Category: OpenStack Israel Podcast

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Mårten Mickos, Head of Cloud Business at HP, formerly CEO of Eucalyptus and of MySQL AB. Some highlights of our discussion:

• HP has made loud public commitments to OpenStack. What does HP’s acquisition of Eucalyptus in September 2014 mean for both OpenStack and for Eucalyptus? HP’s commitment to OpenStack is unwavering. Eucalyptus has always been focused on the very specific use case of Amazon-compatible clouds, and in 2013 Eucalyptus decided to integrate with OpenStack because OpenStack solves a more general use case than Eucalyptus, in a complementary manner.
• On a technical level, there is still a lot to do to integrate.
• OpenStack’s “more general use case” is to be an all-encompassing platform for private, hybrid, and managed clouds, and is therefore open to lots of variation and customization. One technology cannot support both that general OpenStack use case and the specific, out-of-the-box Amazon-compatible use case that Eucalyptus supports. Both can use the same underlying components—the same object store, for example.
• Eucalyptus is to OpenStack as InnoDB is to MySQL.
• OpenStack should have spent a lot more time in the design phase early on. They jumped in and started coding, and are now spending a lot of effort to address those design shortcomings. No project is ideal on the first try, but the design phase is supremely important for OpenStack because it is a distributed system, which is incredibly complex and difficult to diagnose and reason about issues once it’s live.
• What will you do in order to help your developers tackle the complexity inherent in building these distributed systems? The easier a product is to use the more difficult it was to design. The HP Helion group has hired experienced distributed systems experts from the major cloud providers and also newer developers who live and breathe DevOps and agile development, and this combination is the right ingredients for solving the problems.
• Will Eucalyptus end up being a set of microservices that can be deployed alongside an OpenStack deployment, providing heightened AWS compatibility? Quite possibly. There are many different tactics we can take toward technical integration, and in fact we already have run Eucalyptus inside OpenStack. Certainly, Eucalyptus will not become a wrapper around OpenStack. As eager as everyone is to hear about the technical direction Eucalyptus will take to integrate with OpenStack, we must move slowly in this design phase and ensure we’re doing it right.
• It will be 2015 before any design commitment is made.
• If you are involved in OpenStack and Eucalyptus, please reach out to Mårten and his folks at HP with any opinions about what you want to see from Eucalyptus’s integration with OpenStack.
• What is the relationship between Eucalyptus and the new use cases that OpenStack is being pulled to address, such as telecom carriers’ Network Function Virtualization? There is any relationship you want. AWS compatibility and NFV can be used together or not, independently. HP can provide both.
• In 2009 when Eucalyptus came out, we mistook people’s initial interest and learning as an indication of the existence of a market. It wasn’t a market. The market hasn’t taken off yet. It’s only now beginning to do so. So we have refocused on the use case of dev/test and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, and seen heightened interest in our offering as a result.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 15: Mårten Mickos of HP

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical. Some highlights of our discussion:

