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."
Is it good enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
(In many cases) The question is not whether the cloud gets you 99.99% uptime. It is whether it gets you better up-time than what you can run in-house for the same price. It's easy to insult the amazon guys when they fuck up, but the availability they offer is certainly better than what a small company can get from their single part-time admin who does something else as a day job. And even if you are a small tech company, where in theory anybody has the knowledge to run a few services, in practice it is very easy to make mistakes, even for smart people.
And when you scale up, the cloud can scale up with you. Of course, by the time you're google you'll be running your own data centers...
Re:Complexity kills reliability (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud computing services are ideal for situations where you have a startup which might fail in two months and you don't want to have to install a warehouse full of computers to get it going.