Over the past decade, we have seen a shift towards virtualization, a stepping stone to complete cloud utilization. However, even by leveraging virtualization, you still need the appropriate building blocks for a private cloud environment. This involves going beyond simply virtualizingcompute and other central data center subsystems (i.e., network and storage), and requires you to enable flexible APIs in order to automate resource provisioning and orchestration.
1 Open source
Some say that OpenStackis the largest open source project ever. It combines computing, networking, and storage subsystems in layers via APIs within a single platform. The open source environment allows you to create a truly Software defined data Center. For instance, you can modify the APIs to enhance integration and subsystem usage as well as extend resource orchestration beyond your OpenStack environment to the public cloud. Some vendors, such as RedHat, have developed and continue to support their own distributions of OpenStack. And with a community of over 200 active enterprise participants, you should have no trouble finding tailored OpenStack solutions to fit your needs along with the necessary support.
2 Hybrid cloud
Many enterprises see the public cloud as an extension of their data centers. A recent survey from Peer 1 Hosting concluded, with 28% participant approval, that hybrid cloud adoption is likely to triple over the course of the next three years.
Following this hybrid cloud adoption trend, leading public cloud vendors such as Google have been embracing the concept of a hybrid cloud via OpenStack. Another particularly good example is Eucalyptus, which was acquired by HP and has taken hybrid cloud accessibility one step further by enhancing OpenStack’s compatibility with AWS.
3 Orchestration
Without orchestration, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms remain stuck in confined environments. Orchestration is the comprehensive automated provisioning of infrastructure based on specific application requirements such as support for multi-tier, distributed applications that can utilize sporadic resources for particular independent subsets (services).
“OpenStack is a platform that frees users to run proven technologies like VMs as well as new technologies like Containers,” noted OpenStack COO, Mark Collier in Google’s recent announcement to sponsor OpenStack. “With Google committing unequaled container and container management engineering expertise to our community, the deployment of containers via proven orchestration engines like Kubernetes will accelerate rapidly.”
Containers only require a thin OS to run applications, providing the ability to increase workload density in an OpenStack environment without having to purchase more hardware. The combination consequently results in a higher level of utilization and efficiency. With containers, moving workloads is nearly seamless between OpenStack, VMware and public clouds, like AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), that support containers, creating infrastructural efficiency and Scalability.
