Category Archives: Open Source

Financial Results, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenShift, OpenStack, Red Hat

Red Hat says OpenStack, OpenShift deals trebled year-on-year

Red Hat enjoyed a solid fiscal year, with OpenStack and OpenShift

Red Hat enjoyed a solid fiscal year, with OpenStack and OpenShift

Red Hat revealed its fourth quarter 2015 financial this week, reporting revenue of $464m, up 16 per cent year-on-year. The firm also said deals involving OpenStack and OpenShift-based offerings tripled when compared to the fourth quarter 2014.

For the full fiscal year total revenue hit $1.79bn, up 17 per cent on the previous year, and the Linux incumbent reported subscription revenue for the quarter reached $405m, up 15 per cent year-on-year.

“We continued to experience strong demand for our open, hybrid cloud technologies, as evidenced by increased cross-selling in our top 30 deals which were all over $2 million for the first time,” stated Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat. “Customers value the consistency and flexibility as they run their applications using Red Hat solutions across a variety of deployment models, including public and private clouds, to modernize and transform their IT infrastructure.”

In a call with analysts this week Whitehurst also said its OpenStack and OpenShift offerings, as well as Ceph – the storage system provider it acquired last year – are starting to show signs of market acceptance.

“Half of our OpenStack wins are six figure OpenStack wins in the quarter had Ceph as a component. So fully strong affinity between OpenStack and Ceph and our ability to be a credible provider of both, I think helps us do well in both. So we’re seeing a lot of benefit there.”

“The number of times the top 30 deal included OpenStack or OpenShift this quarter tripled from Q4 a year ago. Interestingly, one technology customer expanded their existing OpenShift deal this quarter and we now have our first $10 million plus open shift customer,” he said. “OpenShift has been performing well with customers and momentum is growing.”

OpenShift is currently pitted in a battle for mindshare against Cloud Foundry, another open source platform as a service. Cloud Foundry seems to have gained the lion’s share of vendor buy-in, but Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president, products and technology said OpenShift wins over Cloud Foundry when it comes to standards.

“One of the biggest differences is that cloud foundry from the various vendors is it’s very difficult in implementation. So getting applications that are compatible across those different vendors on Cloud Foundry will be challenging for one thing,” he said, adding that OpenShift relies on more tried-and-tested technology standards.

Red Hat enjoyed a solid fourth quarter and fiscal 2015, and it will be interesting to see how the incumbent attempts to keep that positive momentum going. Professional services may be one viable avenue. The company recently created a consulting division that combines technology expertise and consulting resources the firm acquired over the years.

Anthony Yeh, containers, Database, Google, Infrastructure as a Service, MySQL, News & Analysis, Open Source, YouTube

YouTube brings Vitess MySQL scaling magic to Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate a beefed up version of MySQL with Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate a beefed up version of MySQL with Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate Vitess, which improves the ability of MySQL databases to scale in containerised environments, with Kubernetes, an open source container deployment and management tool.

Vitess, which is available as an open source project and pitched as a high-concurrency alternative to NoSQL and vanilla MySQL databases, uses a BSON-based protocol which creates very lightweight connections (around 32KB), and its pooling feature uses Go’s concurrency support to map these lightweight connections to a small pool of MySQL connections; Vitess can handle thousands of connections.

It also handles horizontal and vertical sharding, and can dynamically re-write queries that could impede the database performance.

Anthony Yeh, a software engineer at YouTube said the company is currently using the service to handle metadata for the company’s video service, which handles billions of daily video views and 300 hours of new video uploads per minute.

“Your new website is growing exponentially. After a few rounds of high fives, you start scaling to meet this unexpected demand. While you can always add more front-end servers, eventually your database becomes a bottleneck.”

“Vitess is available as an open source project and runs best in a containerized environment. With Kubernetes and Google Container Engine as your container cluster manager, it’s now a lot easier to get started. We’ve created a single deployment configuration for Vitess that works on any platform that Kubernetes supports,” he explained in a blog post on the Google Cloud Platform website. “In this environment, Vitess provides a MySQL storage layer with improved durability, scalability, and manageability.”

Yeh said the company is just getting started with the Kubernetes integration, but once users will be able to deploy Vitess in containers with Kubernetes on any cloud platform supported by it.

