday at the Cloud Leadership Forum in Santa Clara, Calif. “We want to capture the higher-value services that sit on top of the stack.”
……………..
States said IBM will be offering OpenStack-based cloud solutions in the near future. “We are working on integrating the OpenStack into our stack,” she said. “Stay tuned.”
See the CRN article for more.
So What Is Open Stack
So if you’re like me, this question pops up and I don’t necessarily see any one place that does a great job of explaining it. Here’s my take on it. Basically, it’s like what you see at Amazon EC2 where Open Stack provides a platform for computing (running code), storage, and networking. For each of those, they provide a whole host of services to manage a project based on Open Stack. For example, from the Open Stack Compute page at openstack.org you see the following list that I shortened:
If you go to each of the other pages, you see similar information and even additional services like image and identity services. In short, it’s a great place to start creating software in the cloud. The cloud itself provides all the key services for your platform and you don’t need to worry about anything beyond coding what you need.
Why Open Stack When I have Amazon EC2 and Force.com?
There are a large number of similarities here. Both provide a similar set of services although Amazon and Force have had more time to mature their IaaS offerings. The key here is that it’s open source. It gives a wide range of committed people and companies the power to see what needs to be improved and create those improvements. In many ways you can think of it as Linux for the cloud. With IBM behind it, I see a bright future here.
Personally, I’m intrigued by IBM’s Lauren States comment, “We are working on integrating the OpenStack into our stack,” IBM has a lot of software out there. I work with the portal and social tools all of which could be candidates to move into a true cloud configuration. I’d love to see something like that where you do more than just get an image running. What if you could just start up your code and call your services like identity management, storage, etc.? that would be great.
So what’s your take on this? What have I missed here? comment on it if you have insights I obviously missed.