• The role Ubuntu and Canonical will play in OpenStack’s future.
  • OpenStack is the next phase of Linux: Linux at large scale. The majority of OpenStack deployments are on top of Ubuntu.
  • The mission is to bring regular, seamless releases of OpenStack to Ubuntu users. To do what Ubuntu did in the public cloud space – making it easy to operate at large scale – in the private cloud.
• Looking back at Ubuntu, here is what we did that resulted in Ubuntu becoming ubiquitous in the cloud.
  • Took the cloud seriously from very early on. Noticed that many interesting, smart people were doing stuff with it.
  • Evaluated what people were doing and the difficulties. Noticed that classic OSes were built to assume the machine would be long-lived.
  • Changed Ubuntu to work very well in the cloud environment, beginning back in 2007.
  • The next frontier is in getting applications to be more widely operable, allowing organizations to share and reuse tooling to deploy and scale applications. That’s what Juju is all about, and it’s not Ubuntu-specific.
• Developers use Chef and Puppet, and Juju is a distant third in the orchestration automation space.
  • Juju is a one of a newer generation of tools, so adoption is naturally lagging behind the older technologies. The growth rate of the Juju community indicates it is strong and healthy.
  • Juju “charms” can be used to wrap Chef or Puppet configuration management and turn it into automated orchestration.
  • Canonical uses Juju to glue together OpenStack and orchestrate it.
  • Juju began as orchestration automation for EC2 and then it was ported to other clouds.
• Containers are very interesting. They are poised to become the unit of deployment for PaaS systems. They are also being used like hypervisors, providing multitenancy in environments where the priority is performance over isolation.
• Ubuntu looked at OpenStack seriously from the very beginning, and threw its own weight behind the project when it moved away from another cloud infrastructure platform. Ubuntu contributed leadership around governance of large scale distributed open source projects. Much of the mystique around OpenStack will disappear over the next two years as it becomes more well-understood and proven to be easy to deploy. Now Ubuntu’s focus is to get OpenStack to be an economically viable alternative to public clouds.
• Does OpenStack need a Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life?
  • Moving some of the technical leadership positions into the OpenStack Foundation would help resolve some of the deadlock we see in the area – but this is not a demand, nor a necessity. OpenStack will thrive nonetheless.
  • And the project should encourage a healthy dialog about how its governance can be improved.
  • The Foundation has been wise to limit its staff, stay small, and stay focused during this period of incredible hype and willingness on the part of vendors to buy a role and ride the hype with fat checks. As vendors understand OpenStack and how they can contribute to it, those pressures will lessen.
  • It would be wise to take a narrow view on what OpenStack really is: Nova, Neutron, and Cinder — a very tight collection of resource management capabilities, with some additional glue around them for identity, security, and other bits and pieces.
  • If the technical leadership were brought into the Foundation, the pace of progress on this core of OpenStack would improve.
  • The Foundation has excellent governance, and in fact is long on governance but short on leadership. We need a Compute “Moses”, a Storage “Moses”, and a Networking “Moses”.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 14: Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Benny Schnaider, Chairman and co-Founder of Ravello Systems. Some highlights from the episode:

• The history of virtualization in two minutes, and why it is still important today.
• Virtualization provides separation, deployability, and mobility. What virtualization has done for VMs, Ravello is doing for collections of VMs – that is, entire applications.
• How is this different from a platform-as-a-service? IT is currently interested in infrastructure, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The cloud provider will always be interested in using VMs as the isolation unit between tenants, and a PaaS environment will not be uniform across providers, so IaaS will continue to be attractive from both sides of the market.
• OpenStack is interesting for Ravello because the more standardized the IaaS features are, the easier it is for us to expand our support for more cloud providers. And, we allow OpenStack developers and operators to create OpenStack deployments within the public cloud, speeding up development and testing.
• How do you keep up with what’s going on in the OpenStack ecosystem? Blogs, reading, attending events, and attending the summits, where it is important to go to meet the people.
• Docker is gaining attention – what do you think of it and similar container technologies? If you can live with the limitations of a container, then that’s great. But Ravello can run Windows VMs and other OSes, which containers cannot do.
• Ravello is used to host OpenStack and deploy it on top of a public IaaS cloud, and provides full Layer 2 networking capabilities, which containers can’t support.
• OpenStack won’t be the only IaaS solution in the future.
• The origin of the company name “Ravello.”

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 13: Benny Schnaider of Ravello Systems

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Dagan Gilat, Senior Manager of Cloud Platforms at IBM Haifa Research Lab.

Highlights from the podcast:

• The major areas of focus of the IBM Haifa Research Center.

• How cloud computing workloads have changed over the years.

• As workloads need to bridge the gap across from traditional style to cloud style architectures, OpenStack becomes more interesting….

• IBM’s initial contributions to OpenStack were in the areas of enabling IBM storage products, and maintaining HA despite certain kinds of hardware failures. Later contributions include the areas of resource management and VM placement, storage – Swift and Cinder – including secure multitenancy, on-demand data migration, and networking contributions.