Cloud Security Alliance, HCL Technologies, Open Source, Scalability, Standards

6 Cloud Computing Standards to Watch Out For

Of the numerous platforms available, cloud computing is slowly becoming the next big wave to hit industries and computing professionals around the globe, after Android applications. The cloud computing platform is one of the only ways in which that companies can reach new levels within their industry. One of the growing trends in the world is the rise in open-source cloud computing. Although very handy and easily available, there are factors that one needs to consider before implementing it across the company. We discuss the various problems associated with cloud computing compliance issues.

Plugging the holes in the cloud while you can

Open source cloud has rapidly increased as a mode of communication and storage for most companies around the world. Yet, due to the fact they are open source, there are certain regulatory factors that need come into the purview. Although, open source cloud computing is a conducive and a viable option compared to existing facilities, there are several factors that should be taken care of while on the cloud.

Standards-to-watch-for

  1. How secure is your cloud: One of the primary organisations that is ensuring the compliance to security issues is met, is the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The latter is a global coalition that represents businesses, apart from industry and subject matter experts. This organization is the reason why most companies are ensuring that they achieve the best practices within their cloud, across the world.
  2. Is the cloud compliant: When placing workloads on the cloud, make sure that you have conducted certain risk assessments before you go on the cloud. Cloud security compliance standards, once implemented is one of the factors that deals with virtualization issues.
  3. Does it have a license? Per user, device and enterprise licensing models for the cloud are essentially factors that impact companies. Licensing issues are also present in the open-source cloud models and they need to address at the outset. There may issues to be dealt with such as proprietary licenses, and other traditional licenses.
  4. Is It Interoperable? Portability within your cloud should be the reason that you are sticking to the cloud. Transferring data from one cloud to another should be the reason that you have selected the convenience provided by the cloud. This will bring forth other important factors to the purview which involves certain standards such as those laid down by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE.
  5. How Scalable is your cloud: The faster you can connect and transfer data on your server, the faster it can upload workloads and store other data. Ensure that you cloud is scalable and brings you the convenience of uploading heavy workload without changing too much in the service contract.
  6. Evaluate the performance: Your SLA with the cloud should involve factors that allow you the convenience of business continuity and disaster recovery. This will help you measure the performance of the cloud in those critical moments.

It’s vital to have some levels of compliance in any technological advancement to enhance your business prospects. HCL Technologies is one of the technological giants that adhere to the cloud computing standards which is the reason it is in the forefront while delivering innovative SAP Solutions for its clients be it on the cloud, on premise, or through a hybrid approach.

To know more about cloud computing standards and services please visit HCL Technologies.

Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Free, Google, Google App Engine, Kubernetes, LXC, Open Source, Tools

Google Adds Docker Image Support to App Engine, Announces Kubernetes Container Manager

Google continues to up the cloud ante by adding a set of extensions that allow Google App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs. Developers can use these extensions to easily access the large and growing library of Docker images, and the Docker community can easily deploy containers into a completely managed environment with access to services such as Cloud Datastore.

From the Google Cloud Platform Blog:

“Based on our experience running Linux containers within Google, we know how important it is to be able to efficiently schedule containers at Internet scale. To that end, we’re announcing Kubernetes, a lean yet powerful open-source container manager that deploys containers into a fleet of machines, provides health management and replication capabilities, and makes it easy for containers to connect to one another and the outside world. We’ll continue to build out the feature set, while collaborating with the Docker community to incorporate the best ideas from Kubernetes into Docker.”

 

Full details here.

Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Docker, Free, Google, Google App Engine, Kubernetes, LXC, Open Source, Tools

Google Adds Docker Image Support to App Engine, Announces Kubernetes Container Manager

Google continues to up the cloud ante by adding a set of extensions that allow Google App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs. Developers can use these extensions to easily access the large and growing library of Docker images, and the Docker community can easily deploy containers into a completely managed environment with access to services such as Cloud Datastore.

From the Google Cloud Platform Blog:

“Based on our experience running Linux containers within Google, we know how important it is to be able to efficiently schedule containers at Internet scale. To that end, we’re announcing Kubernetes, a lean yet powerful open-source container manager that deploys containers into a fleet of machines, provides health management and replication capabilities, and makes it easy for containers to connect to one another and the outside world. We’ll continue to build out the feature set, while collaborating with the Docker community to incorporate the best ideas from Kubernetes into Docker.”

