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Deploying OpenStack Is Difficult? It’s A Myth!!

By on September 23, 2011

Ever since Open Source came into existence, one of the biggest myths about them is “it is not user friendly”. Everything from it is not easy to use to it is difficult to even deploy were thrown against open source. Most of the times, it was intentional FUD unleashed by proprietary vendors whose business is getting disrupted and at other times, it was the ignorant opinion of people whose thinking is tuned by such propaganda. As we moved into cloud based world and as open source creeped into this world, we are slowly hearing such FUD coming out in public. As someone who had dabbled in open source for more than a decade, I could spot them immediately and this post is an attempt to clear any confusion before it gets more steam.

This FUD comes from a good friend of mine, George Reese. He is a smart person and he is one of the few people in the cloud space whom I respect the most. Having made it clear, I want to take on the FUD and clarify that it is not the case. Ben Kepes covered the news of OpenStack’s Diablo release and as a part of the news coverage, he spoke with George on how the new dashboard feature affects his company. During the conversation with Ben, George made a statement which got me worked up to do this post.

Reese also mentioned that one of the big barriers for OpenStack lies in how hard it is to get an OpenStack cloud up and running, a graphical user interface stuck on top of the OpenStack offering will do little to address that problem Reese contends.

Even though I agree with George that the dashboard will not solve the problem of easy deployment, I want to point out that there are other projects in the ecosystem which makes OpenStack install a breeze. The beauty of an open source project is that it is easy for ecosystem partners to extend the project to meet the needs of wide variety of users. The availability of source code and the flexibility of licenses makes it easy to meet even the needs of the long tail users. There are many partners in the OpenStack ecosystem who extend OpenStack project in many different directions. Some of the projects were focussed on making OpenStack deployment a breeze.

I could think of at least three projects that could make OpenStack deployment a child’s play. One of them is StackOps, an European company who can be considered as Ubuntu of OpenStack. I saw a demo of their solution in the last OpenStack conference at Santa Clara and, later, I have tried it myself. I can assure you that anyone with basic knowledge about networking (good enough to input a few parameters) can deploy OpenStack and create a cloud in a couple of hours. Then there is Dell’s Crowbar, a tool that is very powerful to give extensive choice to the users while also making it easy to deploy OpenStack cloud. Even though Crowbar is tightly aligned with Dell’s hardware, its open source nature makes it easy to work with any hardware with a few tweaks. Next week, we will be hearing about another solution which also makes the deployment of OpenStack seamless and easy.

While I agree with George’s point that the new dashboard doesn’t make OpenStack deployment any easier, I want to dispute the claim that the barriers to entry are high for OpenStack. The projects I outlined about completely removes any barriers to deploying OpenStack and, in the future, we are going to see other interesting projects which makes the entire OpenStack experience simple and seamless. If you are considering OpenStack deployment, don’t buy into the arguments that the barriers to entry are very high. I can assure you that it is as easy as any other platform in the market or even better.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.

5 responses to “Deploying OpenStack Is Difficult? It’s A Myth!!”

  1. koolhead17
    koolhead17 September 23, 2011 at 3:20 pm |

    Nice,
    Good that you bought this story. Indeed there has been major change in Diablo, like keystone API. Dashboard was never a blocker in its deployment. You have many command line tools to do what dashboard does for you.

    1. Krishnan Subramanian
      Krishnan Subramanian September 23, 2011 at 4:54 pm |

      Thanks man for the input. I agree.

  2. Mark Baker
    Mark Baker September 26, 2011 at 6:03 am |

    We tend to think as Ubuntu as being the Ubuntu of Openstack and referencing StackOps as the Ubuntu of Openstack seems odd, especially as StackOps is based on Ubuntu.

    As for deployment, 11.10 has a fantastically easy way to deploy and manage an Openstack cloud. More details at the Openstack Design Summit in Oct.

    /Mark

    1. Krishnan Subramanian
      Krishnan Subramanian September 26, 2011 at 10:54 am |

      Mark, when I called StackOps as the Ubuntu of OpenStack, I was trying to highlight how easy it is with Stackops just like what Ubuntu did to desktop Linux.