The "operationalization" of OpenStack
Five years ago we saw a small ripple in the data center service virtualization and cloud computing fabrics. OpenStack flickered to life and a new era of private and hybrid clouds was born. It’s been a somewhat tumultuous journey to get to this point. The community has learned a lot about self-governance, release cadence, feature management, and such. The OpenStack Foundation has done a good job of building an ecosystem that is marked by a reasonable balance of individual and corporate participation. Kudos to all who have gotten us to this point.
We’re at a point where the debate over OpenStack’s viability has subsided and now the focus is on “operationalization.” For those of you who were around in the early days of Linux (followed by server virtualization), this is not an unfamiliar scenario. Once adoption begins the real work begins. Making OpenStack “production-ready” is the next order of business.
One of the biggest challenges in OpenStack has been networking. It’s getting better with time, but still has a long way to go. New network deployments cannot be disruptive. They have to seamlessly integrate with the existing network infrastructure and flow of traffic. And they have to scale and deliver predictable, reliable performance. So how do you make OpenStack networking production-ready?
Rather than go into details in this post I’ll just point you to our white paper – Production-ready OpenStack Networking. At CPLANE NETWORKS, rather than cobble together quick solutions, we started with a super-robust, scalable and resilient service orchestration platform and then built networking applications on top of it. These applications share the same performance, scalability and resiliency as our core service orchestration platform.
Building applications this way has made it very easy for us to solve bigger problems and address new challenges. Things like multi-site OpenStack networking and cloud-bursting. These are just natural extensions of the core capabilities of our platform.
As OpenStack continues to evolve the boundaries between private, hybrid and public clouds will start to blur. There will just be a cloud that provides on-demand services. The mix of things that make up the cloud will change rapidly. VMs and containers will evolve into micro-pods and instance affinities. And beyond that, who knows. Regardless of what these things look like, they will still need to be connected over a scalable, reliable and easy to use network.
Learn how we deliver that network at www.cplanenetworks.com
image: istockphoto (modified)
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