There are many open source projects in the IT world, and others are cropping up daily. Just a few of them make it up to the level where even multinational corps and companies begin to respect them.
The obvious example is Linux. It grew up from a one-person’s project to be an operating system used by a huge number of experts, companies and laymen alike. Relatively recently, even the experts from a rival company Microsoft started using Linux for some specific tasks.
Now the story seems to be similar for OpenStack, a cloud platform that is used to run more and more computer clouds all over the world. Big companies the likes of Intel or PayPal have adopted it and other corporations follow suit. Some people are already referring to OpenStack as the “king of cloud”.
So what’s the hype all about? How does OpenStack work? And what are its benefits for companies who want to use the cloud?
OpenStack: Best friend to many, a monster to some
OpenStack has a reputation of a complicated monster. It’s similar to the Medusa of mythological fame – to get to know it better, you must look closely. But that can lead to petrifaction, as the companies are overwhelmed with the options and information OpenStack entails. And fearing this complexity, some companies run away and spread the myth further.
Even though it’s quite simple to describe.
OpenStack is a cloud platform that facilitates the distribution of computing power.
It means that it can have control over the data center’s resources.
A regular physical server is limited by its hardware. This creates a problem when the performance just doesn’t cut it anymore. The only solutions are buying new hardware or adding another server. But that doesn’t tend to be very effective – while one server can run at a full throttle, the other can have performance to spare.
This can be solved by virtualization. It adds a new layer above the servers – a hypervisor that distributes the performance to virtual servers. It’s more effective, but makes admins’ and developers’ life more difficult. Especially when they use more hypervisors (or different brands), making it all work together well is often a tad problematic.
OpenStack enters this model and adds another layer. It doesn’t care what servers or hypervisors run under its rule. It abstracts resources – all of them are moved into a shared pool from which virtual instances can draw.
It’s much easier to control more complex systems. Basically, all you have to do is tell OpenStack “give me a virtual machine” and it does so without the need to figure out which cluster or physical machine should run it.
There are even more advantages to it. Here are a few:
1) Scaling is easier than ever
Scaling, elasticity or flexibility – whatever the name, it has been an important argument for cloud adoption. In a nutshell, it’s a way to adjust your computing capacity to the demands of a particular task. Does your website have a spike in visitors at a particular hour? Do you need to sometimes run several demanding calculations at once? Or are you in charge of a web-based app that is mostly used during the dinnertime? Where a physical server would be caught short of breath, cloud can keep up with the demand and provide the virtual server with more resources.
OpenStack makes this process easier. It’s designed to be ready for scaling, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s scaling up or down. It’s also designed to be ready for infrastructure not being always available or parts of it outright failing.
And it makes admins’ jobs easier. Creating another instance happens at the drop of a hat. Deleting them when they’re not needed is just as quick.
When a company uses cloud based on OpenStack, it can depend on it adjusting to its demands quickly.
It doesn’t even matter if the company wants to run five instances or five thousand instances. OpenStack can do it all.