CloudCamp LA – Why Open Source (and OpenStack) Matters To the Enterprise
Submitted by Yoram Heller on April 13, 2012
This week, the Morphlabs team attended CloudCamp LA in full force. CoreSite was generous enough to donate what, quite possibly, ended up being the coolest CloudCamp venue ever. Over 150 people were packed two floors underground in the middle of 900 Alameda St. Dave Nielsen, CloudCamp’s nomadic founder, flew straight into LAX from Moscow (!) and did a great job of introducing the basic core tenants of Cloud Computing in his OSSM presentation.
Inspired by the location of the event, private cloud and security were on everyone’s minds. It’s easy to forget that the cloud actually exists somewhere. CoreSite’s Regis Malloy gave an interesting talk on what Enterprises should look for when selecting a data center, from connectivity to reliability to making sure your data is safe as a core competency.
With the OpenStack Summit right around the corner, and the bevy of announcements from Eucalyptus and CloudStack, we thought CloudCamp LA was a great time to put together a presentation on why Open Source matters to the Enterprise.
Our CEO, Winston Damarillo, with his experience as an Eclipse board member and Apache committer, has a unique and valuable perspective on Open Source. He has built multiple Enterprise companies based on Open Source and understands that it is more than a community of developers but a requirement for sound Enterprise IT strategy.
Open Source software has been a key component of cloud infrastructure for almost 10 years. Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon – companies where efficient IT is a competitive advantage – have been deploying open source software on specially-architected modular hyperscale hardware (the beginning of IaaS) for years. So why has it taken so long for the Enterprise to take cues from the massive webscale companies that spend hundred of millions of dollars on data center infrastructure?
Quite simply, until OpenStack arrived, there wasn’t an open source cloud infrastructure project that had start-up and vendor friendly licensing (Apache 2.0) with a vibrant community (the fastest growing ever).
Now that the most recent OpenStack release, Essex is ready for primetime Enterprise deployments, it’s time to take a hard look at your data center and start assessing your current infrastructure. Leveraging an Open Source project like OpenStack allows an Enterprise or a Service Provider to take advantage of all of the benefits of a vibrant ecosystem: mitigated risk of vendor lock-in, better code delivered faster, a more efficient infrastructure, nimble DevOps team and reduced cost.
So what are the characteristics of clouds built with open source and hyperscale hardware?
- Is your cloud compatible with standards based APIs (AWS)?
- Have you escaped the battle with legacy hardware and vendor lock-in?
- Is it based on modular homogenous infrastructure that allows easy automation and replacement?
- As a service provider can you compete against AWS on price AND performance?
- Is the networking topology simple?
- Do you have a self-service UI that allows you to quickly and easily launch and kill VMs?
- Is it not full of name-brand hardware and complex licenses for “Directors,” “Spheres” and “Shields”?
- Is it easy to scale?
- Is it affordable?
We’ll be at the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference in San Francisco and would love to know more about your IT requirements and what you look for in your cloud deployments. Animated discussions benefit the entire ecosystem, and we’re grateful to the CloudCamp community for fostering the dialogue. Thanks to the CloudCamp LA event organizers.
Organizers:
Yoram Heller & Tia Jackson of Morphlabs
Tim Crawford
Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp
Chris Burchell of Platform D
Steve Staso of HP
Uri Budnik of RightScale
Igor Edelman of BofA
Bret Stateham of Microsoft
Bala Esakkinathan of Nepho.Stack
Peter Tshimanga of Okapi Technologies
Danielle Winter of CoreSite
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