“OpenStack is a very ambitious project and has a lot of usability”
It’s new, it’s young and it definitely is the talk of the town. The OpenStack project is the hottest topic in open source circles... possibly one of the biggest projects in the recent past. The OpenStack Foundation that supports the OpenStack project is m
Q: How would you define OpenStack so that everyone— non-technical readers as well as open source enthusiasts – understands what it’s all about? OpenStack is a community of developers and organisations around the world that is building software for cloud computing. It is open source software released under the Apache License. You can take that software and build a public or a private cloud, which you can use to manage servers and networks. Q: How is the OpenStack Foundation empowering the growth and development of OpenStack? The OpenStack Foundation is an independent non-profit organisation that is focused on opening up our community all around the world to develop software and help people to make successful use of the software. We do that with a number of different programmes. We hold a lot of events and support many others across the globe. We bring our developers together each year and plan our software— how to go about the next version, et al. The next event is going to be in Hong hong in November, where we expect 4MMM-5MMM people to attend and discuss OpenStack’s growth in detail and help it grow further. We also have a number of programmes in place to help popularise the project and encourage new people to join the community, use the software and make contributions to it. Q: If I were a developer and wanted to be a part of the project, could you explain how I could join it? The OpenStack Foundation has about NM,MMM members who have joined from over N3M countries. It is free to join the OpenStack Foundation, so anyone who wants to participate in the project can join it. You can join as an ‘individual member’, you can get involved in local meetups, start contributing and help with critical start-up tasks. It’s free!
This is an exciting time for OpenStack, with the establishment of an independent, permanent legal home that can represent Stackers all over the globe for many years to come. As an individual member, you can: Get active in the OpenStack community as a user, developer, business person, art maker, or in any other way you want to contribute. oun for an elected position such as the project technical lead on projects you contribute to, as the technical committee member, or as a member of the Foundation’s board of directors. Vote in elections for the board of directors. Stay informed on the latest OpenStack news through member updates. Visit https://www.openstack.org/join/ to join as an Dindividual memberD of the foundation. If you are a user, developer or potential tester, you can view this helpful resource about how to get started contributing to OpenStack: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute. Q: A lot of heavyweights are attached to the OpenStack project. Yet, despite the presence of these major open source vendors, the OpenStack project took a lot of time to take off. Why was that? We do have quite a few major technology companies involved, as well as innovative startups emerging around the project. I actually
think that the OpenStack project took off really quickly. It is not even three years old and we already have NM,MMM individual members and 2MM companies working on the project. We’ve had six software releases and expanded the scope from Compute and Object Storage to include projects like Networking, Block Storage, Identity and Dashboard, not to mention a strong ecosystem of open source projects that now surrounds OpenStack. We have users from all around the world and from many different industries , academics and government agencies. I don’t know of many open source projects that have moved so quickly. Q: What are the contributions of these heavyweights to this project? I have worked with contributors coming from oed Hat, oackspace, IBM and the likes. What they are contributing is actual code that makes OpenStack work. For every release of OpenStack, we have hundreds of developers that contribute to the software. Most of the developers work for these companies. Each company and contributor brings their own expertise. We have companies like VMware and oed Hat, who are experts in virtualisation and contribute code directly to OpenStack. We have established leaders like NetApp and EMC and innovative startups like SolidFire that contribute to the storage piece. These companies allow us to have experts on different technologies. In addition, they also fund the activities related to promotion and working of the foundation, and allow us to be able to grow the community and support our community worldwide. It is one of the major factors that is contributing to the growth of OpenStack Foundation and OpenStack project. Though we have volunteers associated to the project, having full-time employees contributing to the OpenStack project everyday helps the continuous growth of the project. Q: How has OpenStack’s latest release, Grizzly, been received and what are the key pain points that you have addressed in this release? The biggest focus of Grizzly release is around usability, scalability and making it easier to operate. In the last release, we had a lot of inputs from the users who have been running OpenStack in production, which we have incorporated. The Grizzly release is a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process, as contributors continue to produce a stable, scalable and feature-rich platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds. The community delivered another packed release on schedule, attracting contributions from some of the brightest technologists across virtualization, storage, networking, security, and systems engineering. They are not only solving the complex problems of cloud, but driving the entire technology industry forward. It has nearly 23M new features to support production operations at scale and greater integration with enterprise technologies, including broad Software-Defined Networking support. With more organisations running OpenStack in production, the Grizzly development cycle focused on supporting practical use cases for deployers and operators.
"For every release of OpenStack, we have hundreds of developers that contribute to the software. Most of the developers work for these companies. Each company and contributor brings their own expertise. We have companies like VMware and Red Hat, who are experts in virtualisation and contribute code directly to OpenStack."
Grizzly brings additional support for VMware ESu and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. While OpenStack previously had the strongest support for hVM and uEN, this shift helps us reach a broader base of users with the Grizzly release and beyond. With a new DCellsD capability, Grizzly addressed the scalability issue for very large service providers and private clouds. It allows the users to manage multiple OpenStack compute environments as a single unit. Users are exposed to a single AmI endpoint and a single control system but there can be a whole nest of clusters underneath.
Grizzly also expands the use cases for block storage. It delivers a full storage service for managing heterogeneous storage environments from a centralised access point. A new intelligent scheduler allows cloud end users to allocate storage based on the workload, whether they are looking for performance, efficiency, or cost effectiveness. The community also added drivers for a diverse selection of backend storage devices, including Ceph/oBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-mackard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, oed Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and wadara.