 

Full details here.

Amazon Web Services, Guest Post, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace

OpenStack’s Third Birthday – a Recap with a Look into the Future

Guest Post By Nati Shalom, CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces

OpenStack was first announced three years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.

Is it the fact that it’s an open source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn’t be the main reason. OpenStack was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.

There were two main elements missing from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also, knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud war. I’m happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local community which also grew extremely quickly over the past two years.

OpenStack as an Open Movement

Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that of OpenStack.

OpenStack1

Paul also drew an interesting comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent: APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted, but the reality is that common currency isn’t yet trivial in many countries even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.

OpenStack2

As individuals, we often tend to gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this report. Also, the fact that the number of individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.

OpenStack3

Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS

OpenStack essentially started as the open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is the Neutron (network) and BareMetal projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud infrastructure.

Only on OpenStack

We often tend to compare OpenStack with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.

The open source and community adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:

  • Run the same infrastructure on private and public clouds.
  • Work with multiple cloud providers; have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.
  • Plug in different HW as cloud platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.
  • Choose your infrastructure of choice for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with OpenStack-supported plug-ins.

All this can be done only on OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.

Re-think the Cloud Layers

When cloud first came into the world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Typically, when we designed each of the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high availability etc.

The fact that OpenStack is an open source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn’t reuse the same security, metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure. The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project and Ceilometer in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are, therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana release of OpenStack.

Looking Into the Future

Personally, I think that the world with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new world that we are creating.

OpenStack Birthday Events

To mark OpenStack’s 3rd Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack will host their official birthday party on July 24th. There will also be a celebration in Israel on the 21st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.

For more information about the Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.

Nati-GigaSpaces

Nati Shalom is the CTO and founder of GigaSpaces and founder of the Israeli cloud.org consortium.

 

GigaSpace, HP Cloud Services, Open Source, OpenStack

GigaSpaces Launches Cloudify Player Service on HP OpenStack

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today the launch of the Cloudify Player, a new patent-based service that makes testing and deploying  complex, multi-tier big data applications like playing a video on YouTube. The new service currently supports OpenStack-based clouds and is available as a free online service from HP Cloud Services and GigaSpaces’ Cloudify. The source code for the service is also available as an open source project on Github. The Player was developed in collaboration with HP Cloud Services, GigaSpaces’ cloud partner and leading provider of OpenStack-based public cloud services.

Unlike many of the current online deployment tools, the Cloudify Player was designed as a lightweight widget that can be easily embedded in any external website using JavaScript embed code, similar to the way one would embed a YouTube video.

The lightweight design makes the Cloudify Player a classic tool for open source projects and ISV’s such as NoSQL database providers, (e.g. Couchbase, ElasticSearch, MongoDB and Cassandra), as well as web framework owners such as the Play Framework, NodeJS, or even complete web platforms like Redmine or Drupal. These providers can use the Player as a tool for launching their product on the cloud from within their own website, personalizing the Player with their own logo and brand. The Player allows vendors to offer a single-click, hassle-free deployment experience for users who want to test drive their product. As the widget is based on Cloudify and Chef, users will have a streamlined experience from a simple trial to a full production environment on a public or private cloud of their choice, all using the same tool.

“With the Cloudify player, Couchbase users can instantly launch a full-blown Couchbase instance on the cloud and give it a test drive, without going through the usual download-configure-install cycle”, said Dipti Borkar, Couchbase Director of Product Management. “This can lower the barrier for new users as they evaluate our technology, and can help existing users to evaluate new Couchbase releases without needing to upgrade their already existing installation”.

Prior to the joint development of the Player, GigaSpaces worked with HP using Cloudify to enable on-boarding of enterprise applications to HPCS.

Cloudify users can also use the new Player to easily experiment with and test new tools online without downloading or installing Cloudify.

“One of the biggest challenges in managing applications in the cloud is keeping the right balance between control and convenience,” said Uri Cohen, VP Product Management at GigaSpaces.  “We have focused on making Cloudify the most open framework for deploying any application on any cloud, while also keeping the user in control over the environment, the stack and the cloud of choice. With the new Cloudify Player we provide both full control and convenience at a level that was previously unattainable, through a streamlined experience from a simple trial to full production deployment.”

