Open Source continues to be an important part of the mix in Virtualization and Cloud. Indeed, this year has seen major developments in established players at the Operating System and Hypervisor level, as well as a major new cloud entry at the IaaS cloud layer.
From 2009 to 2014 Dr Mike Norman was the Analyst at The Virtualization Practice for Open Source Cloud Computing. He covered PaaS, IaaS and associated services such as Database as a Service from an open source development and DevOps perspective. He has hands-on experience in many open source cloud technologies, and an extensive background in application lifecycle tooling; automated testing – functional, non-functional and security; digital business and DevOps. in 2014 he moved on to become Cloud Services Architect at JP Morgan Chase.
WikiLeaks – War in the Clouds
WikiLeaks is the most serious social and political event of the emerging Cloud. It has remained alive through a “do-it-yourself” approach as the commercial Cloud was denied to it. When the dust settles, the Cloud may well emerge different, with the rights/obligations of Cloud Services providers clarified.
Red Hat Acquires PaaS Cloud vendor Makara to help compete with VMware’s vFabric
Red Hat today announced the acquisition of startup PaaS vendor, Makara, which provides a deployment platform for most of the Open Source application stacks onto most of the IaaS cloud infrastructures. Red Hat intends to use the purchased technology rather than the product itelf. It gains additional application-level management, monitoring and configuration functionality for an emerging stand-alone PaaS offering to drive its customers towards a fully RHEL-cloud.
OpenStack on Hyper-V – Microsoft does Public Cloud Interoperability
On October 22nd, Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project. The announcement caused a great deal of interest here at the Virtualization Practice, as it signals an unexpected willingness on Microsoft’s part to pursue interoperability at the IaaS layer, allowing users to break out of the Hyper-v stack, whilst still retaining Hyper-v at the bottom. The fact this announcement came from Microsoft (not Cloud.com, Rackspace or OpenStack) seems to signal the seriousness of the intent.
Rationalizing the NRE Cloud Alliance – newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus
newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus have partnered to provide an elastic infrastructure (Eucalyptus), automated software deployment and management (rPath), and a service catalog (newScale). This provides an interesting alternative to the monolithic stack offered by VMware with vSphere and vCloud Director.
Ubuntu edging towards OpenStack
Eucalyptus-based solution that is bundled into the Ubuntu installation from 9.10 onwards and allows you to install a IaaS cloud into which you subsequently install Ubuntu Server instances, rather than directly installing an Ubuntu Server. The Eucalyptus proposition is that the cloud you create is identical from an API – and therefore a tooling – perspective to an Amazon EC2 cloud, and the same Ubuntu instances can run inside it, and even can be cloud-bursted out to it. Canonical make a lot of this duality in their positioning of Eucalyptus and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. It feels very-much like an “onramp” message that we hear from VMware.