Sandro Mazziotta, Senior Director of Product Management at Paris-based eNovance, attended the recent Red Hat Summit in San Francisco and answered a few of our questions about what’s going on with the company and with OpenStack. <\/p>\n
Here’s the second part of our interview with him. The first part is also available at Cloud Computing Journal.<\/p>\n
Roger: You mentioned there’ a fast-moving and growing market opportunity for mobile
\non OpenStack, challenged by getting the right data in real-time to mobile
\ndevices. What specific opportunities have you seen, and can you provide an
\nexample of a project with the challenge of accessing the right data in
\nreal time?<\/p>\n
Sandro: The growth in mobile on OpenStack is being fueled by several major
\nindustry trends such as the emergence of smartphones and smart devices
\nlike tablets, the improved quality and performance of radio networks, the
\nemergence of new mobile use cases like gaming, Internet of Things and
\nsocial media and lastly, the maturity of cloud computing technology as a
\nsuitable platform for business critical applications. <\/p>\n
On this last point, in particular, what we’ve seen recently in the marketplace is OpenStack
\ndifferentiating itself as the platform of choice for network operators to
\ndeploy Network Function Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure.<\/p>\n
In fact, 9 out of 10 operators have selected OpenStack as the target
\ntechnology for deploying NFV. The ratio is so high because open source is
\nkey for their overall strategy and ability to retain control of their
\nnetworks. No operators would leave the destiny of their private cloud
\ninfrastructure it if was not based on open source software.<\/p>\n
Roger: And your company?<\/p>\n
Sandro: At eNovance, we’re involved in several projects helping to launch large
\nscale OpenStack deployments that enable various NFV use cases. All of
\nthese cases are quite complex and always require fine tuning of the
\nOpenStack code on a continuous basis. <\/p>\n
As an example, when a customer
\nrequires a particular feature that is not yet available in OpenStack, we
\ncontribute it first upstream so that it will be supported by all
\ndistribution vendors in the coming release. This is the way OpenStack was
\nenvisioned to be \u00ad continuously integrated, continuously deployed.<\/p>\n
Roger: You mention that OpenStack is the only open-source cloud management
\nstack to deploy Big Data apps in the cloud. What makes it so? What are its
\nadvantages compared to other open-source platforms, and compared to some
\nof the proprietary ways of going about this?<\/p>\n
Sandro: Big Datas is a unique use case because it’s so costly to move data, and
\nyou have to decide early to deploy in a public or private environment.
\nThis is a difficult decision, notably for enterprises when they build new
\napplications or transform legacy applications.<\/p>\n
Openstack is the only open source platform that gives you the freedom to
\n1) either rely on public service provider or 2) to deploy on premise in a
\nprivate cloud. Mobile and Big Data applications are by design better
\nsuited to be developed in a cloud architecture to benefit notably from
\nelasticity, and distribution features offered by cloud model.<\/p>\n
Roger: Why do you think this is true?<\/p>\n
Sandro: For efficiency purpose, these applications need to store and retrieve data
\nwhere the application is deployed. Until now, developers of these mobile
\napplications were lacking easy to use data services in OpenStack. However,
\nwith the two latest release \u00ad Havana and Icehouse \u00ad and most notably with
\nthe introduction of Trove (SQL and NoSQL Database as a Service) and
\nSahara, formally known as Savanna, a hadoop implementation in Openstack,
\nthe OpenStack community is quickly starting to address these challenges.<\/p>\n
While these new data services are not specific to Openstack and are
\navailable for all cloud computing platforms (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.),
\nOpenstack is the only open source alternative on the market today, and we
\nbelieve the most viable framework to meet their current and future needs.<\/p>\n