Can Red Hat Do For OpenStack What It Did For Linux? 118
Brandon Butler writes "Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack. Red Hat executives say OpenStack – the open source cloud computing platform – is just like Linux. The code just needs to be massaged into a commercially-hardened package before enterprises will really use it. But just because Red Hat successfully commercialized Linux does not guarantee its OpenStack effort will go as well. Proponents say businesses will trust Red Hat as an OpenStack distribution company because of its work in the Linux world. But others say building a private cloud takes a lot more than just throwing some code on top of a RHEL OS."
Re:RedHat be unsmart? (Score:2, Interesting)
Plenty of companies forgo Redhat contracts just as plenty of companies used to forgo Sun contracts.
The idea that you need someone else to blame is mainly an idea of a certain small group of large companies that are darlings of the financial news media.
Break things that used to work? Sure (Score:2, Interesting)
Can Red Hat do for Open Stack what it did for Linux?
If by that, do you mean can Red Hat break things that have worked perfectly for years (clustering in FC13-16 vs 17+, and the godawful mess that is systemd replacing perfectly servicable and reliable UNIX mainstays such as sysv init, etc.), then the answer is most definitely:
YES
On a recent conference call with Red Hat, they dismissed Open Stack and touted their own proprietary products for "cloudy" type infrastructure. Bringing fuel into the fold won't be any different...they'll downplay open source fuel and tout their own version, with layers of proprietary, opaque add-ons of questionable value. The RH version will lag a version or two behind the upstream free version, and probably suffer some breakage due to RH addons. Same song as before, different day.
Re:Cloud computing platform (Score:5, Interesting)
Cloud computing is less of a definition about what it is, and more about how it's used. The general idea of cloud computing is to offload storage and applications from your local setup (workstation, network, etc) onto something "in the cloud" which basically means the internet.
The industry does a really poor job explaining that not all cloud experiences are the same, however. I've seen some cloud providers basically just offering seats to a Windows RDP server, which may not sound all that special to you or I, but they've managed to carve a business out of it.
Re:Show what an inferior OpenStack might look like (Score:4, Interesting)
Ubuntu inherits Debian policy. Anything--supported or not--is not updated in any way that breaks things. You might not be able to get security patches for stuff in Universe or Multiverse in a timely manner without rolling and submitting it yourself; but they won't go releasing a package that no longer does X when X worked before. The idea is that, if your configuration works, it will continue to work *exactly* the way you have it without modification no matter which version of the package you have across the entire lifecycle of a stable release--if it doesn't, that's a bug and they need to undo that breakage. Extending is fine, breaking is *not* acceptable.
RedHat on the other hand released RHEL 6.4 and removed crmsh, the configuration system for Pacemaker, to be replaced with PCS. This wasn't documented in the release notes, either. Suddenly things that configure high-availability fail-over on RHEL 6 don't work. Running the same tools/scripts/whatnot breaks. This is still RHEL 6 stable, and under Debian policy that's not supposed to happen. RedHat doesn't have such a policy, so it happens.
That means you're persistently at risk of reaching a situation where your patching priority demands increased resources: I can continue to patch Ubuntu while my dev team comfortably works on readying our stuff for the next LTS or the next 9 month release, usually; but one day RHEL has patches and I either don't upgrade as my company's security policy dictates OR we find resources (meaning, sometimes, hire more people) to step up the porting process.
With RHEL, the risk is that we may need more manpower (labor cost--salaries) to support the same security policy; and that we may still not be able to keep in step as quickly as with a Debian-style update policy (i.e. there may be greater lag time as we rewrite scripts and configurations and do more dev testing before releasing patches). On top of that, we're faced with the risk of more frequent large roll-outs--things that worked in dev might not work in production, and now we're rolling out a patch that breaks production along with a bunch of patches to production to un-break it, and hoping that it all works in production.
Yes, I blame RHEL for this.
Re:The headline is a question and the answer is Ye (Score:3, Interesting)
I concur.
I took OpenStack for a spin last week and I like where they're going. It brings the CLI access from the AWS world with the mature web-based deployment tools of Azure -- and allows for GCE-type sophisticated apps to run within their contexts. This unique combination has made it appealing for me -- and surely whets the appetites for tons of onlookers who are waiting for the chips to fall before making any company-wide commitments.
Ostensibly, they'll have to endure 2-3 major outages in the next few years before seeing the commitments its customer base truly has with them. Hopefully they don't endure any major outages... although they do run atop the AWS IaaS platform...
Re:Break things that used to work? Sure (Score:2, Interesting)
He didn't say anything of substance. Anyone who uses Fedora (hasn't been core since ... 7 or 8) and expects it to never break is a moron. IT'S A DEVELOPMEN DISTRO. That's as stupid as me using Gentoo and being mad that I have to wait for shit to compile. Use the right distro moron.
Second, it reeks of "They changed my stuff, I'm mad. You young people will never implement something better than good old Unix how I used it" Guess what, SYSVInit is shit. It needs to be replaced. If you don't want to, keep using it. Redhat wants to implement a decent replacement (which won't be perfect on first release obviously,) so they gradually implement it in their testbed distro to eventually use it as the base in their stable distro. And guess what, systemd is awesome. Is it the same shit we've gotten used to? no. Will we need to learn new stuff? yes. Is it for the better? yes.
Anyone who doens't want to deal with change shouldn't work in IT. The field will never stop changing. I like stability just as much as the next guy, which is why I use RHEL on my servers, not Fedora. So yes,
TLDR; blah blah blah, get off my lawn.