Open Stack

I absolutely agree with the thinking here and the model.  There is
definitely a grey area between complete PaaS and hardcore IaaS and I think
this helps shed some light on that categorization.

Forgive me if this seems completely biased (it probably is), but hardcore
IaaS by itself isn't any more interesting than managed hosting.  It's
really the Iaas++ that makes it spin and greatly reduces the time to
building a complex application/system for PaaS developers.  If Openstack
is to grow and to compete with the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and
other players in the space, it must have IaaS++ offerings to enable rapid
growth of the ecosystem around the hardcore IaaS.

I believe databases are one key piece of that IaaS++ infrastructure
required to build a vibrant ecosystem.

-jc




On 4/29/13 7:56 AM, "Monty Taylor" <mordred at inaugust.com> wrote:

>
>
>On 04/29/2013 05:25 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> Monty Taylor wrote:
>>> I'm actually less interested in this as a generic PaaS on top of
>>> Heat/OpenStack. That might be because I don't see DBaaS as a PaaS thing
>>> at all, and also because I don't really want to go down that rathole at
>>> the moment.
>>>
>>> Databases are clearly something that people need for applications, and
>>> that are hard to administer properly. PaaS solutions are a thing that
>>> while useful to a set of people, does seem like a scope creep to me for
>>> the project, and one where a general framework provided by us seems
>>> premature.
>> 
>> I'd agree with that. Even if databases are way higher in the OSI stack,
>> I see databases as a basic infrastructure building block in the same way
>> as load balancers. In my view there would be three types of IaaS/PaaS
>>users:
>> 
>> 1. Pure players that only consume extremely raw (some would say "core")
>> resources: VMs, block storage, basic networking -- and build everything
>> else themselves on top of that
>> 
>> 2. Application builders which benefit from using building blocks for
>> almost-always-used functions: DNS, load balancing, databases, message
>> queues...
>> 
>> 3. One-stop deployers who just push a repo and the PaaS platform handles
>> deployment/scaling and the details of their infrastructure for them --
>> Google AppEngine or Heroku style consumers
>> 
>> (1) is clear IaaS, (3) is clear PaaS. (2) is somewhere in between. Let's
>> call it IaaS++. You still care about the details of your infrastructure
>> and which raw resources you consume, but you enjoy a number of
>> higher-level services. You could build those services yourself on top of
>> "core IaaS" services, but that's a pain to setup and maintain, so you
>> enjoy the convenience of IaaS++ services.
>> 
>> You could argue that the only things in "core IaaS" are VMs, block
>> storage and raw networking, since you can build everything else on top
>> of that. You could argue that object storage is actually part of IaaS++.
>> 
>> At this point, I think considering IaaS++ projects as part of the
>> OpenStack integrated release is completely valid, since we already
>> started to enter that space. I would certainly be more hesitant with
>> projects that belong in (3).
>
>Well said. Totally agree.
>
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