Red Hat Makes Supported OpenStack Release 50
judgecorp writes "The OpenStack project could be the 'Linux of the cloud', according to Red Hat, which just announced a fully supported distribution of the open source software. The plan seems to be to offer it as a competitor to VMware's vSphere. From the article: 'The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programs.'"
Re:Wow. (Score:0, Insightful)
Yep, nothing to see here. Just another buzzword platform.
Re:Wow. (Score:0, Insightful)
I have no fucking idea what this is or means. So I guess I don't care?
This is why I keep coming back to slashdot year after year after year. The level of insight in the comments has been more consistent than any other site I've been to!
Re:sorry, don't trust redhat (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat is the sole, most significant contributor or one of the main contributors to to an awful lot of those 'other open source projects':
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions [fedoraproject.org] (and that's massively incomplete)
It's a core principle of RH work that as much work as possible is done or pushed upstream, and that RH products should be 100% F/OSS (the exception to this is when we acquire proprietary software and spend a couple of years doing the legal and engineering spadework to make it 100% F/OSS, which is just a terrible thing for us to do, I know).
All of the source for RHEL is publicly available - http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ [redhat.com] (and other paths on that server), go knock yourself out. (This is not minimal legal compliance, BTW; minimal legal compliance would be providing only copyleft sources, and providing them only to customers. We don't have to put the entire SRPM set up for public download on our own servers). You can get an evaluation version of RHEL 6 for free at https://ca.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/server/download.html [redhat.com] - where 'evaluation' just means 'you only get updates for X days'. You can buy the RHEL Developer Suite - https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/developers/rhel_developer_suite.html [redhat.com] - which includes RHEL with every single add-on, and access to all updates, just like having a commercial support contract only without the commercial support - for a measly $99. Or you can just go download CentOS or Scientific Linux, which projects RH does nothing whatsoever to impede.
RH is the single leading contributor to upstream OpenStack: http://readwrite.com/2013/04/16/will-red-hats-openstack-contributions-turn-to-gold [readwrite.com]
Name me a company that manages to run a sustainable business while contributing more to F/OSS development. One company.
Re:OpenStack competes with vSphere? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't find openstack to be overly-complicated for what it provides. Coming from a "I have managed both Openstack and VMware solutions" point of view, it is a rapidly evolving project with many big names behind it that, as as of yet, does not have much polish. That being said there is a tidal wave of support behind openstack at the moment.
If you have the money, VMWare is currently a superior solution, Give OpenStack a few years and I believe it will be on-par or ahead of VMWare.
Re:sorry, don't trust redhat (Score:4, Insightful)
Which distro is eating Redhat's lunch? Let me finish that thought for you, I think you mean Ubuntu, which has seen a large amount of angry users in the last 2 years.
Redhat is a fantastic server distro. Its rock-solid stable, has long term support, and you'll never find that you have problems with support. In fact, the Redhat folk bend over backwards to support you. They charge for their enterprise offering? What sort of a world do we live in when people charge money for a support contract?
Fedora is free, and RHEL is based on Fedora - its their proving grounds. "But that's not RHEL!" Of course not. Its the bleeding edge. RHEL is a few steps ahead of debian in terms of modern versions but is as stable.
Like you, I once talked badly about Redhat, this was many many years ago, before I had to support clouds of thousands and thousands of virtual machines. Try supporting and auditing that many servers with any other distro - let me know how it goes for you and how long it takes to support. (I program c, c++, perl, ruby, I've been using Linux for 16 years and have contributed to many open source projects. Don't even try to say I'm a newb or if I knew what I was doing I'd use .
Redhat's claim to fame is that you get what you pay for. Sure, there are other Linux distros you can pay for - but have you tried to support them in a large centralized manner with serious oversight? (Suse, I'm looking at you...)
Sure, Debian is great. But when it comes to convincing the director/executive level folk to go with Debian and then pay some 3rd party company of unknowns to support it.................Well, I'm just saying, Redhat is my choice, and I think they are fucking awesome.