Big Data, Denmark, Elasticsearch, Open Source, Partnerships

Elasticsearch, Trifork Partner to Expand Big Data Search

Elasticsearch today announced a partnership with Trifork, a provider of open source solutions, consulting and training for the enterprise market, headquartered in Denmark. Under the partnership, Trifork will include Elasticsearch software within its data and search product portfolio, and offer its global customer base high-end consulting, implementation, training and support for their Elasticsearch-driven big data search projects. Elasticsearch is one of the most popular open source search products in the world and is being used by thousands of companies in production that require real-time data accessibility and transparency across large volumes of distributed data.

“Trifork is an ideal partner for Elasticsearch. Together, we help customers gain invaluable insights hidden in ever-expanding data sets in key markets such as finance, healthcare and telecommunications,” said Steven Schuurman, co-founder and CEO of Elasticsearch. “Their deep experience at developing and supporting business-critical search solutions for its customers is firmly in line with our mission, and will help us to meet the overwhelming demand for Elasticsearch technology.”

A number of Trifork customers already use Elasticsearch including the University of Amsterdam, Greetz, NPO/VPRO, Suppledia, DiVault and PRIME Research. Visit the website to learn more about Trifork’s open source software offerings including the information about our Elasticsearch services.

“We have worked extensively with other open source search solutions, but Elasticsearch has taken real-time information discovery completely to the next level – the combination of its advanced search and analytics capabilities and its user-friendliness makes it the most powerful open source search solution out there,” said Bram Smeets, CTO of Trifork Amsterdam. “We believe in Elasticsearch; the team and the technology and feel both clearly differentiate in a highly competitive market. This makes Elasticsearch the logical choice for both our own internal use and on customer projects.”

Cloudify, GigaSpaces Technologies, GitHub, Open Source, OpenStack, OpsCode, Partnerships, Rackspace

Gigaspaces Cloudify Partners with OpSpaces for Chef Onboarding

GigaSpaces Technologies, with its new release of the open source Cloudify product, has partnered with OpsCode for a dedicated Chef integration that caters to diverse application stacks and systems.

“The concept of DevOps and recipes can go well beyond setup, to actually manage the entire lifecycle of your applications—from setup, to monitoring, through maintaining high availability, and auto-scaling when required.  This is where Cloudify and Chef come together,” says Bryan Hale, Director of Business Development for OpsCode. “By enabling users to leverage the power and variety of Chef recipes and cookbooks to deploy services, Cloudify supports comprehensive application level orchestration on any cloud.”

In addition to the integration with Chef, this new release also includes the following features:

  • Complete application-level orchestration, allowing automated provisioning, deployment, management and scaling of complex multi-tier apps to any cloud environment
  • Built-in, ready to use recipes for common big data components, such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB.
  • Support for non-virtualized environments (AKA Bring Your Own Node), allowing you to treat an arbitrary set of server as your “Cloud” and have Cloudify deploy and manage applications on these servers.
  • Comprehensive REST API for easy integration with third-party tooling and programmatic access.
  • Support for all the common cloud infrastructures, including OpenStack, HPCloud, RackSpace, Windows Azure, Apache CloudStack, Amazon AWS and vCloud.

In addition, Cloudify now also simplifies the complexities involved with deploying big data applications to the cloud.  It is well-known that the massive computing and storage resources that are needed to support big data deployments make cloud environments, public and private, an ideal fit.  But managing big data application on the cloud is no easy feat – as these systems and applications often include other services such as relational and non-relational databases, stream processing tools, web front ends and more, where each framework comes with its own management, installation, configuration, and scaling mechanisms.  With its new built-in recipes, Cloudify provides consistent management and cloud portability for popular big data tools, exponentially reducing the operational and infrastructure costs involved with running these systems.

“We’re seeing a growing market trend for the need to migrate applications – not just in one-off processes anymore – but on a much larger scale, by enterprises, managed service providers, and ISVs alike, who are looking to take advantage of the cloud promise—while until now, only about 5% have actually been able to do so,” says Uri Cohen, Vice President of Product Management at GigaSpaces. “The beauty of Cloudify and its recipe-based model is that it enables you to simply and smoothly take both new and existing applications to the cloud by the tens and hundreds through Cloudify’s built-in recipes and the new integration with OpsCode’s Chef, in very short time frames.”

You can fork the Cloudify code from GitHub, or download the Cloudify GA release.