Open Stack

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 5:52 AM, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Jordi, thank you SO much for this email. It is excellent feedback for
> our community and our developers. I've provided some comments inline, but
> overall just wanted to thank you for bringing some of these product needs
> to our attention.
>
> On 12/03/2014 01:42 PM, Jordi Moles Blanco wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I've been looking though the old messages in this list and I haven't
>> found this kind of information (sorry if it is present somewhere and I
>> couldn't find), so I decided to ask you because you are the experts on
>> this.
>>
>> We want to build a new cloud platform and we have been playing with both
>> options for a while.
>>
>> There are plenty of articles where people give their opinion about which
>> stack technology is better, but they are more business-oriented than
>> technically-oriented.
>>
>
> Agreed. And, to be fair, we try not to promote the idea that there is
> always a one-size-fits-all solution for everybody's needs.
>
> Both OpenStack and Cloudstack are solutions that work well for certain
> customers -- anybody who says one is a good solution and the other isn't is
> being dishonest or shallow.
>
>  I don't want to do that, I don't think there are good or bad players in
>> this game, just different options that you have to know very well before
>> you make your decision.
>>
>
> ++
>
>  And that's why I'm asking you as Openstack experts. You see, I managed
>> to deploy a Cloustack 4.4.1 platform with 2 compute nodes (for
>> live-migration testing) in less than 2 hours, while it took me days to
>> deploy an Openstack infrastructure that was functional and sometimes it
>> just breaks and I have to reboot some nodes or redeploy with Fuel.
>>
>
> This is an extremely common complaint about OpenStack. That it is just too
> difficult to install and configure a simple OpenStack environment with
> common compute, block storage, and networking functionality.
>
> I could sit here and say that this problem is due to the fact that
> OpenStack's community has embraced each and every configuration management
> system, deployment architecture, and package management platform and
> therefore the complexity you find is simply due to the dizzying array of
> options and flexibility offered by the ecosystem.
>
> But, of course, that would be a complete cop-out and terrible excuse. The
> fact is, our installation and deployment story is currently overly
> complicated, inconsistently documented, and difficult for newcomers to get
> their heads around. That needs to be fixed.
>

One of the new cloud service provider I am following (iwStack) chose
CloudStack for their  platform because of this.  He thinks CloudStack is
more organized while OpenStack is a mix and match collections of services
and API.


>
>  I know, I'm just an inexperienced Openstack user, but that is one of my
>> points: For any company that wants to go all the way to Openstack, it
>> may inevitably face a big transformation and I don't think that everyone
>> is ready for that. Sure, you do that because you want to change, you
>> want to be able to provide infrastructure much faster, but there are
>> other options that don't mean such a big change.
>>
>
> Agreed.
>
> <snip>
>
>> What I do care about is having a platform that eases the process of vm
>> provisioning and at the same time is easy to install, configure and
>> maintain.
>>
>> Both platforms do that, but I feel that in order to do that, you need to
>> have a group of highly trained people in Openstack whose only job is
>> keeping the infrastructure running, while due to Cloudstack
>> architecture, It doesn't seem like you need the same kind of expertise.
>>
>
> Yes, completely agreed. It's something we need to do much better at.
>
>  If you don't want to dedicate resources, you can always pay for a
>> managed Openstack solution, but then you are outsourcing your platform
>> and, again, not everyone is ready for that, both for culture and pricing.
>>
>> I've also read several times that Openstack is a more mature project,
>> with more features than other projects.
>>
>> Here are some thoughts:
>>
>> -As for vm provisioning, they both do that.
>> -Cloudstack also has something similar to Ceilometer.
>> -Cloudstack network management is also able to provide Network As a
>> service: vpn, lb, etc.
>> -Support for several commercial hypervisors on both.
>> -Orchestration tools on top of the stack. It is true that Openstack
>> comes with things like Heat, Juju or Openshift, but you can also use
>> Juju with instances from Cloudtack and there are things like Cloudstack
>> integration in Vagrant.
>>
>
> To be clear, the only thing directly related to OpenStack is Heat.
>
> Juju is a tool from Canonical that can be used to install/deploy
> applications in various VMs. OpenShift is a platform from Red Hat that
> provides an application container system for developers to deploy their
> applications into a cloud infrastructure.
>
> There is OpenStack "integration" with Vagrant via various things like
> devstack-vagrant:
>
> https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack-vagrant
>
>  -Both can integrate well with Amazon.
>> -Things like deploying Hadoop with a click from Horizon is great, but it
>> is virtualized and not suitable for all needs. Also, you can deploy
>> Hadoop with Juju on Cloudstack vms.
>>
>> Obviously, I know pretty well what we will do with the Cloud
>> infraestructure: vm provisioning that will allow us to sell services to
>> end users. We won't sell vms to the end-user, only services: web, dns,
>> mysql, etc. We will also probably go for containers, but you don't need
>> Openstack for that, tools like Kubernetes let you play with Docker at
>> scale in a very easy way.
>>
>
> True enough. OpenStack Nova/Glance/Cinder/Ironic/Neutron is about the
> infrastructure underneath those containers, though, not the containers
> themselves. You still need a system to provision the bare metal and/or VM
> resources in which the containers will be hosted.
>
>  So... given all that and the complexity of running Openstack, I just
>> want to know, feature-wise, why you think Openstack is a better option.
>>
>> For example, I can think of scalability. Openstack has the storage
>> system built-in with Swift and Ceph.
>>
>
> Note that Ceph != OpenStack. Ceph is great, but it's entirely separate
> from OpenStack. It's true that Glance, Cinder, and Nova contain various
> drivers that support RBD/Ceph, but the Ceph project is not in OpenStack
> itself.
>
>  Ceph is great and very scalable, while Cloudstack only asks you to add
>> an external storage system (mainly NAS or SAN).
>> So, in Cloudstack, you have to prepare and scale if necessary an
>> independent storage system or create a new zone with a new pool.
>> I wonder how much you can actually scale Ceph and if you don't have to
>> make a new deployment of Openstack when you reach a certain number of
>> Ceph nodes or computes nodes (specially because performance declines
>> after a certain number of Ceph nodes).
>>
>
> Not sure. I'll let the Ceph experts handle that question...
>
>  We are right now testing both projects and their features seem equally
>> advanced for what we want to do (I would even say that Cloudstack has
>> some cool features like the ability to limit how many IOPS an instance
>> can use.
>>
>
> Note that OpenStack also has the ability to limit IOPS that an instance
> can use, however, like many things in OpenStack, this feature is not
> particularly well documented and is awkward to configure:
>
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/InstanceResourceQuota#IO_limits
>
>  Can you highlight some Openstack advantages that we may be missing in
>> our tests?
>>
>
> There are few technical differences between the features offered by
> Cloudstack and OpenStack. OpenStack generally supports more driver options
> and topology options than Cloudstack, with the cost of increased complexity.
>
> The primary differences between Cloudstack and OpenStack are the
> non-technical differences that you said you were less interested in: the
> size and breadth of the community providing support, the focus on GUI
> configuration versus command-line + GUI interfaces, etc.
>
> All the best,
> -jay
>
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