• Interesting lesson from the OpenStack Summit in Altanta last week: OpenStack is a mature system that can handle a fairly complex and heterogeneous environment that includes many types of computational abstracts – containers, vms, bare metal servers – and many types of hypervisors.

• The initial challenge with OpenStack was in climbing the learning curve. It was difficult to bring up the environment, networking configuration was complex, automation tools were lacking. These areas have improved, and several alternatives are available – so the challenge today is to choose a solution wisely. The key to choosing is to evaluate the options carefully, with the help of an experienced partner.

• Most companies will choose a distribution instead of adopting the vanilla OpenStack project.

• The main obstacle facing OpenStack today is its complexity. Each subproject within OpenStack will succeed or fail based on the quality of its technical leadership.

• From IBM’s experience in keeping large clusters of OpenStack up and running, it’s important to ensure you only upgrade to stable versions, and it’s equally important to ensure that, like the technology, your operational processes are mature.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 12: Dagan Gilat of IBM

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Nelson Nahum, CEO and founder of Zadara Storage. We talk about:

• What does Zadara Storage do and how do you use OpenStack?
• How easy or difficult have you found it to keep up with the changing APIs across releases, especially in the early days of OpenStack? What should OpenStack users do to keep up
• What challenges have you had with using OpenStack?
• What do you think of RedHat’s acquisition of Inktank, creators of storage provider Ceph that is popular in OpenStack deployments?
• What lessons have you learned from your experience operating several large scale OpenStack deployments?
• How can we get an OpenStack Summit to happen in Israel?

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 11: Nelson Nahum of Zadara Storage

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Yaron Haviv, VP of Datacenter and Storage Solutions at Mellanox. We talk about:

• Why is OpenStack interesting for Mellanox today?
• What lessons are being learned by Mellanox’s customers using OpenStack?
• What are you doing to leverage your lessons learned from customer and internal use?
• What is the scale of OpenStack use and skills within Mellanox?
• What are Mellanox customers doing with OpenStack, and how are you helping them?
• Why is OpenStack important to Mellanox for the future?
• When and why did you know that OpenStack was worthy of serious consideration?
• What will you present about at the upcoming OpenStack Israel event?
• What advice would you give someone just starting to get familiar with OpenStack?

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 10: Yaron Haviv of Mellanox

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Ken Pepple, CTO of Solinea and author of Deploying OpenStack. We talk about:

• What does Solinea do?
• How does OpenStack compare to other infrastructure cloud software on the market, such as CloudStack, vCloud, and Eucalyptus?
• What types of customers are using CloudStack vs. OpenStack, and for what?
• What are CloudStack and OpenStack deployments making money on?
• What has attracted customers to OpenStack in the past and now with Icehouse?
• What is the focus of the Icehouse release, and how will it help enterprises?
• What kinds of Hadoop solutions are happening that integrate OpenStack?
• What happens during the two to three months of a pilot infrastructure cloud project?
• What is the difference between an OpenStack distro and an OpenStack services offering?
• What are the two main challenges facing the Israel OpenStack community?

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 9: Ken Pepple of Solinea

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Florian Haas of Hastexo. We talk about:

• OpenStack Icehouse and breaking out of IaaS
• Trove Data Storage API
• Typical challenges to building highly available OpenStack services.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 8: Florian Haas of Hastexo

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Nati Shalom, CTO of Gigaspaces. We talk about:

• General update on the upcoming OpenStack Icehouse release
• Recent Gigaspaces Cloudify 2.7 updates
• Upcoming Cloudify 3.0 additions
• Call for Papers for the upcoming OpenStack Israel Event June 2014.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 7: Nati Shalom of Gigaspaces

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I welcome back Samuel Bercovici of Radware, and we talk about how to contribute to OpenStack.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 6: Welcoming Back Samuel Bercovici of Radware

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