On Mar 28, 2011, at 9:03 AM, casey mcg wrote:
> The company I'm working for is using Amazon Web Services for their cloud
> infrastructure. We serve up a lot of data, but also run multiple instances
> of other servers that are needed to process a lot of data too. We are
> starting up a new project and are wanting to use python on the backend.
>
> After my reading up on OpenStack, am I correct in thinking that it is
> designed to be able to replace things such as Amazon Web Services?
Sort of. ;-)
AWS is a commercial product that offers "cloud computing" to customers
for a fee, allowing businesses to create their own applications and web
presence without committing to fixed hardware. Rackspace has a similar
offering: Rackspace Cloud Servers. Both operate using proprietary code that was
developed internally at each company, and as a result, if you invest in either
of these services and build something that is valuable to your company, you're
stuck with them. If for whatever reason (pricing, reliability, service) you
wish to no longer use Amazon or Rackspace, you're free to leave, but you lose
all your work: there is no easy way to move from one cloud provider to another.
This lock-in is a huge hinderance to cloud adoption, and so last year
Rackspace teamed up with NASA to create OpenStack: an open, standards-based
cloud computing infrastructure. Among other things, a primary goal is to avoid
this sort of lock-in. Any company that wants to be a cloud provider can create
their offering based on OpenStack, and you can much more easily move your
instances from one provider to another.
OpenStack Compute, which we call 'nova', is currently in production
internally at NASA, and we're working on adding the Rackspace-specific stuff
(billing, support, etc.) to the code base so that Rackspace can switch its
Cloud Servers line to be OpenStack-based by the end of 2011. OpenStack Object
Storage ('swift') is currently using in production for Rackspace Cloud Files,
and already a few companies have deployed it for their solutions.
IMO, the creation of OpenStack has the potential to jump-start the
growth of cloud computing the way that the LAMP stack jump-started the web:
they provide standard, open tools that anyone could use to make their ideas
come to life.
So to answer your question, no, OpenStack won't replace AWS. What it
will do is enable other companies (and not necessarily Rackspace) to much more
easily create alternatives to AWS.
-- Ed Leafe
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