Tag Archives: NASA

WHIR Webinar Notes: Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar & OpenStack

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Panelists: Me (@zehicle) & Joseph B. George (@jbgeorge), Director, Cloud and Big Data Solutions, Dell

Moderator: Liam Eagle (@theWHIR) , Editor-in-Chief, Web Host Industry Review

Wow, this Webinar was an hour of OpenStack insights (see the whole thing). If you don’t have the hour then you can use my time line nodes to jump to what you want to hear.

  • 2:50: Presentation Starts (introductions are over)
  • 3:40: Joseph coins the word “dynormous” for dynamic & large scale clouds
  • 4:40: Customers want to know how they are going to maintain a cloud
  • 4:50: Customers don’t want a 9 month cycle for features, want it faster. DevOps gives us the flexibility to meet our customer needs as quickly as they want to.
  • 7:11: Massive scalability… their (Rackspace & NASA) business is about scale
  • 8:00: Rackspace and NASA started from the beginning to build a community
  • 8:50: We have the data that this has staying power
  • 10:10: We see a lot of companies joining in the community
  • 11:56: Shout out to Opscode Chef
  • 12:40: From bare metal to a fully functioning cloud in under 2 hours. Crowbar allows you to introduce new elements into the environment
  • 13:40: Crowbar leverages our experience with cloud deployments
  • 14:33: Dell was the only provider there from day 1. We have the most experience.
  • 17:27: DevOps Poll
  • 18:40: DevOps is a significant trend that you should consider. Hosters have a lot of operational chops.
  • 19:34: There are a lot of right ways to do cloud. You need to pick what’s best for your business model
  • 20:23: We could get hardware and software, but operational expertise was missing.
  • 21:33: We’re more making the complexity of a cloud go away. We are getting our customers a head start. We are chipping away at the learning curve.
  • 22:05: The cloud is always ready, never finished. Cloud is an ongoing operational environment: DevOps!
  • 23:30: Crowbar bakes a lot of operational experience into the deployment.
  • 25:17: Core tenant of DevOps: there is no single OpenStack image. Cloud is too complex. We build it in layers.
  • 26:26: Before you deploy, you can change the configuration.
  • 27:30: Barclamps are modules that execute a function. We are inviting community participation
  • 28:40: Crowbar process view – Crowbar is a “PXE state machine” is a very simplified description.
  • 29:57: You can go through a tuning cycle where you can get it working, make sure it’s right, flush and reset. That ensures you have an automated system.
  • 30:34: Screen shots with descriptions
  • 33:25: Event the core state machine that runs Crowbar is deployed as a barclamp
  • 35:00: You can download OpenStack and install it yourself from our github. We don’t want to talk about OpenStack, we want to DO OpenStack.
  • Poll Results (see to the right)
  • 38:00: Online resources
  • 40:00: Question 1: Timeline for RHEL. Answer: RHEL is part of Hadoop, will make it into OpenStack by end of year (or sooner based on market demand)
  • 42:17: Question 2: What led Dell to get involved in OpenStack? Answer: It’s about experience. We like being able to fix and change if we needed. There is a lot of active community
  • 45:30: Question 3: How does a hardware maker play with open source software? Answer: It’s a solution for us. We wanted to make sure that people cloud deploy the software. Adding DevOps takes it to another level.
  • 48:00 Question 4: What elements of Diablo are most exciting? Answer: Keystone (centralized authentication) is a big deal. Networking changes that “bust the top” of the networking hurdles.
  • 50:25: Question 5: Where is OpenStack going long term? Answer: We’re pleasantly surprised about how much it’s picked up. We’ll see more standards in the community. We have high hopes for OpenStack and have invested heavily. We’ll see more as-a-service capabilities to build on a common infrastructure: both open and commercial.
  • 52:47: Question 6: What’s the biggest barrier to operating at scale? Answer: learning how to operate is the biggest hurdle. We took a learning approach to help customers get started. We are hosting a training with Rackspace.
  • 55:00: Question 7: Where does Dell and Rackspace overlap? Answer: We see Rackspace Cloud Builders that the premier experts. Dell Services is involved with all of it. Dell takes the phone call and deals with our customers directly.

OpenStack videos peek into cloud shakers

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Barton George (Dell’s cloud evangalist and cloud shouter) has posted videos from the OpenStack conference last week:

OpenStack Bexar Design Summit Day 1

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Yesterday, Dell sent me to be part of our OpenStack vanguard for the design summit.  The conference is fascinating and productive for the content of the sessions and even more interesting for the hallway meetings.

It’s obvious looking at the board composition that RackSpace and NASA Nova are driving  most of the development; however, the is palpable community interest and enthusiasm.  Participants and contributors showed up in force at this event.

RackSpace and NASA leadership provides critical momentum for the community.  Code is the smallest part of their contribution, their commitment to run the code at scale in production is the magic rocket fuel powering OpenStack. I’ve had many conversations with partners and prospects planning to follow RackSpace into production with a 3-6 month lag.

Beyond that primary conference arc, my impressions:

  • Core vendors like Citrix, Dell, Canonical are signing up to do primary work for the code base.  They are taking ownership for their own components in the stack.
  • Universally, people comment about the speed of progress and amount of code being generated.  Did I mention that there is a lot of code being written.
  • Networking is still a major challenge.  OpenStack (with Citrix’s Xen support) is driving Open vSwitchas a replacement for iptables management.
  • IPv6 gets lackadaisical treatment in the US, but is urgent in Japan/Asia where their core infrastructure is ALREADY IPv6.  Their frustration to get attention here should be a canary in the cloud mine (but is not).  They proposed a gateway model where VMs have dual addresses: IPv4 gets NATed while IPv6 is a pass-through. Seems to me that the going IPv6 internal is the real solution.
  • Cloud bursting is still too fuzzy a thing to talk about in a big group.  The session about it covered so many use-cases that we did not accomplish anything.  Some people wanted to talk about cloud API proxy while others (myself included) wanted to talk about managing apps between clouds.  My $0.02 is that vendors like RightScale solve the API proxy issue so it’s the networking issues that need focus.  We need to get back to the use-cases!

Executive Tweet: #openstack: Partners & Code = great progress.  Networking = needs more love

Other notes: