Ubuntu Switches To OpenStack For Cloud 55
angry tapir writes "Canonical has switched its cloud software stack to the open-source OpenStack. The current version of its Ubuntu Server, version 11.04, uses the Eucalyptus platform. Ubuntu Server 11.10 will include the OpenStack stack as the core of the company's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) package. The server release will also include a set of tools to help users move their cloud deployments from Eucalyptus to OpenStack."
Re:Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
Overlap between one (Score:5, Informative)
LTS is 5 years for servers
About two and a half years of that overlap between one version and the next. It takes about six months to get a .04.1 respin that's stable enough to offer as an upgrade to users on the LTS channel. There's even less overlap if you're trying to use the same LTS version on your development workstation/server and your production server. Let's take Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), the operating system currently offered on Go Daddy dedicated servers running Plesk, as an example:
Complexity kills reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Leslie Lamport' s comment on distributed systems applies:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down."
This is even more so with the "Cloud". Think 99.99% uptime? Then why had some Amazon customers recently to wait 5 days to get access to their data again only to find out it was not all there? Don't get me wrong, cloud computing has its place, for example short term high-CPU or high-bandwidth needs. It can be used as a redundant (secondary, _not_ primary) system for e.g. Web-Servers. It is also nice, if you can rent a high-memory instance when you have the occasional (rare) job that needs more memory than your own machines have. Also virtualization has its place, namely as a HAL on steroids.
One thing the "Cloud" is not usable for at all is high-reliable server services. Another is processing of any confidential data. It is not self-redundant either, there are single points-of-failure, as Amazon recently demonstrated. For redundant, reliable infrastructure, you have to do your own primary systems, the "Cloud" can at best serve as fail-over. These limitations do apply to private clouds as well. For longer-term high-CPU needs, your own infrastructure is far, far cheaper and better tailored to your needs. For processing anything confidential or secret, public clouds are unusable and private ones need the whole private cloud classified to the highest secrecy level processed on them. You may also have to have several ones of each classification level if there is a horizontal isolation need (i.e. you may not process secrets from A with secrets from B). At some point the cloud becomes a problem, not a solution.
Why everybody is driven to the "Cloud" like lemmings is beyond me. It is one more tool with specific limitations and strengths. It is not a one-size-fits-all at all.
Re:Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
You are using of course LTS for your servers, right? Because otherwise it would be stupid... So, is 3 years support not enough for you?
Actually, Ubuntu LTS server is five years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org] In fact, 6.06LTS server support is just wrapping up this June. Desktop versions of LTS are three years.
Ubuntu is adding, not switching, to OpenStack (Score:5, Informative)
Hi. I'm one of the ARM Server developers who just attended UDS Budapest. In fact, I'm still here at the hotel.
Ubuntu did not _switch_ to OpenStack. Rather, Ubuntu has added OpenStack as another method of creating a personal Cloud using Ubuntu. By doing so, we're adding to the rich diversity available in the Ubuntu universe. It's not replacing Eucalyptus! Eucalyptus remains supported.
-Martin B
ARM Server Developer
(In Budapest)